The Lobster Dance

Image: drawing of the Mississippi State Institution.

In doing some research on the trope of asylums in horror, I found this excellent article on Nursing Clio on the problems with using “insane asylums” for ghost hunting and ghost tours:

When I got home [from an unsuccessful research trip to the Willard Psychiatric Center], some research revealed what attracted so many to the tour: the paranormal. The Travel Channel’s Destination Fear had run a short segment on the asylum, featuring two employees of the correctional facility campus describing vaguely creepy events, such as the suspicion that the ghost of a red-haired nurse-turned-patient wandered the halls. When the tour of the asylum was announced, news had apparently traveled through local ghost-hunting circles. Most of the folks who had lined up by the thousands to tour the old asylum weren’t interested at all in the history of asylums — they were hoping to see a ghost.

Sarah Handley-Cousins pulls no punches:

Haunted attractions that use asylums as settings rely on reductive and offensive portrayals of the mentally ill as horrifying, dangerous, and evil people that must be kept within an asylum for the protection of the public. They exploit the ways that the real patients of mental institutions were treated for cheap thrills — “patients” are often depicted in restraints or undergoing medical procedures and experiments. Indeed, part of the “creep” factor is the general disrepair of the institution, invoking the very real neglect patients experienced. The thousands of “paranormal investigators” who hoped for a tour of the Willard Asylum were looking for the real-life version of what Pennhurst Asylum has created: an eerie setting filled with the ghosts of scary, dangerous lunatics.

Having seen this trope pop up on something as seemingly innocuous as Food Network’s Halloween Wars (don’t judge my taste in hotel cable), let alone using mentally ill or disabled persons as movie monsters, this is still a conversation we need to keep having.

Contains some detailed descriptions of abuse and neglect in asylums and psychiatric wards, real-life medical horror, practicing medicine without patient consent.

“Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted Asylum”