Haunted Dirt: selling Belchertown’s broken dream
Image courtesy of Flickr
The auditorium building of the former Belchertown State School is popular among local teenagers and out-of-state ghost-hunters.
BY LINDSEY MCGINNIS
Tucked in the bucolic Western Massachusetts landscape, just south of Belchertown center, is a sprawling campus of graffitied brick buildings and white cottages. An administration building leers over a gravel parking lot on the property’s outer edge with an air of importance. A dormitory where well-meaning attendants once chemically sedated disabled residents has lost its fire escape to rust and wind. Trespassers brave enough to climb the dark, glass-strewn staircase of the former men’s ward are rewarded with access to a rain-warped rooftop with a westward view of the Mount Holyoke Range State Park. The auditorium, known as “the schoolhouse,” is the main attraction, the most photographed location in the abandoned remnants of Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded. Red curtains still border the stage that once hosted popular community minstrel shows and Christmas pageants. Vines grow from the damp, littered floor, through the balcony, and graze the rims of rooftop holes that let in both sun and snow. As long as you can break through the plywood blockades at the schoolhouse entrance, you can still walk up the stairs and sit in the balcony’s decorative theater seats.
In 1972, a staff member told the Hartford News that when he first began working at the State School, the terrible odor of urine, feces and disinfectant “would knock me over.” Today, the corridors smell of earth and mildew. When District Judge Joseph Tauro visited unannounced in 1972, he said there was “no acoustical relief from constant moaning and screaming.” Today, the campus is silent aside from the rustling of overgrown grass.
Thousands of people once roamed these grounds — nurses, residents, volunteers — but no one has lived at Belchertown State School for nearly 25 years. Local archivist Cliff McCarthy said the property has been “a political football” ever since its closing in 1992. Locked in bureaucratic limbo, the institution that once put Belchertown on the map has been left to rot.
Rewind 70 years, and the State School was about to redefine Belchertown society. Attitudes toward mental disability had shifted in the late 19th century and caretakers placed a new emphasis on the “moral treatment” of disabled people, seeing them as human beings who could and should be educated — hence the misleading name “Belchertown State School.”
In 1922, the Massachusetts Board of Insanity opened the State School, which was less of a school than an institutional village, on hundreds of acres of farmland. The campus housed administration buildings, classrooms, a hospital, an abundance of farmland, two barns to milk cows, a poultry plant that provided fresh eggs, a cannery for the farm’s vegetables, a plumbing shop, a carpentry shop, a greenhouse and garage. Able-bodied male patients known as “farmboys” worked the land, providing poultry and produce for not only the State School, but the Monson and Northampton State Hospitals as well. The school served as the largest single employer of Belchertown residents throughout its operation, and was central to the town’s identity. However, as much as the early Belchertown State School was marketed as a cheerful safe-haven for the disabled, it also protected the outside world from the “feeble-minded.”
The introduction of intelligence testing, which promoted the idea that mental disability was hereditary, coincided with the rise of the Eugenics movement in America. A 1916 photograph shows Eugenics supporters standing on Wall Street, holding posters that read “I cannot read this sign, by what right have I children?” and “Would the prisons and asylums be filled if my kind had no children?” People began viewing “Feeblemindedness” as a threat to society which could be managed through isolation.
At Belchertown State School, girls and boys were segregated in nearly every aspect of life to prevent pregnancy. They could interact as characters only — in minstrel shows, musicals and Fourth of July parades — when they were monitored, had an audience and pretended to be someone without a disability.
According to “The Girls and Boys of Belchertown” written by Robert Hornick, only 5% of the residents “graduated” within the first few years of operation. When they reached adulthood, most residents were simply “employed” by the State School, cleaning tunnels and fixing residents’ shoes, often for no salary. Overcrowding was almost inevitable.
A waitlist developed in the ‘40s. The school was pressed to admit the most severe cases first, so the bulk of incoming residents were profoundly disabled. The mildly disabled, who were relied on for most maintenance tasks, were admitted less and less. According to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the school’s population peaked in 1963 with 1,708 residents, but even by the ‘50s, nurses and attendants focused more on monitoring their residents for physical safety than enriching their lives.
