April, 2004.
The best exploration is often that which comes unplanned-for. One Sunday, when Bill Ding and I were feeling particularly bored, we decided to search for the bomb shelter that allegedly existed in the forest between Hawthorn Center and Northville Regional Psychiatric Hospital (NRPH). We called it "the Evil Woods" in reference to the classic cult movie Evil Dead.
My associate Dr. Drunk had spent five years of his young life in the service of the state at the Hawthorn Center. He claimed to know the layout of that place like the back of his proverbial hand. And he had told me of the existence of a small concrete structure out in the woods there that appeared to be a bomb shelter. He had seen it several times when staff would take groups of patients on nature walks on the trails out there, and described it as consisting of a short cement staircase leading into the ground to a door. Inside it was a bare room with some shelves of Civil Defense rations and a pot-bellied stove.
He didn’t know much more about it than that, and only knew its approximate location, which he pointed out to me on aerial images. But nonetheless, it sounded too cool to pass up the opportunity to re-find it. We had spent about three hours in the woods, wandering where the old administrators’ houses once stood for NRPH, across from Schoolcraft College, but turned up nothing but odd scraps of debris. The nature trails that wormed around those woods were so confusing that it was almost impossible to know where we were going. It was mid-April, so the trees were not yet in full foliage—which worked in our favor, because in the summer the vegetation is so thick that your hand will disappear if you extend your arm out in front of you.
We had come to a halt and rested, about to give up, when Bill spied something several yards off in the mangy brown tangle of vines and punkwood. It appeared to be a cement platform, almost totally obscured by dead matted leaves and sticks. We amost ran toward it, excitement building.
I was let down momentarily to see that it was nothing more than a square, featureless platform…not an unusual thing to find in the woods of Wayne County, necessarily. But then I thought that I should at least scrape some of the leaves off of it, in case it was the entrance to the rumored tunnel connecting Hawthorn to NRPH.
Straining with all my might, I pulled on the heavy lid, and just when I thought it wasn't going to budge, it suddenly popped open with a start.
It was like the lid had been hermetically sealed by mud and other muck over time seeping into the gap around it. There was a sound and smell almost like opening a centuries-old tomb…indescribably stale air wafted out to finally mingle with the living world of sun and light.
We peered in.
We could see pipes and a couple valves, but this was not a tunnel, merely a square room about 8’x8’ with a mud-covered floor. Then we noticed something else—there was…stuff down there…!
Not satisfied with merely craning my neck to inspect this weird subterranean nook, my attention was now completely arrested so I volunteered to go in first, and Bill handed me his light. For several moments after climbing down in, I stood in complete confusion, trying unsuccessfully to conjugate what I was seeing into something I could explain logically.
All I could say for several seconds was “Dude…what the @#$%...” over and over again, as Bill repeatedly asked me what was down there. He stuck his head down into the hole after me to demand answers, but then ended up reciting the same mantra of “Dude…what the @#$%....”
There was all kinds of…wacky pagan-looking clutter down here…. In one corner was a wooden table draped with a fringed leather skin, and on top of it was a copper chalice, filled with a dark liquid, possibly stagnant water…? The white fur is actually a rabbit pelt, to which some kind of polished white stone, resembling some sort of charm, had been affixed:
Inside the chalice were also the remains of a deceased mouse, though how exactly the mouse came to meet its end was not immediately evident. And no, I did not get a photo of the dead mouse...I didn't really feel like getting my face that close to infectious carrion.
Mounted on one of the steam valves was a dream-catcher or "sacred hoop" type thing, but the hoop, which was made of a bent stick held together by grass twine, held a piece of leather that had a colorful design painted onto it.
In another corner were the pipes, which entered the room only for a brief 90-degree bend—and were dead-cold. They had remnants of what looked like mildewy asbestos insulation still clinging to them, so they must have been steam pipes, but I knew that Hawthorn Center received its steam service via above-ground pipes from NRPH's powerplant, which ran along the service road, not via underground tunnels.
My first thought was that some weirdo was using the room as a makeshift sweat lodge, because I saw a copper dish with several smooth stones piled on it like a sauna, and because this room would have been extremely hot anyway when the steam pipes were active.
