Byberry was a notorious psychiatric hospital in
northeast Philadelphia from 1907 to 1990. Its fifty buildings housed seven
thousand of the city’s mentally challenged to criminally insane. For much of
the century, it more resembled a concentration camp with patients abused and
exploited, huddled naked in crap-smeared corridors, having teeth extracted
without Novocaine—the kind of hell the staff should go to Hell for. At
last, budget cuts and a series of appalling inspections shut it down.
For the next decade-and-a-half, Byberry would become
an abandoned post-apocalyptic playground for looters, gangs, and dark tourists.
My friends and I were among the earliest wave of trespassers, high-schoolers
from nearby Bucks County armed with a crowbar and flashlights, maneuvering past
the on-duty cop to get inside. There was still wax on the floors. Wheelchairs.
A straightjacket. Boxes of patient files. An art room featuring a dementedly
asymmetrical portrait of the Pink Panther. A morgue.
The first time venturing into the cold, tile hallways,
light beams unable to see the end in either direction, all that terrible
history in mind, disembodied noises… we lasted as long as virgins do before
pulling out. But we returned a hundred times, getting braver, staying till the
sun came up to explore every last nook. The blueprints we found even led us to
underground tunnels used for shuffling people between wards, concealed from the
light of day.
Best friends already, our little club bonded deeper
as we got covered in tics on the overgrown property and had to strip naked for
the drive home up Roosevelt Boulevard, where the other cars honked at us in
celebration and disgust; as we encountered a former-resident-turned-squatter in
a stairwell; as a dozen Satan worshippers with medieval weapons chased us on a rooftop,
down through levels of ransacked architecture, and out desperately onto the highway—cars
honking this time to avoid running us over. Not quite a military kinship, but
at least the Goonies in a fucked-up asylum.
Everything was razed in 2006 in a ceremony with the
mayor. It’s condos now, so someone’s microwaving a Hot Pocket in the spot where
an auditorium once had theater productions with lunatics. And where, later, I
sat unknowingly in the seats while a giant demon head floated in an exit door
behind me, accidentally captured with a $20 Radio Shack camera. In the
developed photograph, a line of chairs obscures the entity’s mouth, but those
eyes suggest a malevolent smile. My only record of our tremendous adventures
there, it prompts me to look over my shoulder now and again, to be mindful of
toxic forces that creep up unchecked such as burnout, complacency, or those
extra Jack and Cokes. And to keep finding ways of tapping into the bold
electricity of youth which landed me in that front-row seat to exhilarating
madness.
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