For nearly 100 years, this psychiatric institution was Philadelphia’s real-life House of Horrors.

Construction of the first of more than 50 buildings of the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry – better known as just “Byberry” – began in 1907 on what was then more than 800 acres of wide open farmland, and what is now the northernmost stretch of Roosevelt Boulevard in the Greater Northeast.

By the 1930s, Byberry was extremely overcrowded and underfunded. Barely clothed patients spent their days huddled in dingy, harshly lit rooms with no activities or supervision. Every mental institution nightmare you can imagine came true there – padded cells, restraining devices, solitary confinement, beatings by brutal warders and violent inmates, frontal lobotomies and electric shock treatment.

Although intended for the mentally ill, Byberry was also a place where financially desperate families took senile grandparents, or children with severe mental deficiencies, and left them like garbage to rot away the remainder of their lives.

The authorities finally closed the place down in 1990, but that did not end Byberry’s dark history. The poorly-guarded, crumbling, abandoned buildings (and the subterranean tunnels that connected them) became a magnet for all sorts of unwelcome visitors – looters, bums, violent gangs, satanic cults and, it is rumored, even former inmates who had become homeless and returned in search of shelter.

Teens looking for weekend thrills or a place to get drunk would sneak in with flashlights and wind through the dark corridors to “experience” the broken glass, jagged metal, smashed furniture and fixtures, water puddles, human waste, dead animals, rodents, ticks and (some people claim) ghosts. Websites even sprang up providing detailed building/tunnel maps and useful tips for making the most of these midnight adventures.

Byberry would have been dynamited years ago, except the buildings were caked with asbestos – and you know how upset local residents can get when their neighborhoods are swallowed up in a mushroom cloud of toxic dust. It’s being demolished by gentler means now. Within a year or two we will see upscale housing and offices there, and the Philadelphia State Hospital will be nothing more than a bad memory.

Outstanding Byberry website by Philadelphia explorer/photographer Goddog

Magnificent photos of Byberry and other urban ruins in the US and UK

More magnificent photos of Byberry and other urban ruins

         

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