On the floor next to the table was a primitive hammer or scepter perhaps, fashioned of a forked stick and a rock, bound together with bark strips. You can also see that there is a metal brooch or something attached to the fringed leather table covering, which had four small turquoise stones adorning it:
So there seemed to be a quasi-Native American theme going on here, but it was offset by a lot of the other stuff in the room. On a wall hung a strange occult symbol of some sort, which looked vaguely Rosicrucian or something, containing a “Luciferian Eye,” a large candle sitting beneath it:
Everything was covered in a thick layer of scum, indicating that this stuff had been here a long time. Balanced on one of the pipes was what looked like a weird mini-altar, with two brass candle holders and a statuette of a sitting deer or fawn...below it a small tray of corroded jewelry, arranged as if it had been laid down as a prayer offering:
Next to the leather dream-catcher was a shard of some kind of ceramic or plaster sculpture, depicting what appeared to be some eldritch female deity perhaps:
I was utterly confused…who the hell did all this? In here were the hoofprints of almost every brand of wacko I could think of, a synthesis of eclectic pagan crap that suggested all at once Wiccans, hippies, lipstick-Satanists, Illuminati-conspiracist nutjobs, and neo-apocalyptic shamans. It was almost as if an art student and an anthropology major from Schoolcraft had gotten together over a bong and a healthy dose of half-baked material culture concepts, made all this stuff, then assembled it into this small room hidden underground in the woods across the street, to...role play? Meditate? To invoke ancient demons for the purpose of devouring the soul of a professor for giving them a B- on a term paper? Or was it all an elaborate gag or hoax?
When I attended Sc'raft in the late 1990s, I too ventured across the street between classes to explore the ruins of the “Haggerty House”:
In the process I ended up on the "Haggerty Trail," and accidentally stumbled onto the grounds of Northville Regional Psychiatric Hospital, which was still operational at the time. Little did I know, I would eventually be thoroughly exploring that place as well. But I never heard of anyone from the college going into the woods to do stuff like...this.
We couldn’t believe what we had found. This was as unexpected as anything imaginable…and as we climbed out we almost felt as if we had opened something that was not meant to be disturbed, that we had violated the sanctity of someone's secret lair, and they might be about to sneak up on us and bury a hand-made sacrificial dagger in our backs to keep their secrets safe.
Yet despite our shock and confusion at this disarmingly bizarre discovery, we now had another lead to follow—the pipes. They likely held the key as to the chamber's original purpose, as they obviously had to come from somewhere. There was a slight hump visible in the ground corresponding to where the pipes were buried. We closed the lid of the crazy-secret-cult-room and covered it back up thoroughly with brush to conceal it. As we did so, covered in the mouldering leaves we found a pair of ‘70s sunglasses and a vintage Boy Scouts of America flashlight that was equally as old.
This place had remained lost and forgotten for years; judging by the amount of soil on top of it, we were the first ones to stumble upon it and crack it open in perhaps decades. Though we closed the lid it did not seal completely, likely due to the sediment buildup around the hinges, so no matter how hard we pressed on it the lid would not close flush like it was before we disturbed it. The seal had been broken, and could not be re-sealed. Whatever genie we had released into the world was not about to be put back in its bottle; so we obscured it as best we could.
We took a bearing off the cement platform, and estimated the direction of travel that we would take while following the underground pipes. There were a few times when we lost sight of it, but picked up its trail again. I was without my compass and kicked myself for it. After about half an hour more of woods-trekking, we realized that what we had suspected was true…the pipes led to Hawthorn Center. But from where? NRPH?
At the edge of the forest we stood in the cover of greenery while we watched the goings-on at Hawthorn. It was currently rush hour, and there was a fair amount of activity going on…cars frequently entered and left the main parking lot on Haggerty Road. Bill Ding knew that the northernmost cottage of the facility (which turned out to be Cottage 1) was vacant. He and Chad had been here once before, and had popped a lid near the corner of that cottage looking for a tunnel entrance. There was only one steam tunnel for Hawthorn, with pipe trenches connecting it to the cottages.
We furtively slinked up to the back of Cottage 1, following a path that would keep us out of the line of sight of anyone out front. We could see inside the windows of the cottage, and it was apparent this building was being used as storage.
According to the 1998 book Northville Township…From the Beginning, A Jouney Recalled by Shari Peters, construction on Hawthorn Center began in early 1955, and it opened on July 1, 1956. It was the first public institution in Michigan for psychiatric care dedicated to juveniles, followed by six other such institutions, usually located next to a state hospital in the same way that Hawthorn was located next to NRPH, but by 1998 they had all been closed and Hawthorn was again the only such institution for juveniles in the state.
We found an entrance. Pathetically easy—the basement window could be removed from outside. Sliding in, we noticed that there was still power and heat on in the building, but no one had come in here in a loooong time.
