Henryton Sanitarium

      

The Henryton Sanitarium in Marriottsville, Maryland.  What is there to say about the Henryton that can't already be "felt" the moment you step foot into any one of the dilapidated buildings?  The place is falling apart, it's true.  However, it's also being destroyed, piece by piece, by purposeful vandals and vagrants.  It's a sad sight to see, but in a different perspective, it is also a thing of beauty.  It's definitely Urban Exploration at its best, and as for the paranormal investigations?  This place is the cream-of-the-creepy-crop.

Tony and I arrived at the Henryton parking area where we met up with Jenny and PRRS team.  We entered the grounds and were immediately struck by the size of the location.  There were at least 3 buildings to explore, although Tony and I only managed to cover 2 of them during both sessions we had been on the grounds.   The first session took place in the day time, so we could get some daytime footage, and daytime photographs.  And, of course, there was the nighttime session, when we had planned on making best use of the grounds and really tapping into that spiritual energy that may, or may not, be present.  The main problem with the latter part of our plan was that, apparently, this is a hotspot for many-a-local-teen and young-adult in this area.  The Henryton is the go-to place for cheap thrills, and unfortunately, it's those people looking for a cheap thrill that are tearing the place apart.  Sad, but true.

I'm not sure what I should be saying about the Henryton, since we didn't spend a whole lot of time wandering the inside of the building.  I will say this with conviction, though; the next time I visit the Henryton, and I do hope to return there one day before it's vandalized to smithereens, I hope to spend more time wandering the place in the light, than in the dark.  In the dark, this compound took on a whole different persona.  In the light we could see where we were going, better.  We could get our bearings in the place, and really observe our surroundings, which was a plus because there are some "freaky looking areas" that are nothing more than a play on light.   I remember twice-seeing this one particular entrance of a room that Tony was in, and both times I scared the life out of myself when I approached it.  I laugh now, but I know if I were in there in the dark it'd have been all over.  I'd have piddled like a 3rd grader who couldn't "hold it" anymore!  :P   

The fact of the matter is, the Henryton hit me hard, and not on a scientific level.  I've been to places where the "vibe" was creepy and I felt watched, and verbalizing that was enough to help me feel better about the situation.  But the Henryton was different.  I couldn't seem to "see past" what I was feeling in this place, and I also didn't want to verbalize it because I was working overtime to make sure I came across as "professional", or, as professional as I could be without sounding like a kook.  I'm not a sensitive, I'm not "psychic", I don't have a keen 6th sense I'm totally in touch with...  I rather believe I have that kind of 6th sense that triggers the flight-or-fight mechanism I hear so much about.  Basically, if I'm feeling any sort of "vibe", then I figure I've stepped into something that's way over my head, and way over my ability to handle in a way I can process and understand.  My very limited and narrow view of my 6th sense goes like this: if I'm "feeling" something that's actually there, and I'm sure it's not my imagination, then it must be something pretty significant because I'm not "sensitive" in that way.    That's pretty much what I experienced at the Henryton Sanitarium.  The "feeling" I had, roughly %75 of the time I was wandering that place, was less than "positive" for me, and actually stood in the way of me being a good scientific investigator while on-scene, which is something I regret.  

I've tried, a few times, to lock down that 1 moment when it all started going bad for me, and the more I think about it, the more I'm brought back to the very start of when we entered the complex.   I had my video camera recording the whole group, from the parking area all the way down into the actual Henryton complex and it was working fine until we reached where the buildings were located.  We hadn't arrived at the entrance to the buildings yet, but where we were walking we could see directly parallel to us was one of the buildings that housed the little kids.   Little kids, I should scoff, they were babies.  They were toddlers and infants and they were diagnosed with TB and left to starve to death because, let's face it, they weren't going to survive this disease anyway, so why waste the food?  I had no idea that's what this building was used for until, almost a week later, but I remember right where my camera shut off and exactly what happened when it did.   I'll write, here and now, that I've been using this camera like it's permanently attached to my hand.  I love video recording, and I use it extremely frequently.  The 6.5 hour battery I had in it had just been fully charged and freshly placed into the camera.  I turned it on, walked down the road to get to the Henryton Complex, and when I reached that point in the road where we were in clear site of the buildings my camera went blank, my battery was sucked dry to the point that my camera wouldn't turn on "at all" (not even a little blinking light for a moment when I try to power it on).  When I replaced the battery with another freshly charged 6.5 hour battery the LCD display showed me a blue screen - something I had never seen before, and a message that I didn't have a clue what to make of.  This message on the screen was telling me there was a backup taking place, and led me to believe only 1 thing.  That the battery had gone dry so incredibly fast that the camera didn't have enough time to register the data I had filmed, and I couldn't get this camera out of "recovery" mode to save my own life.  It was stuck there for a good 5 minutes or so, "recovering" with this blue screen.  And to think, I didn't make much of the ordeal.  It was a pain in my rump, and I think that's all I was thinking about at the time.  I should have known...

