As someone who attended night classes after teaching all day, I can tell you that the origins of the campus are very clear in the rolling green hills and architecture of the buildings. It still very much looks like a mental institution. And it was not hard to be creeped out walking across an almost empty campus night after night.
The horror of the place, the expose, was all common knowledge to the staff and students, although I'm sure the administration preferred to ignore it.
The staff I encountered, security guards and custodians, mostly locals, were always happy to tell stories about Willowbrook. One story in particular stuck with me- that removing so much of the equipment after the scandal broke and the state school was closed was too expensive, so in many of the buildings they just stored things in the basement and padlocked the rooms.
Of course, this is all wrong- the perception, WHY I and others constructed Willowbrook as horror, what scared us. As Sarah Handley-Cousins wrote so excellently for Nursing Clio, the construction of the asylum as haunted depends on the audience viewing disabled people as scary, a threat, a horror. At Willowbrook the torturous conditions the people were subjected to was a combination of a staff that did not care about basic human conditions, unregulated state schools, and horrific misconceptions on mental health. The stories I heard during my time there reflected this. I was there in 2001-2004, and was not in New York during the original reporting, but I knew who Geraldo Rivera was, although not that this was his "big break." The stories I heard still seemed fresh in people's minds. The stories I heard were of the criminally insane that were put in locked wards at Willowbrook because they did not fit at Riker's. Stories about people who were mentally ill or disabled, whose families put them in Willowbrook when they were very young and then promptly forgot about them. People who were deaf and mute, locked in rooms with dozens of others, of varying, serious, conditions, with food thrown at them, hosed off occasionally, sitting in their own filth.
It is often reported as the "institution that shocked a nation into changing its laws." But while that's a convenient and easy story to tell, it's not really true. When Robert Kennedy visited in 1965 he famously called the place a "snake pit." But nothing changed. In 1972 Rivera took cameras inside and showed the world the horrific conditions which resulted in court cases that changed conditions and treatment. But Willowbrook remained open until 1987. In 1993 The College of Staten Island took over the campus.
There were plenty of true horrors of Willowbrook. How the residents were treated. How their families abandoned them. How staff disregarded the human beings in their care. The misunderstanding and total uninterest in treatment of mental health and disability. Then there are the horrors that continue to be perpetrated in the name of Willowbrook. The atrocities of that place have become local folklore, which means that the very real people who suffered there have been erased from the story, serving as background to set the haunted mood. What happened to them once Willowbrook closed? In light of the state of health care today has society learned anything, done anything different, or are they just better at hiding the Willowbrooks? Or in the case of the treatment at the camps on the border is it just a matter of perspective? Drawing clear lines between who matters and who doesn't? Horror requires a normal, an audience that is the object of the lesson, and the abnormal, that is the lesson. Historically who and what has been classified as horror is classist, racist, misogynist, and reflects colonial and patriarchal norms.
Willowbrook State School and the stories told on the College of Staten Island campus are a lesson in folklore unfolding in real time. These stories are not from 100 or 1000 years ago, they are within a human lifetime yet how easily the real people affected by these horrors have been erased, leaving behind mood and images of hauntings that are totally divorced from reality.
I was reminded of all this this past week with two separate incidents.
The first was students were telling me about a haunted building on campus. We'd been talking about other things, and somehow it came up that dorms were full, overloaded almost, even though we had a couple of buildings/dorms that were empty, abandoned. Now, our school has gone through a period of low enrollment that we're recovering from, and the campus is slowly but surely renovating buildings that have needed it for a while so these conditions are not unusual or unexpected. But for the students this is not the story told. The students say that the building has been abandoned because it is haunted because a woman, a student, was brutally murdered there. They knew her name, the details (I later looked them up, they were accurate), and the aspect that I believe has led to it becoming folklore on campus- the fact that her murder is to date unsolved, and that it was reported the murderer taunted the family saying they'd killed the wrong woman.
True crime blogs have fed the sensational aspect by describing racist "wilding" behavior as having occurred on campus earlier, not too subtly blaming this environment for the murder. Then there's the aspect of betrayal, fear, because it occurred on campus in a dorm room. Feelings of normalcy and safety were an illusion. Blogs also create a conspiracy out of the event, saying that it's suspicious there is no "digital footprint" for the case, despite it occurring a good decade before Internet use.
The story has all the elements of a horror tale. The fact that the students know the details 35 years after the fact, and with few of them with local knowledge, not being from here, speaks to how easily and quickly this story became part of the campus' story. But to accept the horror of the tale is to ignore the racist framing of "savage" and "wild" predators and gangs that threatened a southern town. It ignores the fact that women are sexually assaulted and murdered at alarming rates. It also ignores the institutional racism in the south and elsewhere that determines who gets justice, who is deemed worthy of investigation, justice, and who is not.