The founding of Hawthorn was spearheaded by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the League of Women Voters in the early 1950s, led especially by a Mrs. Edward Latulip. She and her group found that there were about 600 children under the age of 18 housed in Michigan's asylums, on adult wards with no programming or schooling oriented to youths. They contacted the Detroit News and Free Press to expose this issue. Not surprisingly, once the issue was brought to public knowledge, there was broad support from voters and legislators to rectify the situation with appropriations for suitable institutions and programming.
Everything in the classroom areas was as it had been left in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s when it was mothballed. On a chalkboard, someone had scrawled Run DMC lyrics. Cobweb strings snapped across our faces as we walked through the main hallways; no one had disturbed this building in many years.
This institution derived its name from the fact that there were Michigan Hawthorn trees present on the property where it was built. Through the years, many important researchers were affiliated with Hawthorn Center, such as Dr. Fritz Redl, Dr. William Morse, Dr. Ralph Rabinovitch (and his wife, Dr. Sara Dubo), and Dr. Harold Wright.
Like the Wayne County Training School before it, the program of Hawthorn Center was an entirely new and untried concept at the time it was founded, and was eventually studied by experts from across America and the world. It was small, with only 162 in-patient beds and 120 day care slots.
We were nervous as hell in here, so we were hasty in our documentation before escaping back to the cover and safe haven of the woods. Now we were interested in knowing where the other end of those pipes led. We tracked the hump in the ground all the way back to the creepy underground chamber, and took another bearing off of it, then hiked. This hump was a lot harder to follow, and we soon lost track of it, but kept hiking in the same general direction.
Around 1958, W.J. Maxey, director of the Michigan Department of Social Welfare (as it was called back then), was seeking to relocate the Lansing Boys' Vocational School, which was essentially a training school for delinquent male juveniles. His prime choice was west of Northville at Whitmore Lake, but a site between Hawthorn Center and Northville State Hospital was also seriously considered...in other words, in the "Evil Woods." Though residents of Whitmore Lake were opposed to their community being the site of a delinquent boys' facility, Maxey said “there are too many institutions in Northville already.” It ended up in Whitmore Lake, and was later named the Maxey Training School.
After another 30 minutes, it soon became evident that the only logical place the pipes could run to is NRPH. We eventually found ourselves at the backside of the psych hospital’s E-Building, which was still open as always. We decided to try and check out D-Building, which none of us had been in before, so we went into E and looked around for awhile.
Since that day, I have tried at least twice to relocate the mysterious hidden underground chamber in the Evil Woods again, but I could not.
The NRPH property continued to be a millstone around the neck of both the developers and local government until around January of 2013, when I saw that the Evil Woods had suddenly been cut down, presumably in preparation for development.
Immediately I thought of the mysterious underground chamber that had eluded me since 2004, and knew that I must go out there to see what could be seen now that the forest was gone. Perhaps I could also find the bomb shelter that Dr. Drunk had told me about in the beginning of all this. What I found was not what I was expecting.
The mysterious underground pagan chamber was nowhere to be seen. But I did see a pair of concrete structures in the ground in approximately the location where I thought the alleged bomb shelter would have been. I approached it quickly, full of anticipation despite the finger-stinging cold weather.
Here is a view looking down on it, with what appears to be a square hole precisely like the kooky pagan chamber would have had, and two other smaller square concrete structures downhill from it:
Odd...there was a doorway in the side of this thing:
I peeked in, my curiosity now crackling...
Odd, this wasn't how I remembered it at all. There were no pipes or valves; instead there was what looked to be a boiler body, but it was actually recessed into the wall. Very strange. Nor were there the ladder rungs in the wall that I had climbed down nine years before:
I racked my brain trying to remember what the kooky pagan chamber had looked like, but I just couldn't place any of what I was seeing with what I remembered. It didn't look much like the bomb shelter that Dr. Drunk had described either.
Was it possible that this was yet another mystery chamber that had lain hidden out there in the Evil Woods all those years, completely unseen even by me? Too bizarre. I began to get that nagging feeling that with the leveling of these trees, many secrets that had long sheltered within the protective eaves of this old wood were passing into the realm of the forgotten, never to be solved by anyone. That's the feeling that tortures any explorer's mind, keeping us up nights--staring out the window with thoughts haunted by the questions of what could have been, and what has been lost forever.
I looked inside the metal tank:
Nothing but an empty tank.
I decided to go look at the other two nearby foundations, I saw that one still traces of a cinder block structure that stood on top of it once:
The other seems to have been part of a sewer or drain?
I don't now what to make of these structures or the others that used to be here. Laid open, naked of its trees, it was impossible to recall any kind of familiar geographical context of the land as it had been before. Without pulling all kinds of old infrastructure documents and maps from county repositories, I can't tell you what exactly these structures would have been, other than they obviously had something to do with the utilities for NRPH and Hawthorn Center, and the staff houses that sat in the woods between.