   As the daytime tour progressed, we went into the main building, and all the way through the reasonably accessible parts.  We toured the first floor level, and the basement level, and even located a really cool pipe tunnel.  Actually, the pipe tunnel was an area that made me nervous for some reason I couldn't put my finger on.  (When we eventually exited the building through the cafeteria and turned off all of our recording equipment, something or someone slammed one  of those pipes in that basement level tunnel, two very loud times, and we could hear it throughout the inside and outside of the building.  I thought it sounded pretty darned loud and purposeful.)  We had traveled through the first floor level and had taken loads of pictures and lots of video, and we were having a genuinely grand time when we came upon this particular part of a hallway that housed smaller rooms to my left side, but this one really large open area to my right.  The large open area had lots of windows all through it, so there was so much bright light coming through it was really inviting.  But that's not what enticed me into it.   As I was poking around in the hallway, Tony and Kate (the PRRS team photographer), were across the hall intrigued by something else.  I distinctly heard a shuffling in this larger room to my right.  The problem for me was that I couldn't see into the room.  The room was so large that it had at least 2 entrances, maybe 3, and it spanned a length of, probably 40 feet or more.  So there was a doorway, a large length of wall, another doorway, another large length of wall, and then another doorway.  When I heard the shuffling in that room I was between 2 doorways and couldn't see inside to identify what was making the shuffle.  When I finally made my way toward the doorway I had heard the shuffle again, right before I got to the doorway, but this time it didn't sound like it was inside the room.  It sounded like it was on the other side of the exterior wall - the wall with all the really big windows on it.  The windows were either gone/broken or they were screened in, so it was essentially like being on an extremely large porch.  Anyway, when I told Tony I wanted to be in this particular room later that night, he asked why.  My response was that I had heard scuffling but I wasn't sure if it was inside or if it was outside.   For all I know, it could have been "both". 

   

 At any rate, I snapped 5 pictures of this area and in 2 of the 5 photos it looks like I may have captured a shadow figure, we're not sure yet so we're still debunking it (Thanks to Kate's psuedo-bro, Josh). Check out the photo gallery I set up for this event. In the other 3 photos it looks like the shadow figure may have disappeared, or just isn't in the frame any more.  After really close inspection by Josh, it's very possible that the Shadow Figure could be nothing more than a black drawing on the wall the figure looks like it's leaning against.   Either way, that room was creepy and that whole place has a "vibe" to it I couldn't shake all day, all night, and until the following Tuesday.   I continued to have nightmares about aspects and intimacies of that hospital I didn't even know about, and the people inside it.

Henryton spoke to me on a level I wasn't anticipating.  I went there for a fun and intimate ghost hunt with paranormal professionals such as ourselves.  I was looking forward to capturing evidence and working the data, comparing techniques and learning of different methods for evidentiary standards.  Instead, I wound up spending most of my night feeling intensely watched, targeted, and on the verge of an emotional breakdown, the roots of which I could not identify nor could I understand.   What everyone else was finding, either "cool" or "interesting" I was finding "loss of hope", "despair" and genuine depression the likes of which I have never experienced before.   It hit me so hard I didn't know what to do with it, and so I tried my best to put my game face on and go with the flow.  When I saw all of the "kids" that were bombarding the place I had to admit, it brought me some sort of relief.  Not that we couldn't investigate, because [b]that[/b] aspect of our time at the Henryton really kind of got to me... I did, desperately, want to investigate this location, and I was willing to beat back any of these feelings I was having, to go into certain parts of certain areas of the complex (though, not at all, "all parts" of the complex).  No, the "relief" I felt when the kids arrived was the thought that "maybe it'll target someone else in this group" instead of searing it's staring, piercing vibe onto me.  Maybe one of these oblivious kids can absorb some of this intensity and I can shake it off and get down to business (or at least "get back to being me").  They're here for a totally different reason than I am, maybe the more of them there are the less of "this" I would feel.   It didn't exactly work out that way, and so we continued to investigate as best we could, and for the most part, up until one particular episode with Kate right before the police had arrived to clear the place out (our group had permission to be there so we stayed), I kept it all to myself.  

