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What is it that’s so uncanny and strange about an abandoned hospital? Perhaps it’s the emptiness of an immense place, or the wrongness of silence in a building that’s supposed to be bustling with activity at all times — or the nagging sense that we’ve somehow failed; it’s a place meant to care for us when we’re in need, which we could not ourselves care for. Of course, not all hospitals care for their patients the way they should be cared for — take for instance the Oregon psychiatric hospital which once served as the shooting location for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It had always been home to abandoned people — people so alone they weren’t even claimed after death. In 1913, the hospital began to cremate these unclaimed patients and store their ashes in copper cannisters on pine shelves in a small room.
Nearly one hundred years later, the hospital is partially abandoned, partially converted to a facility that houses violent criminals. But the room where the ashes were stored — called the Library of Dust in photographer David Maisel’s new photo essay of the same name — is still there. Maisel had learned that the copper cannisters had for years been reacting chemically with the human ashes stored inside them, creating a kind of beautiful hybrid of man and metal — and he set out to photograph them — hundreds in all — in a small photo studio he set up inside the hospital.
Maisel’s book of photographs comes out later this month through Chronicle Books. Here are a few of his strangely moving images, and brief excerpts from an unusually poetic accompanying essay by Geoff Manaugh.
Each canister holds the remains of a human being, of course; each canister holds a corpse – reduced to dust, certainly, burnt to handfuls of ash, sharing that cindered condition with much of the star-bleached universe, but still cadaverous, still human. What strange chemistries we see emerging here between man and metal. Because these were people; they had identities and family histories, long before they became nameless patients, encased in metal, catalytic.
After all, these ash-filled urns were photographed only because they remain unclaimed; they’ve been excluded from family plots and narratives. A viewer of these images might even be seeing the fate of an unknown relative, eclipsed, denied – treated like so much dust, eventually vanishing into the shells that held them.
In some ways, these canisters serve a double betrayal: a man or woman left alone, in a labyrinth of medication, prey to surveillance and other inhospitable indignities, only then to be wed with metal, robbed of form, fused to a lattice of unliving minerals – anonymous. Do we see in Maisel’s images then – as if staring into unlabeled graves, monolithic and metallized, stacked on shelves in a closet – the tragic howl of reduction to nothingness, people who once loved, and were loved, annihilated?
It is not a library at all – but a room full of souls no one wanted.
All photos by David Maisel. Via BLDGBLOG.
Very disconcerting to read, but fascinating.
posted by beth on 8-19-2008 at 8:46 am
Powerful read. This reminds me of a project just undertaken here in Lexington (KY) - our city is home to one of the state mental institutions (one of the oldest in the country, actually) and a group of volunteers just set out to clean up and identify graves in an old, neglected cemetery on the hospital grounds. It, too, provided a final resting place for anonymous, unclaimed patients. I wonder how many other such sites remain to be discovered…
I’m putting a link to a website about the project in with my name.
posted by Roger on 8-19-2008 at 10:09 am
Welcome to Salem, Oregon. The Oregon State Hospital is an iconic series of buildings on a major street near downtown. I always take visitors by there when they’re in town. The building is eerie, even from the outside. Tall barred windows, paint peeling from the old bricks, and you can still see patients peering out from the inside. It’s scary that the falling down building is still housing mental patients.
The state is planning on tearing down the “J” building (named because it’s shaped like a “J”), saving the historic facade, and replacing the rest with a state of the art mental hospital that will house twice the patients. Lovely. Add that to the 4 prisons already in Salem.
What a lovely town. :-)
posted by Jenny on 8-19-2008 at 10:36 am
Wow that is very sad and at the same time very amussing. The Urns look beautiful. Well at least the no name patients are getting a bit of fame now.
RIP
posted by Nicole on 8-19-2008 at 11:00 am
My grandparents live just a few blocks away from this hospital. I’ve driven by it countless times when I’ve visited them. It’s interesting to finally see inside and learn it’s sad story.
posted by Amanda on 8-19-2008 at 11:40 am
The first pic gave me flashbacks of Saw II, but those urn pics are beautiful. Isn’t chemistry amazing? Sad about the patients being unclaimed, though. What a nice way to commemorate them.
posted by adrienne on 8-19-2008 at 11:48 am
Staunton, Virginia has its own version of this — TWO versions, in fact. The Western State Lunatic Asylum has been in Staunton since 1828. The first buildings were designed by Thomas Jefferson’s architect and are stunning, with fan lights, domes, rotundas, etc., and all in a beautiful setting with willow trees, a babbling brook, and artfully placed boulders (back when “lunatic asylums” were not unlike the spas of today, places for a temporary retreat). The complex sat empty for years, but is now being saved and rehabbed into condos. When the lunatics left that campus (it became a prison before the condo renovation), they went to the DeJarnette Buildings (named for the guy who forcibly sterilized Virginia’s insane and “feeble” population in the name of eugenics). Those are very spooky and Gothic-looking and sit abandoned and forbidding at the top of a hill overlooking the town. The older complex boasts a cemetery of hundreds of patients. Nearly all of the graves are marked with stones, but because of privacy laws, the stones are completely blank. It’s haunting and thought-provoking — a sea of nameless graves.
posted by Soutnern Buddhist on 8-19-2008 at 12:37 pm
Another fantastically fascinating article from Ransom. They’re always my favorites.
posted by tej on 8-19-2008 at 1:41 pm
We had Stockton State Hospital here, and many of the patients were sterilized. They were still doing it into the 1960s. The unclaimed dead were buried in a “Potter’s Field”, the graves marked with numbers. Walking through that area of the cemetery is very disconcerting as one often sees bones protruding from the gravesites.
posted by Judy on 8-19-2008 at 2:04 pm
I don’t think it’s sad, I think it’s amazing. Amazing that even in death, people are still individuals. I would bet that all those copper canisters, which were once all the same, now all look different. The way that each individual’s cremated remains reacted with the copper is unique. Yes, it is tragic that these people died without having people who care about them, and are now nameless, but they have asserted their independence in a fantastic way.
posted by Amy D on 8-19-2008 at 4:11 pm
There were two journalists from The Oregonian who wrote a series about the place, called “Oregon’s Forgotten Hospital.” In 2006, it won them a Pulitzer Prize. Their descriptions of the hospital are really haunting. And on The Oregonian’s site, there’s also a slideshow of hospital pictures. Click on my name for the link.
posted by Steph on 8-19-2008 at 4:24 pm
My grandparents, aunt and stepfather all worked at the hospital at some point. Growing up near it, I was always fascinated with the building and the people inside of it, I imagine it is filled with ghosts, memories of those that lived there without love or hope. These photos are moving and haunting all at once. Thank you to the artist for sharing these images.
posted by Melody on 8-20-2008 at 12:19 am
Holy crap, what an amazing article!
posted by Dave on 8-20-2008 at 1:04 pm
I live in Massachusetts which is the land of the abandoned asylum and I’ve had the opportunity now to photograph 13 of these amazing buildings. I can’t wait to travel out west to see more and I really enjoyed reading this piece. Wonderfully done!
posted by Kate on 8-26-2008 at 7:47 pm
I live in Massachusetts which is the land of the abandoned asylum and I’ve had the opportunity to photograph 13 of these amazing buildings. The stories behind the facades are heartwrenching and intriguing and it’s great to see them gaining more mainstream attention. Wonderfully done!
posted by Kate on 8-26-2008 at 7:49 pm