References:
Northville Township…From the Beginning, A Jouney Recalled by Shari Peters
When I attended Sc'raft in the late 1990s, I too ventured across the street between classes to explore the ruins of the “Haggerty House”:
 |
| Courtesy of Northville Historical Society |
We couldn’t believe what we had found. This was as unexpected as anything imaginable…and as we climbed out we almost felt as if we had opened something that was not meant to be disturbed, that we had violated the sanctity of someone's secret lair, and they might be about to sneak up on us and bury a hand-made sacrificial dagger in our backs to keep their secrets safe.
Yet despite our shock and confusion at this disarmingly bizarre discovery, we now had another lead to follow—the pipes. They likely held the key as to the chamber's original purpose, as they obviously had to come from somewhere. There was a slight hump visible in the ground corresponding to where the pipes were buried. We closed the lid of the crazy-secret-cult-room and covered it back up thoroughly with brush to conceal it. As we did so, covered in the mouldering leaves we found a pair of ‘70s sunglasses and a vintage Boy Scouts of America flashlight that was equally as old.
This place had remained lost and forgotten for years; judging by the amount of soil on top of it, we were the first ones to stumble upon it and crack it open in perhaps decades. Though we closed the lid it did not seal completely, likely due to the sediment buildup around the hinges, so no matter how hard we pressed on it the lid would not close flush like it was before we disturbed it. The seal had been broken, and could not be re-sealed. Whatever genie we had released into the world was not about to be put back in its bottle; so we obscured it as best we could.
We took a bearing off the cement platform, and estimated the direction of travel that we would take while following the underground pipes. There were a few times when we lost sight of it, but picked up its trail again. I was without my compass and kicked myself for it. After about half an hour more of woods-trekking, we realized that what we had suspected was true…the pipes led to Hawthorn Center. But from where? NRPH?
At the edge of the forest we stood in the cover of greenery while we watched the goings-on at Hawthorn. It was currently rush hour, and there was a fair amount of activity going on…cars frequently entered and left the main parking lot on Haggerty Road. Bill Ding knew that the northernmost cottage of the facility (which turned out to be Cottage 1) was vacant. He and Chad had been here once before, and had popped a lid near the corner of that cottage looking for a tunnel entrance. There was only one steam tunnel for Hawthorn, with pipe trenches connecting it to the cottages.
We furtively slinked up to the back of Cottage 1, following a path that would keep us out of the line of sight of anyone out front. We could see inside the windows of the cottage, and it was apparent this building was being used as storage.
According to the 1998 book Northville Township…From the Beginning, A Jouney Recalled by Shari Peters, construction on Hawthorn Center began in early 1955, and it opened on July 1, 1956. It was the first public institution in Michigan for psychiatric care dedicated to juveniles, followed by six other such institutions, usually located next to a state hospital in the same way that Hawthorn was located next to NRPH, but by 1998 they had all been closed and Hawthorn was again the only such institution for juveniles in the state.
We found an entrance. Pathetically easy—the basement window could be removed from outside. Sliding in, we noticed that there was still power and heat on in the building, but no one had come in here in a loooong time.
The founding of Hawthorn was spearheaded by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the League of Women Voters in the early 1950s, led especially by a Mrs. Edward Latulip. She and her group found that there were about 600 children under the age of 18 housed in Michigan's asylums, on adult wards with no programming or schooling oriented to youths. They contacted the Detroit News and Free Press to expose this issue. Not surprisingly, once the issue was brought to public knowledge, there was broad support from voters and legislators to rectify the situation with appropriations for suitable institutions and programming.
Everything in the classroom areas was as it had been left in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s when it was mothballed. On a chalkboard, someone had scrawled Run DMC lyrics. Cobweb strings snapped across our faces as we walked through the main hallways; no one had disturbed this building in many years.
This institution derived its name from the fact that there were Michigan Hawthorn trees present on the property where it was built. Through the years, many important researchers were affiliated with Hawthorn Center, such as Dr. Fritz Redl, Dr. William Morse, Dr. Ralph Rabinovitch (and his wife, Dr. Sara Dubo), and Dr. Harold Wright.
Like the Wayne County Training School before it, the program of Hawthorn Center was an entirely new and untried concept at the time it was founded, and was eventually studied by experts from across America and the world. It was small, with only 162 in-patient beds and 120 day care slots.
We were nervous as hell in here, so we were hasty in our documentation before escaping back to the cover and safe haven of the woods. Now we were interested in knowing where the other end of those pipes led. We tracked the hump in the ground all the way back to the creepy underground chamber, and took another bearing off of it, then hiked. This hump was a lot harder to follow, and we soon lost track of it, but kept hiking in the same general direction.