Attendants dealt out vicious punishments for minor infractions. Those who stole food, slumped in their chairs or annoyed attendants with their constant chatter may find themselves getting slapped, tied by the legs to a bench or confined to the back wards for lower-functioning residents. Several people tried to escape, and a few succeeded.
One attendant, Harvey Samson, worked at the State School from 1936 to 1976, and said that runaways were common. “Mr. Samson,” a resident once said, “I’m gonna tell you something. I’m gonna run away over the weekend.” Samson thought little of the threat. Just talk.
“He was gone on Monday,” he admitted in a 1999 interview with Belchertown archivist Cliff McCarthy. “They never found him.”
Residents who were caught wandering off the grounds were subjected to at least three days in the “seclusion room,” wrote Hornick, with no toilet or bucket. The school system was deteriorating, but very few people, even residents’ parents, knew the extent of the horrors until the ‘70s, when a series of three very public criticisms — an exposé, a lawsuit and a documentary — threw the institution into a harsh spotlight.
In 1969, New Hampshire University professor Phillip Wakstein became a mental health administrator in Massachusetts and was shocked by the aggressive use of “chemical and physical restraints” on patients, nauseatingly filthy facilities and widespread pneumonia among resident children at the State School. He partnered with James Shank of the Springfield Union to publish a six-part exposé in 1970, in which Wakstein called Belchertown State School “an Auschwitz without the gas chambers.”
These articles focused notably on the K and A buildings, which housed the most disabled male and female residents. 120 men, ranging from 15 to 80 years old, lived in Building K. “Physically grown men roll on the cold tile floor,” wrote Shanks, “sit in grotesque positions motionless, or rock rhythmically back and forth…. sometimes in pools of their own waste.” They were watched by three attendants during the day and two attendants at night.
In the A building, Hornick wrote, each woman “ate like an animal from a deep aluminum bowl in which soup, meat, vegetables and dessert were all indiscriminately mixed.” They tore at their clothes and wailed throughout the night.
A couple years later, Benjamin Ricci, president of the Belchertown State School Friends Association and father of resident Robert Simpson Ricci, filed a class-action lawsuit against the school. In 1972, a WTIC-TV News crew from Hartford, Connecticut toured the facilities filming a documentary which addressed accusations of mistreatment made by Ricci and other critics.
WTIC cameras captured chilling shots of various restraints, from an off-white strait jacket wrapped tightly around a resident’s torso to a man who always wore a fencing mask — “he bites off ears,” explained a staff member. There were some residents who sat in a single spot, all day, either by choice or because the on call attendant fed them sedatives, praying for an easy night. Cockroaches crawled across these motionless patients.
The State School employees featured in the documentary (which was titled “They Need Love”) attributed the inhumane conditions and lack of quality care to the institution’s overcrowding and staff shortage. During 1970, a single attendant would be responsible for an average of 40 residents at any given point in time. They, too, prayed for intervention.
One former employee, Tom Doody, vividly remembers the frustration and desperation of the Belchertown staff. He graduated from Brown University in 1972, the year that Ricci filed his lawsuit, and followed his girlfriend to Western Massachusetts, where she would be attending UMass Amherst. He had just enough money for two months rent and knew nothing about the State School’s scandalous record.
“I had gotten my college degree, was home working for the summer, falling in love with my [future] wife, partying,” he recalled 44 years later, blue eyes fixed on something in the distance. “I was just looking for a job. There was something in the paper…so I applied.”
He’ll never forget his first day. Beard trimmed and tie straightened, Doody arrived at Belchertown State School for an interview. He asked someone where he could find G building.
“Boy, I hope you like the color brown,” they said, before directing him to walk down the path beyond the school building and hospital. “It’s that building way at the back of the grounds.”
G building is roughly 300 feet wide, and several stories tall, with a single entrance visible from the front. Tom remembers the gloomy courtyard, with ruts in the dirt from where trucks drove back and forth, collecting pieces of discarded clothing. He heard screaming from somewhere inside.
“I walked into the lobby of G building and there’s no furniture there,” he said. “I’m smashed with the smell of the old institution, which is a mixture of feces and urine and a bit of disinfectant. Half of the ceiling tiles were ripped off, there was standing water in the lobby.”
