Pretty much one of the best walks I’ve ever taken. I walked up Richmond Road to Walmart – about two miles – and I looked at everything on the way, and it was so beautiful. I love things, the left-behind things of human living, so much I think it will burst my heart sometimes.
The highlights of the walk up: finding a pile of gas station detritus behind one building; the quiet ray of light that fell right on the disused train tracks as I was walking them; watching the train go by on the usable tracks and then following after it; the row of tractor-trailers behind an abandoned house.
The highlight of the day: the best bit of trespassing I think I’ve ever done. Once I got out to Walmart, I wanted to keep going, and so I did. And then I remembered that, while the most visibly impressive building of the old Western State Mental Hospital, the one they used as a prison for a while, is right in downtown Staunton, the other one, the one in more disrepair, is right up there on the hill behind Sheetz and the Frontier Culture Museum.
And so I went up there. And it was so beautiful I kept thinking it couldn’t get any more beautiful and quiet and heartbreaking and…no, none of those are the terms for what it is. Right. Let me try to explain.
A lot of people claim this building is haunted. It would not be surprising if it were. After all, it was a mental hospital, which is a scary/upsetting/emotional kind of place, and now it is an abandoned building, without a use, and both of those things would lend themselves very much to being haunted.
Now, I don’t see ghosts. At least, I never have. But buildings that have contained a lot of people feeling things very strongly, and especially abandoned or disused buildings in which there have been many people…fascinate is not a strong enough word for how I feel. To say they call to me seems silly. Sometimes they horrify me. More often they move me to tears. I…I love these places. I understand these places. I am compelled by them. In some way, I feel as if I communicate, not with the spirits of individual people, but with the building itself. I feel…possessed by these places in a way. It is usually exhilarating, sometimes horrible, and always impossible to resist.
Anyway, I have had a heartbreakingly strong desire to explore the Western State buildings since the moment I came into Staunton. I am intensely interested in mental hospitals, disused buildings, and haunted places, so this makes sense.
And today was the time. There didn’t seem to be much security, so I just walked up the driveway. (If I get poison ivy despite my best efforts to watch for it, this will be where. I did not dress sensibly for trespassing.) And I walked all around the outside of the building and it just kept getting more frighteningly beautiful.
I hadn’t realized that this building, like the one downtown, also has porches enclosed with cage-like mesh, and barred windows. But if you walk around the back, there they are, silent cages overlooking the fields rolling away towards Middlebrook. The outside is covered, also, with Virginia Creeper, twining its five-leaved self around the bars and the crumbling brick and shattered windowpanes.
Through one of the windows I could glimpse a bin labeled for medical waste, through others torn strips of pink and white curtains. A caretaker’s shed of some kind is filled with trash: broken-down desks, a table with a hole in the center, a dismantled sink. And looming over all the gabled roof of the building itself, surrounded by silently wheeling birds – crows and starlings mostly. I startled something else occasionally too – probably a rat or a rabbit.
It was enough; I was exhilarated; but then I made my way finally around to the one side of the building I had not yet seen, and lo – it was more beautiful than all the rest. A wide series of steps leading up to a portico completely covered in creeper, a set of peeling white columns on a porch shaded in pale green by the flourishing leaves above and around and on all sides.
And there it was – a window with the pane completely smashed out of it, right there on the porch. I put my hand in and it was cold in there. Probably ten or fifteen degrees colder than the mild temperature outside. I listened. The light was fading – it was now after 5:30, and dusk was coming on. I heard nothing. A strange nothing, in fact, since there should at least have been birds or cars. But the impression of the place is so quiet…actually, it isn’t true that I heard nothing. I heard the building. I heard it being there. Awake. Aware in some way. Quiet. It was being quiet for me.
And so, in the twilight and the silence, I climbed up carefully inside the window and went inside.
It is very empty in there – at least the floor that I explored is. It isn’t a very big building, and most everything in there has been removed. There are cabinets with their drawers and doors partly disassembled, lying on the floor, peeling strips of flowered contact paper. There are several bedpans scattered around, some still in dusty wrappers. There was one sheet of patient data of some kind: “When Amanda acts out in a way that threatens self-harm,” it read, “the objective is to calm her and steer her away from these behaviors.”
There are wavy, cheap mirrors stationed along the hall and in the tiny bathrooms. The patient rooms still have their filthy beige carpets. The nursing stations and the halls have fragmented linoleum. In several places there are childish, peeling murals. I think they must have been painted by patients – an attempt to help them feel they were being cared for, not punished or imprisoned. A chart on the floor in one room reads “You have the RIGHT…to ask about your treatment…to complain to a supervisor…” A countertop in one room contains a torn sneaker – probably from some other trespasser – beatified by the sunset light.
The caged porch on this level has a solitary chair still sitting on it. The view is breathtaking, but separated from the viewer by steel mesh. It is only to be looked at. One on this porch may not go into the fields and walk forever. She may only look out. It was warmer out there.
Eventually, it was getting very dark, and so I left through the window I’d come in through. “I’ll be back, I think,” I whispered, and then “thank you.”
I was euphoric all the way home. I’m so glad I went in. And that I had my camera, although I didn’t at all capture how beautiful I found the place. Another time I will explore the other floors, and maybe I will take black and white pictures when there is more sun out. It didn’t seem like the place is often patrolled by police, so that’s no worry. And the structure hasn’t been abandoned long enough (I believe it finally closed in 1996, the first building having opened in 1828) to be unsound. And it certainly isn’t unfriendly, at least to me. If there are ghosts there that are the kind that bother people, they will not bother me. I likely couldn’t see them even if they wanted to.