Around 1958, W.J. Maxey, director of the Michigan Department of Social Welfare (as it was called back then), was seeking to relocate the Lansing Boys' Vocational School, which was essentially a training school for delinquent male juveniles. His prime choice was west of Northville at Whitmore Lake, but a site between Hawthorn Center and Northville State Hospital was also seriously considered...in other words, in the "Evil Woods." Though residents of Whitmore Lake were opposed to their community being the site of a delinquent boys' facility, Maxey said “there are too many institutions in Northville already.” It ended up in Whitmore Lake, and was later named the Maxey Training School.
After another 30 minutes, it soon became evident that the only logical place the pipes could run to is NRPH. We eventually found ourselves at the backside of the psych hospital’s E-Building, which was still open as always. We decided to try and check out D-Building, which none of us had been in before, so we went into E and looked around for awhile.
Since that day, I have tried at least twice to relocate the mysterious hidden underground chamber in the Evil Woods again, but I could not.
* * *
The NRPH property continued to be a millstone around the neck of both the developers and local government until around January of 2013, when I saw that the Evil Woods had suddenly been cut down, presumably in preparation for development.
Immediately I thought of the mysterious underground chamber that had eluded me since 2004, and knew that I must go out there to see what could be seen now that the forest was gone. Perhaps I could also find the bomb shelter that Dr. Drunk had told me about in the beginning of all this. What I found was not what I was expecting.
The mysterious underground pagan chamber was nowhere to be seen. But I did see a pair of concrete structures in the ground in approximately the location where I thought the alleged bomb shelter would have been. I approached it quickly, full of anticipation despite the finger-stinging cold weather.
Here is a view looking down on it, with what appears to be a square hole precisely like the kooky pagan chamber would have had, and two other smaller square concrete structures downhill from it:
Odd...there was a doorway in the side of this thing:
I peeked in, my curiosity now crackling...
Odd, this wasn't how I remembered it at all. There were no pipes or valves; instead there was what looked to be a boiler body, but it was actually recessed into the wall. Very strange. Nor were there the ladder rungs in the wall that I had climbed down nine years before:
I racked my brain trying to remember what the kooky pagan chamber had looked like, but I just couldn't place any of what I was seeing with what I remembered. It didn't look much like the bomb shelter that Dr. Drunk had described either.
Was it possible that this was yet another mystery chamber that had lain hidden out there in the Evil Woods all those years, completely unseen even by me? Too bizarre. I began to get that nagging feeling that with the leveling of these trees, many secrets that had long sheltered within the protective eaves of this old wood were passing into the realm of the forgotten, never to be solved by anyone. That's the feeling that tortures any explorer's mind, keeping us up nights--staring out the window with thoughts haunted by the questions of what could have been, and what has been lost forever.
I looked inside the metal tank:
Nothing but an empty tank.
I decided to go look at the other two nearby foundations, I saw that one still traces of a cinder block structure that stood on top of it once:
The other seems to have been part of a sewer or drain?
I don't now what to make of these structures or the others that used to be here. Laid open, naked of its trees, it was impossible to recall any kind of familiar geographical context of the land as it had been before. Without pulling all kinds of old infrastructure documents and maps from county repositories, I can't tell you what exactly these structures would have been, other than they obviously had something to do with the utilities for NRPH and Hawthorn Center, and the staff houses that sat in the woods between.
References:
Northville Township…From the Beginning, A Jouney Recalled by Shari Peters
I was a patient at Hawthorne Center and played in the woods. I heard about a bomb shelter in the woods. I was there from 1971-1974. I instinctively knew the place was evil. I thank God for your curiosity. The whole area is a sanctuary for demons.
ReplyDeleteI was a staff member at Hawthorn for almost 3 decades. The woods were not evil. However, they were a wild life preserve full of deer flies and mosquitoes and poison ivy, so few with good sense choose to venture far from the sun lit hospital grounds. The cottages housed the more trust worthy patients. Those doors were not locked. Cottage one was the auto shop, which was part of the school program. Staff could get their oil changed and brakes fixed, if they were willing to trust patients with their car. Knowing the demons lurking in the minds of our patients, I choose not to. Today, due to budget cuts and privatization, Hawthorn has abandoned the cottages, closed the older wing of living areas, and provides special ed only for in-patients. School systems from all over the metro area used to bus their problem children in for special ed classes, but that stopped under Gov. Engler. The whole complex was a sanctuary for children sickened by the demonic forces in our society (poverty, racism, violence, sexual assault, social disorganization, neglect, and tribalism). We did our best to exorcize the ill effects of society's demons in the lives of these children, but our sanctuary was just a hard fought temporary bubble of compassion that has been steadily shrinking in cynical despair for decades. Mental health workers, emergency managers and technocratic fixes can't heal an unjust society. They can only try to clean up the mess.