This "episode" with Kate happened at night when our group exited "the admin building" and was collected out in the main parking area, or walking area.  I'm still not sure there was enough space for parking at this complex, but that's neither here nor there, I suppose.  We were standing around outdoors in the dark and Kate asked me if I wanted to take a walk over to the main hospital building.  She wanted to get inside the front door we used earlier in the day, just to get some random "shots" of the interior while the rest of our group prepared for a ghost box session outside.  The truth of the matter was that I hadn't met Kate before, and she seemed somewhat brazen, and with her spunk and desire to capture as much of this  area as possible... I could relate.  I've been there before and so "yah" I was going to say I'd go.  Everyone else seemed busy, and no one else seemed the least bit unnerved - certainly not like I was feeling/sensing - and so I told myself to just " 'can' it, get in there and just do it."   I didn't say anything to her about feeling like I wanted to crawl out of my skin the closer we got to the building, heck no.  But as we approached, and she reached for the door handle, she stopped... right before she grabbed it.  She dropped her arm and said to me that she didn't think she wanted to go in.   I asked her why that was, and short of comparing notes regarding "6th sense in overload", we agreed that there was something more intense than we had realized was going to be here at this complex and turned around and walked back to the car... and sat there... pretty much in silence for quite a while.

   

During our daytime visit to the admin building I was left to straggle behind Tony and Dave (of the PRRS crew).   As I was walking through the lobby area of the Admin building I heard a scuffle on the floor, like someone was dragging their feet when they walked.  It was only 1 step, and I refused to look over to it because if there was something there, and I was the only one to see it, what good would that do the group, our research, and my desire to want to come back to this place in the dark later on that evening?  So I didn't turn my head, I just kept walking.  I took another step or two and distinctly heard another scuffle at floor level, and so I hustled down to where Tony and David could see me straight on.  If they could see me, then they could see if anything was behind me.   I remember David saying "I don't know about you guys but..." he didn't think there was anything in that building, but I disagreed.  I didn't want to say it straight away because I didn't want to come off like an arrogant know-it-all so I left it unsaid, but I was darned-straight going to make sure Tony was walking behind me the entire rest of the time I was in that building.  And a few minutes later I told him I heard something in the lobby area and I thought it was taunting me the second time it scuffled.

   

This admin building came off as being "the place" I wanted to be when we first entered, but there was this 1 room that turned this whole building into a very uncomfortable place.   Some people in the group thought the "lab" was creepy, others thought the classroom had a vibe to it, but the moment Tony, Dave, and I first set foot into this very large, open room with curtains hanging from the ceiling I said to Tony "I don't know what this room is, but I don't like it".   It gave me the heebie-jeebies in a way I couldn't explain.  I was starting to overload at this point because when the girls from the other half of the group (4 of them) were coming into the building from backside, they wound up on the 2nd floor.  At one point there was an offer of "let's go up to the second floor" and I comically pictured myself anchored quite firmly to the front desk in the lobby refusing to budge from this location.  There was absolutely no way I was going to that second floor at that point in time, and I couldn't tell you why.  It just wasn't happening at that particular point in the day.   It may have happened later, and it may have happened earlier, but at that point in time, I wasn't going anywhere but "out" of this building.   Later on in the evening there were multiple reports  of various groups on that second floor seeing shadow people and seeing shadows jumping across the hall, and running from room to room just out of the shine of flashlights.  The thought doesn't scare me, it doesn't even freak me out... there was just something else there with me that I couldn't shake.  Dave and Jenny2, of PRRS, personally watched a shadow figure manifest itself along a wall, down to the floor, and up the wall on the other side of the hallway.  Dave had his night vision camera pointed at it while it was happening and reported that, for some reason, his camera did not record the event.