The students who told me the story were Black women, and I wondered how much this played into it. Did they construct this tale as horrific because the woman killed was Black? Does this tale resonate because the murder is unsolved? Because it focuses on common fears of college women- the isolation of living away from home, away from the safety of the known, exaggerated and internalized racist ideas of dangers in majority Black cities? The fear that if something happened to them justice would not be done? Why does THIS story get repeated?
The students did misidentify the location of the murder. They claimed it happened in a building currently empty when it occurred in a currently occupied residence hall. The facts are available online with little searching, so why the misidentification? Is it convenience to place it in an empty and unrenovated building? Does a used building not fit the narrative? Is it a reflection of how they constructed the horror of the tale, a way of placing distance between themselves and the horror, that it has to be in an empty building, one not used, the inside not seen, safely contained and not in a building students are currently living in?
The other story I heard was just a few days later. This time the tellers of the tale were faculty not students. Someone asked where I lived, and I explained I was next to the hospital, a few houses down from the nursing home that is primarily a care facility for dementia patients. I was complaining that the EMTs aren't allowed to smoke on hospital grounds, so them drive in front of my house, smoke, and leave their cigarette butts all over the place. I also told them about this one man, in a wheelchair, who rolls himself over from the nursing home, to smoke, then rolls himself back. This prompted the faculty to tell me the story.
They were shocked that security was so loose because just a couple of years ago, a woman wandered off and died due to hypothermia (it was February). The place was supposedly under new management, and it does have two sections, one that is assisted living and one that is for the patients with dementia, so it's not unreasonable to think the man is just sneaking off then returning without issue. The story they told me was that she wandered off, but INTO the forest/swamp directly behind the home, and the entire neighborhood. The land behind this entire section of town is dense trees, wisteria, sloping down to swamp and then the river. Their story told me she'd wandered off and become lost in the woods. In reality, she wandered down the street and was found in a greenhouse about half a mile away. Unlike the murder, they did not know the woman's name. She was anonymous. Like the stories surrounding Willowbrook, she was a symbol, a stand in, not a real person. They specifically identified her as a dementia patient, she was not, she was part of the assisted living section, and it was reported she'd wandered off before. There was no alarm on the front door, so no one noticed when she left. The building is not gated or secured in any way. She most likely just walked out the door and down the street.
Unlike the haunted dorm story, these changes are a little easier to understand, and as much as they're disturbing for the fact that people still construct mental illness and disease as a horror, it is a known and familiar element. News reports, like the story I was told, erase her as a person from the narrative. There is a picture of her, her name, but the focus is on the death, and the consequences the home faced for the neglect. Her obituary tells a different story. Her picture is bright, cheerful. She was a caregiver within the community, with children, and grandchildren. She suffered from Alzheimer's, and probably became disoriented once she lost sight of the home (there's a bend in the road). She is a sad victim of neglect, a single narrative in a sea of them about how we mistreat and discard our elderly.
Her story as relayed to me already has the makings of folklore. An older woman walks into the forest, dies mysteriously. I've written before about the power of the folkloric forest. The forest and swamp that lead to the river are wild, dense, full of dangers, a reminder on the edge of the subdivision that not all is ordered and able to be controlled. Perhaps shifting the story to the forest mitigates the responsibility of the people who allowed her to wander off to her death. Does constructing a siren call of a forest as undeniable make the story more tragic? More inevitable? When did the story first shift to there? Was it an assumption on the part of the audience because it runs all along the subdivision, impossible to ignore? Because it's easier than believing she wandered down a residential street, into someone's yard and greenhouse and no one noticed? Is the forest a better, more palatable bogeyman than inattentive people?
Taken together, what stories or responsibility are these folkloric narratives explaining away? While the stories on the surface appear very different, they are both about women, from groups who have historically been neglected and ignored. In both stories as relayed to me the women are silent. There was no bit about screaming or yelling in the hauntings. The murdered young woman was described only for her murder, not for her family, or that she was graduating and going to be a teacher. In constructing her story as folklore, her true narrative has been lost. The story of the wandering woman has no dialogue. Her disappearance into the forest is the totality of the story. Who she was, how she got there is erased, considered of no consequence.
Both of these stories, told to me so close together made me think about how quickly stories can be constructed as folklore. A couple of years, a couple of decades, and the reality is transformed. It got me thinking about why this happens, to whom. I also realized that for an area that is quick to tell stories of ghostly colonists and pirates, in all my years of living here I really cannot recall this kind of specific folklore. Is it because the folklore of this region focuses on groups who are marginalized, whose stories aren't shared out of certain groups? Given where we are, is the folklore divided by race? What stories have I never heard? Whose stories have been ignored? What could we gain by studying these stories? Both their construction as folklore and the truth of their beginnings, the work of telling the world about these women. Who they were, not what the stories made them out to be.