ReplyDeleteDr. Dale, the only reason I called the woods the "Evil Woods" was as a reference to the cult horror movie "Evil Dead." There was never anything evil about the property, that is just how my friends and i always referred to the woods.
DeleteI was a staff member at Hawthorn for almost three decades. I never heard the woods between us and the adult hospital referred as the evil woods, but between the deer flies, mosquitoes, poison ivy, and wandering mental patients, we tended to avoid it. I believe the children in the unlocked cottages were told the woods were evil so they would not wander and get lost.
ReplyDeleteIn a way, the whole area really was a santuary for those possessed by society's demons. We did our best to create a compassion bubble that emphasized our shared humanity as a balm for society's demonic forces of poverty, racism, violence, neglect, and tribalism. Hawthorn serves less than half the children it used to, and Northville State Hospital is closed. Our State's commitment to mental health has fallen victim to tax revolts and small government ideologies. Our efforts to address the demonic social forces that cause mental illness have devolved into technocratic emergency city managers and prisons filled with the mentally ill who are too dangerous to allow to aimlessly wander the streets. Until we grow into a just and sane society, we need sanctuaries like Hawthorn, but they can never be a substitute for a just and sane society.
Hello, I was wondering what ever happened to the farm house my father rented from his boss was where I spent about 1 1/2 years. I was 11 the first summer we moved there and my parents bought me my first horse. As I got to know other local kids who had horses my territory expanded. The farm we lived on was exactly behind the NSPH on 6 mike rd. I had one friend who lived over on 7 mile rd. and it was a long ride to go up to Haggerty Rd. to get to 7 mile to her house, anyway one day she had to be home at a certain time and we didn’t have enough time to get there so we decided to cut back through the block to take a shortcut. Not knowing that the hospital was there. As we cut through the woods on horseback we came upon this extremely high fenced yard with some people in it. When we came out of the woods and the people saw us they (not all) came running up to the fence and scared the dickens out of us. They hung onto the fence and some of them were drooling and someone said horsey, horsey. Seeing this made us travel on our way quickly and we NEVER took that shortcut again! I was 11 in 1969 and 12 in 1970. In that time we had a few people (escapees) that would come to the farm. One person was found in the dead of winter down the road in a ditch filled with water with no coat or shoes, another came and sat in our front yard and asked for a glass of water (in summer) until my mom figured out that he was another escapee. It wasn’t long before someone came and picked him up. As a child I found this very scary. My fathers name was Gerald Lyon.
ReplyDeleteI too was a patient but I should have never been there. I was having problems because my father was a drunk and my mother believed what the elementary school told her that I was a problem child. But I only skipped school because after I would get beat up every day I walked home. Anyway I was there in the early 70's also all I can remember was I was sexually assaulted a few times by one kid who also was a patient. I never told anyone after the shrink I was seeing there didn't believe me. I too remember those out buildings and they were creepy to say the least and at night outside of our window we could hear strange noises and one night we saw shadows outside our window. There were 4 or 5 of us in one room. I was in cottage 5 if memory serves me right. One of the guys who worked there had a 1974 Mercury Cougar convertible, I always loved that car. Unfortunately I can't remember his name.
ReplyDeleteSome good info! I grew up off of Six Mile directly south of the hospital grounds and ventured around as far as I safely could as it was active during my time in Northville. Never wanted to be mistaken for a walkaway and returned to the hospital! We were chased by staff once and once was enough. I do remember the farmhouse on Six Mile and the big barn we ran to. It was vacant then, I would guess about 1975? Anyway, there were some nice single tracks for dirt bikes throughout the area and even heard stories of group camps, fishing and swimming in Waterford Pond (kinda risky with the Rouge?) That whole area to the south was farmland and a dairy at one time. Even found some old Northville Dairy bottles back there in the early 70's. I think the place was pretty cutting edge for psychiatric help when it opened and really is too bad we don't have treatment facilities for the mentally ill in Michigan any longer.
ReplyDeleteI remember hearing about the tunnel entrance in the woods. I had a couple friends that lived down at Haggerty and Plymouth. One those friends friends was a psych at Hawthorne. This was back in the 90s. None of us had ever seen this supposed entrance in the middle of the woods, only had heard about it.