We left this admin building during our night time visit and we headed over to the old swimming pool.  When we were at the pool I just stood there for a second... staring at it, and Tony asked me if I wanted to go in it and take pictures.  I walked down the pool steps with Kate and we walked in that pool and it was the most energy sucking depressing feeling I had experienced all day.  It wasn't the depression that got to me, it was the fact that I felt I was supposed to be happy, and I wasn't. It was more than the fact that I wasn't, it was that I knew I never would be again, and no matter what happens from this point on, my happiness about this moment and this place - the swimming pool - and this action - swimming - will never hold the same feelings or happy memories that it used to when I was younger... when I loved swimming and couldn't wait to get back to the lake, or to the pool, or to the water.  Swimming is where childhood lives... and when I stood in that pool, no water in site, I had this strikingly depressing realization that death was the least of my depressing thoughts.  It was the destruction of all of those happy memories I never realized was the foundation of my life as I know it.   Something as precious as the eagerness to swim, I had no idea it meant so much to me until I stepped into that pool and felt the depression of knowing .... of feeling... "swimming... here... it's not about fun because it's hot out, it's about therapy because I'm dying".  

It was overwhelming and I couldn't tell anyone.   At this point I was starting to think there was far more going on here at Henryton  than just ghosts wandering the insides of the buildings.   I mean, I was really starting to wonder what the heck I was feeling with this "staring" sensation I couldn't get to go away, and the fact that all these kids were all around... and the chaos of the place...  Then, this one particular group of rowdy, loud, and obnoxious kids started toward us.  They were cussing and swearing, and being over-the-top as far as I was concerned... the whole atmosphere just got to me and I very-forwardly announced loud enough to make it clear I meant business "You planning on being that loud ALL night long, or what??"  Apparently it made an impression.  They turned out to be very decent kids wandering around in the darkness of an incredibly creepy place.  I think many of them may have felt they were over their heads, too, so they were - as today's youth put it - "frontin' " .  Say it rapper style if you have to, but that's what I think they were doing.  Being louder and badder than all the other groups that were there that night, and definitely keeping the "quiet time" down to a minimum... all the noise would have been a great distraction from really hearing and seeing the spirits.

Anyway, this one particular group I approached wound up talking to a couple of our team's members.  It turned out that one of the back buildings was a little kids building (as I mentioned above).  They didn't say what went on in there, only that there was a kid's area with a nursery and all that jazz.   They said that they had left toys up there before and when they returned to see if the kids played with the toys, they were knocked over and strewn across the room.   As they were explaining where it was they offered for us to go up there and I had a sense of panic.  I walked over to Tony and told him sort of passively, "nah, I really don't want to go up there..."   Apparently, Jenny and the crew went back to the Henryton the next day and Jenny had quite an emotional time in that building.  If she reacted that way, I can only imagine the blubbering idiot I'd have been that night.   

I remember sitting in the car and being relieved when Kate questioned herself about this complex, saying she wasn't sure if it was a sort of first-time-investigation overload she was experience, or what it was, and all I could tell her was that I think... here... at this place, tonight... it's something more than that, something far more than that.  And I didn't know anything about the complex so I couldn't tell her what it was, all I knew was that I'd been to a few pretty active places, and this place was so intense it was like being stared at by 100 people all at the same time.  I could almost feel heat on the back of my neck.  For 3 days later I felt like someone was staring at me so hard they were shooting hundreds of pins and needles at me.  It was so aggressive I just didn't know what to do with it.  I had this 1 recurring nightmare Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and on Sunday I started to have these thoughts about the patients and their well being at this place.  I couldn't shake this thought "what if they didn't die of TB".  It wouldn't go away.  And there was this statement that kept coming to my mind, and I couldn't shake it "Personal offenses, Personal offenses".  They didn't die of TB, but of "Personal offenses" yet I had nothing to base it on.  I couldn't go anywhere with this thought.  I didn't research the location, I didn't look it up or anything.  I had this one website address with pictures of the place, and that was it.  I read that it was TB hospital, and saw a YouTube video about the grounds of the place, and it stated it was a TB hospital for the "black" population.  That's it.  Why I was having this nightmare, repeatedly, and why I kept thinking these thoughts about this term "personal offenses" I couldn't understand.

