For my twelfth anniversary this year, me and my love went to visit an old asylum (The Traverse City Regional Psychiatric Hospital formally known as 'The Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane') 😍 and it was awesome! Below are some of the pics I was able to capture :D We took a two hour long tour of the main revamped building (now used as a mini mall type venue with housing in the top floors), a 'cabin' which is a fancy word for a separate dormer on the property for patients and one of the underground steam tunnels.
This is a small view of the revamped portion from the front of the main building. Each separate window on the sides of the picture were one single room each when it functioned as an asylum. The set of three close together windows in the middle were a 'day' room where all the patients in that wing gathered.
A little history:
The asylum construction was started in 1883 and finished (the main building anyway) in November of 1885. The first Superintendent was James Decker Munson who served in this position until 1924. In it's start up year, the asylum housed only several hundred patients. Over the next several years multiple new buildings were constructed to house additional patients and a Nursing school was started in 1906 on the property. As the housing requirements grew, so did the amount of acreage. Initially there were only 350 acres bought - before the asylum closed indefinitely in 1989, it had an amazing 1,000 acres full of housing and farm land. The most patients recorded in the asylums history peeked at 3,600 patients in 1966. As far as the more macabre details of anything that went on during the years the asylum was running, our tour guide was insistent that nothing of note happened here. If fact she stated that the use of restraints in this facility was strictly prohibited through out its long history and that only one death ever occurred (and that was a patient/patient issue that resulted in a death).