ReplyDeleteMy brother was sent to hawthorn center when he was 6 years old. I was 8. I remember how sick I felt. We would visit him every other weekend and he would come home on alternating weekends.
ReplyDeleteHe needed help, but really at home my dad beat him everyday, my grandma called him names, so any help he got was undone when he came home. He became a drug addict, homeless, no life skills, living in Florida, and I am terrified of him.
I was a patient in 85-87 . I was 10 when I arrived. I was fortunate enough to live in cottage 2. I was housed with individuals that were sexual abused and assaulted, diagnosed eating disorders and mild behavior issues due to loss of parents or abuse in the home. Cottage 1 was an Auto shop. Cottage 2 was all female. Cottage 3 was all boys. Cottage 4 was a recreation hall that had arcade games, pool table and a single court basketball rim out front. I vaguely remember Cottage 5 which would have been used for storage. We had a greenhouse just shy of that.
ReplyDeleteWhile I was there I participated in a work activity program that literally paid .45 an hour and was on Northville State hospital property. I happen to work at Thursday's Place which was a restaurant inside the hospital. We learned to serve the public, prepare food and host hospital personel. It truly was a very sad and inhumane hospital. People were physically abused and sexually assaulted there. I once encountered a female patient wandering the grounds in a vest with restraints to her wrist. The poor girl was very mentally disabled and disfigured and could not speak only moaned and had oral secretions / drool perfusly leaking from her mouth. She scared the living shit out of me. I was emptying a canteen out the backdoor of the building when she walked up on me. I realize now that she probably wanted someone to help free her.
I learned to swim here and received a lifeguard license. I went to school on campus in the main hospital which is locked down. They have cinder block quiet rooms with padded mats and cameras and often misused thorazine on patients who resided in lockdown wards as well as straight jackets.
We were taken for nature walks on the trails and literally could feel the eeriness from the woods. There was a power source building that ran off coal. I recall some smaller cement style buildings or bunkers in the thickets of the woods which we were never granted permission to check out only view from a distance. I recall a few times patients escaped NSH and wandered to the cottages where you could see shadows roaming around outside our windows at night and the Cottage would be on lockdown until they were found.
The cottages had an A frame structure. We had a rumpus room.. people generally laugh when I use that word but it's true. We had a piano and had in house lessons. The room was one big game room with Chess tables and lots of board games as well as Tv, VCR and a Stereo. We had a part time Cook who made our meals fresh in the morning and prepped meals for lunch and dinner.
The cottage consisted of 4 levels. Obviously a main level and basement that houses the washer and dryer which we were give an assigned day and once old enough taught and expected to do your own. 3rd floor houses all of our bedrooms. Some were single rooms 1 double bed room and one was a quadruple bedroom. The restroom was a 4 or 5 stall with several sinks and a separate shower room that had 2 showers and 1 tub. One room was designated phone room to make and recurve phone calls. The hallway was so narrow you could climbed the walls to the ceiling which is the main reason the Cottages were shutdown. The fire department shut them down due to safety concerns and fire hazard. The 4th floor was specifically for staff only it had a private bathroom and office that had large front facing windows to over see the grounds as we were permitted to go outside without staff with permissions.
I always felt really bad for a lot of the residents on lockdown wards. I felt they were mistreated and made fun of. Shortly before I left and went to Children's Home of Detroit they started hiring younger people with no experience, training or education in psychiatrics or devolopmental disabilities. Quite a few mean and uncompassionate employees that abused their positions and authority.