The last straw in that complex was when the cops dismissed everyone but 2 groups.  Our group had permission to be there, and they let another group stay.  Other than that, everyone else pretty much cleared out.  Our group decided to back inside the main hospital building into the area we called "the cafeteria".  Now, I've heard that PRRS learned that this room was not used as the cafeteria, but I still haven't heard what it was actually used for, so I'll call it the cafeteria for now.  We were all in the cafeteria, looking around, hunting down pictures and working the audio and video when, at one point, Kate announced she wanted to walk to the part of the cafeteria where it turned into a hallway.  This hallway connected the cafeteria to the rest of the main building.  She asked me if I wanted to go with her to this hallway, so I said "yes", of course.  We don't want anyone walking off on their own, and I don't want to be the woosy who says "no" so, "yah, I'll go".  So we started walking toward this hallway and the closer we got, the more stressed I became.  I can't say why, because it was like something out of a bad movie.  I just don't know what my problem was that night.   We approached the hallway, and right as the hallway began to actually "become" the  hallway, where the wideness of the cafeteria was going to suddenly disappear and we were about to step into this hallway, I panicked, inexplicably and without reasonably justification.  I never ever do this, but I suddenly grabbed her arm -  and I never, ever do that.  I'm not, in the least, a "touchy feely" kind of person.   This panic was so sudden it was unreal.  I let go of her arm just as suddenly and tried to look composed (hope I pulled it off!) and calmly said something like "I thought you wanted to go TO the hallway?"  She clarified, she wanted to go INTO the hallway.  Big difference.  So I tried to play it off, probably miserably, and apologize for the confusion, but there was no way I was going down into that hallway.  And offered to call Tony over to escort Kate into the hallway.  I stood there for a couple of seconds and then walked away from that hallway.  It was too intense for some reason.

Thank the lord for the reveal the very next Tuesday and the next Thursday because I thought I was losing my mind.  I had so many regrets about being unable to do what I was so eager and excited to do, which was investigate a reportedly haunted environment such as the Henryton Sanitarium!   If it wasn't for that reveal on the place I'm not sure where I'd be right now, in terms of re-evaluating my abilities as a paranormal investigator.  

Some things that are pertinent to my personal experiences that were discussed at the reveal:

 1. During the live radio show that was being recorded while we did the investigation there were a few "sensitives" listening in and chatting in a shared chat channel, along with 2 PRRS moderators.  At some point in the night, one of the psychic/sensitives became so distraught over the negative presence we were in the midst of, that she had to leave the room because she was feeling physically ill.  

2.  The children were toddlers, babies, infants, and newborns.  They were diagnosed with TB and were left to starve to death because they weren't going to survive treatment anyway, so what was the point of feeding them?

3.  The adults were sometimes starved to death after they reached a clear point of no return.

4.  I had caught a photo of what I thought was a nurse with a medical mask on, but didn't tell anyone.  The first question I was asked during the reveal was "did anyone catch the nurse in the laundry room?"  I almost fell out of my chair.  That's where I caught my picture of what I thought was a nurse.

5.  Multiple sensitives in the channel announced there was a nurse there protecting the patients that remained (and the visitors, she ushers us out of the building).  My recurring nightmare was of a nurse standing between me and incredibly skinny patients - clearly dying. She looked "wild" and was sending me a message, "if you want them, you need to come through me", but the message wasn't for me.  It was for someone else.  She was nice to me.

6. The nurse was the person sending me the sentence "Personal offenses, personal offenses".  I couldn't get it out of my head.

7.  There was a big dark, ugly secret about Henryton that I had no knowledge of.  There was a Dr. there who was so incredibly genius that, apparently, he transformed from "genius" to "maniacal" and started doing unauthorized experiments on the patients, to the point he was misdiagnosing these people on purpose so he could experiment on them.  He killed many patients, and many of those murdered weren't killed in the most painless ways possible.   

8.  He's known as "The Butcher" and the sensitives involved with this case have categorized this spirit energy along the lines of being almost "demonic" in characteristic.

9.  There are at least 3 other doctors there involved with The Butcher, and only 1 has a slight voice of reason and goodness.

10.  There are many patients still staring out the windows, often.  They don't know they're dead, and they didn't think that death was   something they'd face at Henryton.  They just didn't know.

11.  Many of the unauthorized experiments were conducted on the poor and those without family or support because their deaths wouldn't be questioned.

12.  There are reports of unmarked graves off to the sides of the hospital grounds, in and around the general outlying areas, and shortly into the woods; most likely of the patients without family who died here.

13.  There is at least 1 mother persistently crying for her newborn child.

This case was so intense I know I didn't write the half of it here.  It was an investigation that followed me home and "stuck" for days.  I just thank everyone for that incredibly complete "reveal" they did on the Henryton.  Without it, I don't know how I would have filled in the blanks I had about the place, and my experience. Be sure to check out my possible apparition/shadow figure.  We still aren't sure if that's what it is, but at first glance it looks like a person standing with arms folded, so feel free to comment.