Anyway. Best walk ever. I’m so glad I saw everything I saw
The highlights of the walk up: finding a pile of gas station detritus behind one building; the quiet ray of light that fell right on the disused train tracks as I was walking them; watching the train go by on the usable tracks and then following after it; the row of tractor-trailers behind an abandoned house.
The highlight of the day: the best bit of trespassing I think I’ve ever done. Once I got out to Walmart, I wanted to keep going, and so I did. And then I remembered that, while the most visibly impressive building of the old Western State Mental Hospital, the one they used as a prison for a while, is right in downtown Staunton, the other one, the one in more disrepair, is right up there on the hill behind Sheetz and the Frontier Culture Museum.
And so I went up there. And it was so beautiful I kept thinking it couldn’t get any more beautiful and quiet and heartbreaking and…no, none of those are the terms for what it is. Right. Let me try to explain.
A lot of people claim this building is haunted. It would not be surprising if it were. After all, it was a mental hospital, which is a scary/upsetting/emotional kind of place, and now it is an abandoned building, without a use, and both of those things would lend themselves very much to being haunted.
Now, I don’t see ghosts. At least, I never have. But buildings that have contained a lot of people feeling things very strongly, and especially abandoned or disused buildings in which there have been many people…fascinate is not a strong enough word for how I feel. To say they call to me seems silly. Sometimes they horrify me. More often they move me to tears. I…I love these places. I understand these places. I am compelled by them. In some way, I feel as if I communicate, not with the spirits of individual people, but with the building itself. I feel…possessed by these places in a way. It is usually exhilarating, sometimes horrible, and always impossible to resist.
Anyway, I have had a heartbreakingly strong desire to explore the Western State buildings since the moment I came into Staunton. I am intensely interested in mental hospitals, disused buildings, and haunted places, so this makes sense.
And today was the time. There didn’t seem to be much security, so I just walked up the driveway. (If I get poison ivy despite my best efforts to watch for it, this will be where. I did not dress sensibly for trespassing.) And I walked all around the outside of the building and it just kept getting more frighteningly beautiful.
I hadn’t realized that this building, like the one downtown, also has porches enclosed with cage-like mesh, and barred windows. But if you walk around the back, there they are, silent cages overlooking the fields rolling away towards Middlebrook. The outside is covered, also, with Virginia Creeper, twining its five-leaved self around the bars and the crumbling brick and shattered windowpanes.
Through one of the windows I could glimpse a bin labeled for medical waste, through others torn strips of pink and white curtains. A caretaker’s shed of some kind is filled with trash: broken-down desks, a table with a hole in the center, a dismantled sink. And looming over all the gabled roof of the building itself, surrounded by silently wheeling birds – crows and starlings mostly. I startled something else occasionally too – probably a rat or a rabbit.
It was enough; I was exhilarated; but then I made my way finally around to the one side of the building I had not yet seen, and lo – it was more beautiful than all the rest. A wide series of steps leading up to a portico completely covered in creeper, a set of peeling white columns on a porch shaded in pale green by the flourishing leaves above and around and on all sides.
And there it was – a window with the pane completely smashed out of it, right there on the porch. I put my hand in and it was cold in there. Probably ten or fifteen degrees colder than the mild temperature outside. I listened. The light was fading – it was now after 5:30, and dusk was coming on. I heard nothing. A strange nothing, in fact, since there should at least have been birds or cars. But the impression of the place is so quiet…actually, it isn’t true that I heard nothing. I heard the building. I heard it being there. Awake. Aware in some way. Quiet. It was being quiet for me.
And so, in the twilight and the silence, I climbed up carefully inside the window and went inside.
It is very empty in there – at least the floor that I explored is. It isn’t a very big building, and most everything in there has been removed. There are cabinets with their drawers and doors partly disassembled, lying on the floor, peeling strips of flowered contact paper. There are several bedpans scattered around, some still in dusty wrappers. There was one sheet of patient data of some kind: “When Amanda acts out in a way that threatens self-harm,” it read, “the objective is to calm her and steer her away from these behaviors.”
There are wavy, cheap mirrors stationed along the hall and in the tiny bathrooms. The patient rooms still have their filthy beige carpets. The nursing stations and the halls have fragmented linoleum. In several places there are childish, peeling murals. I think they must have been painted by patients – an attempt to help them feel they were being cared for, not punished or imprisoned. A chart on the floor in one room reads “You have the RIGHT…to ask about your treatment…to complain to a supervisor…” A countertop in one room contains a torn sneaker – probably from some other trespasser – beatified by the sunset light.
The caged porch on this level has a solitary chair still sitting on it. The view is breathtaking, but separated from the viewer by steel mesh. It is only to be looked at. One on this porch may not go into the fields and walk forever. She may only look out. It was warmer out there.
Eventually, it was getting very dark, and so I left through the window I’d come in through. “I’ll be back, I think,” I whispered, and then “thank you.”
I was euphoric all the way home. I’m so glad I went in. And that I had my camera, although I didn’t at all capture how beautiful I found the place. Another time I will explore the other floors, and maybe I will take black and white pictures when there is more sun out. It didn’t seem like the place is often patrolled by police, so that’s no worry. And the structure hasn’t been abandoned long enough (I believe it finally closed in 1996, the first building having opened in 1828) to be unsound. And it certainly isn’t unfriendly, at least to me. If there are ghosts there that are the kind that bother people, they will not bother me. I likely couldn’t see them even if they wanted to.
Anyway. Best walk ever. I’m so glad I saw everything I saw
0 Responses to “best walk ever”
Post a Comment