He approached a wooden door with small wire mesh windows and rang the doorbell. It didn’t work. After pounding on the thick oak, a nurse dressed all in white came and unlocked the door using a ring of keys chained to her waist.
“Oh, you’re here to see the boss?” she asked. “Well he’s busy right now — I’ll take you up to low boys ward and you can sit and wait for him there.”
She led Doody upstairs, through two more doors like the one in the lobby, to a room with 30 half or fully naked teenage men. “There was no entertainment at all,” he said. “It was just a sea of beds.”
“You can sit here and wait for him,” said the nurse, “but make sure you keep your back to the wall.” He did, and as he was waiting for the supervisor, a man named Ron approached him wearing only boxer shorts.
“Ah-deh-deh-dah,” he said, waving a curled hand back and forth. “Ah-deh-dah.”
“That’s all he could say,” said Doody, “and I freaked out. That was day one, my introduction to people with intellectual disabilities.”
The State School hired Doody on September 27, 1972, as an attendant nurse in G building.
This meant he monitored residents, cleaned messes and sometimes administered medication. Later, he was promoted to shift supervisor, then Unit Director, where he managed the direct care staff of several dormitories.
Doody recognized the institution’s efforts to improve school conditions, namely hiring more doctors and hands-on staff, but coming in cold to the field of disability services, he still found it hard to grapple with the brutality at Belchertown.
“I have one memory of being transferred to K building, which was the back ward building for adult men,” Doody said, “[and] holding somebody down for stitches without Novocaine, because ‘no brain no pain’ ... that was the perspective of the doctor.”
The state settled Ricci’s lawsuit with a landmark consent decree in 1973, which outlined specific improvements, including the hiring of 365 additional on-care staff, but the newspaper exposés, documentaries and high-profile lawsuits couldn’t save the State School from the plague of state politics.
In 1980, Doody was asked to serve as the school’s Medicaid compliance officer, or, as he described it, as a “low-level bureaucrat.” And not a very good one. It was here that he developed a lifelong cynicism toward the state system.
Doody saw the State School, and other public institutions which found themselves in hot water at the time, in a constant state of meaningless reorganization. Staff members were shuffled around, notorious buildings were knocked down and the residents relocated to similar dorms. Doody, who couldn’t identify any positive impact these changes had on the residents, was not considered a “team player” by the administration. He was laid off after forwarding a critical report of the State School’s progress to the Medicaid office.
The institution crawled along for about 10 years after that. Supported by a national push toward deinstitutionalization, which was as much motivated by the frugal policies of the Reagan era as it was by the belief in communal living, Belchertown psychologists began working with vendors to phase out the institution’s residents into appropriate neighborhood homes. Critics argue that, nationally, deinstitutionalization was a failure, with many former residents ending up on the streets or in prisons. However, of the 190 public facilities in the United States, Belchertown was a surprising success. Although the adjustment took years, with the final residents leaving the premises on December 23, 1992, it was the first public facility in Massachusetts to relocate all residents. Robert Hornick speculates that the “many decades of school produce and craft exhibitions, minstrel shows, Fourth of July floats and parades” made it easier for the local community “to receive the school’s residents.” It might also be the case that, after surviving the State School, former residents and employees alike celebrated even the smallest improvements in living conditions.
The school keys were handed over to the state on December 31, eight days after the last residents left their dorm. The transfer made the front page of Springfield’s Sunday Republican: “Home, haven, and hell: Controversial School Closes.”
The town’s defining institution closed in disgrace, and Belchertown residents worried over the future of the 800-acre campus. How would it be divided? Who would get the pieces?
First, the New England Small Farms Institute (NESFI), a non-profit committed to training and educating aspiring farmers, received 416 acres of the school’s former farmland. The town itself leased an area known as parcel A — a 20-acre plot including building E and F, and a few Nurseries — to build a new middle school, senior center, police station, etc. That left three plots of land, known as parcels B, D and E.
As former State School residents were settling into their new homes, Belchertown had voted to create a seven-member Economic Development and Industrial Corporation (EDIC) “to plan, finance, develop and manage underutilized parcels of land.” The corporation was more like a committee, a pseudo-government board of qualified volunteers, chosen by town selectmen. The establishment of the EDIC was an optimistic start to a 24-year development journey just as tumultuous as the school’s slow collapse.