Hello Unknown...I was discharged the year before you were there and i was 13. I was on a lockdown unit K2-A 2nd floor that faced haggerty and schoolcraft. I always wanted to get moved up into the cottages as that was like a resort to us in lockdown. I also remember a few times when something crazy would happen at NSH and we would go into lockdown mode like the show OZ.....I took classes in that greenhouse and learned about plant life. The padded cell with the camera you speak of (it was called the Q.R., short for Quiet Room), we had those too but they were not padded , it was a small roughly 10X10 concrete room with a camera and mic in the ceiling and there was a small monitor and speaker in the staff charting room and anytime someone would get put in we would try and sneak peeks of the monitor. I got to see some good brawls between staff and patients when they would resist the QR. Once in you did not see light for at least a day or more. i watched as staff would pin people down and strip them and toss em in. once tossed in the whole ward could hear the inmate screaming, yelling, crying, punching and kicking the door (there were 2 doors to get in) some would headbutt the dorr and staff would have to go back in and round 2 would begin. i never saw a straight jacket though and i was there for 1 full year. they would use drugs, nurse Tovis would be called. If you were good once in a while the staff would take us to the vending machines in the main lobby when it was closed so we could get honeybuns and snacks, that was a big deal. we all had small radios and we would all listen to Dr Ruth westimers "sexually Spleaking" where people would call in and ask funny sex questions and we would all be cracking up and staff would bust us for radios on after lights out. I have searched high and low on social media for all the people that i was locked up with and i have not found a single one ever. I can tell you stories all day about being there as i was there longer than any inmate at the time, most people were there for 60-90 days max but i was there for 365 days, i never knew why, come to find out i had "good" insurance so i was held there as long as they could for the $$. As of today 06-10-2021 my ward (K2-a) K2-B, L1 and L2 are all unused and unoccupied...i would do anything to walk those halls and see my room again. -Inmate #0403991
DeleteWell I work there now. And L2 is getting remodeled. Should have people in it in 3 weeks
DeleteI was a patient in 84 on unit K2-A....who remembers these names, staff member Arch tapallion with the fu-manchu moustache, pickle the art teacher, norm autin the school teacher, genie the librarian, dr paisley, dr john horvath, nurse carol tovis, bernard the ward supervisor, staff member mike brown.....we all had a crush on a girl on K1..gina spurling.....we would all sit in the window and watch her play tetherball and drool...big pool, little pool...patient sidney bright that lived in the sick bay and when we went to kensington park he drown and died...so sad.....the following patients- paul czyika, stuart feltz, danny persall, brian dourghty, kelly mccoy, deaf craig, paul "bam bam battleship' bagozzi who had a head trauma from a hockey game, richard "pepper" due, cory burrell, tim king, william perdue, sam centers, deaf miles, the list is endless...who remembers state shopping? and the Q.R...i spent many nights in the QR naked and on camera. there is a facebook group too , join it!
ReplyDeleteI was in Hawthorn in 77 and 78,i was 8 when i got there and turned 9 in cottage 3 i was on the ward from july to October of 77 then in cottage 3 from October 77 to june 78. although I seen kids getting dragged of to the QR it was usually a couple of boys with major behavior problems. One kid i remember well was a black kid named joe, he visited the QR atleast 2 to 3 times a week. Not sure what he did but was getting dragged off often. A few of the staff were nice, don't remember there last names but there was bill,Kathy,gary,nora,jeff white guy with an late 70s afro.just to name a few. Then there was my assigned doc,doctor Utec i hope I'm spelling his name right he was amazing he put me in cottage 3 after only 3 months on the ward.I hope he's still alive but i doubt it he was a little older then in the late 70s. I learned how to swim in Hawthorn in the little pool and the big pool. I learned how to play basketball in the little gym and the big gym. I didn't like being away from home but made the best of it. I had a really nice teacher named Sara where i used to listen to the bee gees and star wars music on the record player when we had free time lol it was the late 70s. We went camping cottage 3 at bishop lake in brighton. They took us roller skating every other friday. The cottage was the place to be.in the 70s cottage 3 was boys 6 to 12,cottage 4 was boys 13 to 17, 2 was girls can't remember what 5 was use for. The staff in cottage 3 were kool for the most part. Don't remember last names but there was Rose,Dave,Roger,Jan and so on. The lady that cooked our food was nice too, don't remember her name. I would be very curious if some of the staff or some of the kids from 77 and 78 are still around?
ReplyDeleteDo the names Bruce or Wayne ring a bell to you? They are still there. Wayne is head of the training department and used to be a CCW. Bruce is still there as well.
DeletePeople need to read this information ! It has really effected me! I just can’t imagine how all these things happened! I new dr rebinavich he was a very good person! I no he wouldn’t have let those things happen if he new what was going on! It really hurts me to hear about these things. I feel sad u all had to leave your family’s and endure all the pain and suffering! I hope u are all in a better place and enjoying your life.
ReplyDeleteTry looking up Dr.Lee and how he used to sexually Abuse his patients there .it's not a secret anymore. He was prosecuted for this in the 70s around 76-78 to be specific I delivered the Newspaper with the article explaining all about this sick quack that enjoyed abusing children in Hawthorne center. There are more reasons to shut that place down than meets the eye
DeleteIve worked at Hawthorn for a number of years. It is currently being torn down in preparation of the new Psychiatric Hospital that will combine Walter Reuther Psychiatric Hospital and Hawthorn Center. Although Hawthorb aka Hellthorn has had nothing but negative stories in the news, some of us truly bust our asses off and care for the kids.
DeleteI lived in Northville from the day I was born in 1970 until I was old enough to bolt. There were many CS predators in that town. Some were organized. Many had access to children through schools and medical offices.
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