The problem with the State School’s transfer rested in the “Fair Market Value clause” which insisted that, unless used for government-monitored public use projects, the state should seek a “fair compensation for property it conveys.” Unlike the farmland granted to NESFI and the buildings leased to the Belchertown government, the transfer of parcels B, D and E would be approached like a traditional business transaction. The volunteers of the EDIC tried negotiating with the Division of Capitol Planning and Operations, which managed the property under state ownership, arguing that the EDIC, as a “hybrid institution,” should be exempt from this clause as well. The state didn’t bite.
Conflicting appraisals of Belchertown’s cleanup costs further complicated this process. Concerns over the asbestos lining the school’s underground tunnels, hazardous waste from the institution’s power plant and lead paint began to surface in 1993. In November 1995, the EDIC finally received their first official clean up estimate from the state: $6,529,000. Between the disposal of sludge, asbestos abatement, underground tank removal and power plant clean up, the estimate was $1.5 million more than anticipated.
These estimates went back and forth for years, preventing the state and EDIC from nailing down a clear sale price, so although the EDIC kept investigating different development options — a new prison complex, a national music center for retired musicians, an assisted living center — they couldn’t break ground on land they did not own. Opportunities whizzed by them for a decade, as the property deteriorated. Pipes rusted throughout the campus, brick crumbled at the corners of buildings, mold formed on the forgotten furniture inside. The campus was petrifying like a discarded peach pit, exposed to the elements for far too long.
In 2002, the exasperated members of the EDIC voted to buy the three parcels outright, paying $10 for 263 highly contaminated acres of land.
But then what? The EDIC was in desperate need of money, so vice chairman Bill Terry hoped to pursue a piecemeal development plan, chipping away at the property bit by bit, to keep the organization financially afloat. Others disagreed — “We need to slow down,” said EDIC member Peter Galuszka, according to the Hampshire Gazette. “There’s a helluva future over there. It’s better to wait 15 years and do it right.”
They sent out requests for development proposals, but got no response. After 10 years of decay, few developers would touch the former Belchertown State School. The EDIC kept searching until they found him: Belchertown developer Mark Kislyuk.
By the end of the year, the committee and Kislyuk reached a deal. He would buy parcel E, a 44-acre plot between route 21 and route 202, for the low price of $125,001. In exchange, he promised to finance a traffic study and to install 2,200 feet of sewer lines, a pumping station and a traffic light, all of which would cost about $800,000. When Kislyuk complained to the EDIC that completing the extra infrastructure developments within a single mortgage bond would present him with serious financial difficulties, the EDIC allowed Kislyuk to stretch the work beyond the bond’s expiration date.
“We wanted him to succeed. We didn’t sell it to see it go under,” EDIC member Kirk Stephens would later explain. “He was the first guy to develop the land, and the first guy has the most to lose.” It was also the first time the EDIC had worked with a developer. They were too trusting.
Kislyuk installed only 1,700 feet of sewer, a smaller pump than originally specified, and did not pay for either the traffic light or the study. Ultimately, his total work on town infrastructure was valued at $200,000. Kislyuk did spend nearly $800,000 developing an office park on the property — then sold it for a $1.9 million profit. The EDIC had missed a massive money-making opportunity, and been cheated out of $600,000 worth of new infrastructure, that would not only have benefited the town, but also increased the value of the remaining two parcels. Though the Kislyuk scam taught them a lesson, it wouldn’t be the last time the EDIC was disappointed.
In March 2006, Paul McDermott of Bridgeland Development was chosen as the master developer for a massive resort project, which, according to Robert Hornick, included a spa, hotel, equestrian center and museum. The developers would transform 162 acres of State School land into an oasis that’s as idyllic in reality as the early State School seemed on paper, that provides much needed jobs without straining local resources. 2006 marked the birth of a new dream for Belchertown residents — the EDIC and Bridgland Development signed their memorandum of agreement in a festive, public ceremony on Belchertown common that May.
“We’ve been working towards and highly anticipating this day for a long time and we really feel this is the highest and best use of this historic and beautiful land,” said EDIC chairman Bill Terry. “Belchertown and the region deserve it!”
But trouble trickled in.
First, the September closing date passed without action. It would be postponed eight times in the following nine months. In February 2007, McDermott’s weekly column in the Sentinel stopped running without explanation. In June, rumors surfaced that project employees weren’t getting paid. Finally, in October, when McDermott requested a ninth extension on the project closure, the frustrated members of the EDIC demanded a non-refundable deposit of $100,000. The check bounced on October 22, 2007, and the resort dream was snuffed.
Since then, the EDIC has been painfully cautious. They’ve sold bits and pieces of the property to the town and private owners, 10 acres here, two buildings there. But parcel B — which holds 30 State School buildings, and the underground tunnels coated with asbestos — has remained mostly undeveloped. It’s the heart of the State School’s history, of each macabre scandal. Some might call the land haunted, or infer from its stubborn presence that the entire town is cursed to watch their 20th century failure rot into the soil, but the volunteers of the EDIC are too pragmatic for such speculation.
In a recent meeting at Town Hall, the EDIC gathered in a narrow room with walls the yellow-white color of unpasteurized milk. There were two property maps pinned to a bulletin board. Just five of the seven members took their seats around a faux-wood table, on mismatched metal chairs upholstered with either dark green or bright orange vinyl.
Terry, the EDIC chair, began the meeting by passing around a thin piece of paper — a mercury removal invoice — and discussed the progress on demolishing the school building, where the semi-intact stage and theater balcony still get a lot of unwelcome foot traffic.
Several members of today’s committee, like Terry and Stephens, worked on the EDIC during the Kislyuk and McDermott debacles. These experiences have made them more careful as they try to salvage parcel B. MassDevelopment, a semi-public agency, and the EDIC are currently working with state legislature to free up funds that Governor Deval Patrick had set aside for cleanup costs. Their big-picture plan is an assisted living facility — not as glamorous as a health resort, but welcomed by the Belchertown community.
Kirk, who had defended the EDIC volunteers after the Kislyuk scandal, wore blue jeans and a denim shirt, hair combed back under a straw cowboy hat which he removed and placed upside down on the table when the meeting began. He sat in an orange chair that squeaked as he shifted in his seat, complaining about trespassers.
During the day, senior residents from across the street walk their dogs along school paths, and the occasional group of students from one of the five neighboring colleges comes to take artsy photos in the ruins, but Kirk is most concerned with deterring “the paranormals from the internet.” For years, the State School has been featured on websites such as ghostvillage.com, ghostsofamerica.com and hauntedplaces.org. When someone googles “Belchertown State School,” they may find a post from New Hampshire blogger ghostly7, who visited the schoolhouse in 2012. “I wanted to get away from this building, turn and run as fast as I could,” she wrote, “yet even though I was consumed with the negative energy pouring out of this building the hair on my arms and on the back of my neck was standing on end, there was something deeper pulling me in … I could feel the ‘tug’ on my sleeve.” There are dozens more like it.
The EDIC breaks momentarily to swap stories about out-of-state ghost hunters who try to pay locals for “authentic” haunted tours. Bob Rivard, EDIC director, stopped recording the meeting minutes as the members aired their disgust.
They were equally dismissive of the idea that the State School’s past still hung like a shadow over the Belchertown community. Cliff McCarthy would disagree — as a man who comes in contact with both gratuitous sensationalists looking to pry into the town’s grim history, as well as older community members who are still sensitive about the State School’s closing, he is often reminded of the institution’s painful and persistent legacy.
Those who remember the tragedy of Belchertown — attendants, residents, state administrators and the Belchertown citizens caught in the middle — are haunted by memories of K and A building, of unseen abuses and the sounds of screaming, by exposés and unemployment and national judgment. The EDIC’s experience is plagued by unending battles with state administrators, public critique and misguided bargains, asbestos and trespassers and empty deals.
But while archivists tend to dwell on the past, the EDIC’s seven members are asked to look toward the future. They may be exhausted, disillusioned and cautious, but they have no interest in being haunted.
“As every building comes down,” says Bill Terry, “it’s just a piece of dirt.”