Scouting An Abandoned Mental Asylum: A Visit To The Rockland Psychiatric Center, Part 1

I worked at Rockland State Hospital, worked in Building 10, the hospital of the hospital. It was both interesting and training for the rest of my life as I worked as medical transcriptionist. Met my husband there, he was an attendant in Bldg. 58 which housed maximum security patients. One night a patient forced another employee by gun point to take him into New York City by via Tappan Zee Bridge so he wouldn’t get charged with kidnapping by going thru NJ. He was captured soon afterwards. My husband got a state stipen for going to school and was able to obtain RN license which benefited our family. Lots of memories, good and bad there. I was sitting in the steno pool when the news came about JFK getting shot. Never forgot that moment.

The entire site is great place to visit.The buildigs bring you back in time and when you loook through the windows or go through the buildis it makes your mind wonder. There was an old (scout?) camp ground at the southern/west end of the property that is now almost completely gone that was rite on the edge of the resovoir. I had done some vol. work there talking and working with patients and I would concider some inmates there. I run in to some of them when I visit the Palisades Mall or about the county . Alot of the Patients can go out on the local buses that travel through the facility and go to both local malls as well as Jersey or into Manhatan PABT. There is also some High lockdown locations on site I had visited where the patients/inmates are equaly interesting and needing help to get back in the community if it comes availible to them through rehabilitation. It is also the site of the first AA rehabilitation center in the country and still going strong.I hope the town of Orangetown thats buying up the propertiesdors the rite thing with it all in the end.

I grew up a few towns away from this place, in Sparkill, NY. Looking at the pictures I didn’t see the two really tall ones, one of which was Building 57 where my mother worked in the mid 1960’s. I also didn’t see anything about the tunnels that ran underneath the grounds, which allowed them to take patients from one building to another without being allowed out on the surface. They were gradually closed off with locked gates and I only ever saw bits of them. The people that worked in the hospital were afraid of them and used to talk about rats but I think what they were afraid of was not rats. Truly I believe that the only thing one ever needed to be afraid of was the people who ran the place. They were very creepy.

My father’s family had been living in the area for a very long time, and my aunt knew the director of the place very well. He was a chap named Alfred M. Stanley, and whenever she wasn’t happy with how I talked or behaved she would tell me how easy it would be for her to call him on the telephone and have me disappear forever. Later on my mother worked there, and my stepfather (both in the research foundation), and my aunt Elizabeth Pullman worked in Occupational Therapy. Later on I discovered that they had all had my father’s brother Bob put away because they didn’t like the way he made the beds or some such thing. He stayed there until he was too institutionalized to live anywhere else, and in any case they would have lost face if he had suddenly reappeared. But the people that worked in Research were a nice sort and came from all over the world: English, Welsh, Scottish, Haitian, a Russian from Buenos Aires. We all had parties at my mother’s house in Congers later on, and some of the people would bring their pajamas and stay for days.

Eventually my parents (mother, stepfather and I) left and moved to Middletown, NY, in Orange County. Over the years I came to see that my father’s family was as mad as anybody else in that place, and their souls were as dark as any of the tunnels. But this was a very strange place, very close to the old Camp Shanks of World War II history. In those days Camp Shanks was acres and acres of rotting old barracks and deserted houses and you had the feeling that you had stepped through some sort of time-space warp into a very creepy world that you didn’t want to be in. People were inbred, illiterate, and very strange. Lucky for me there were a couple of places such as Hickory Hill in Tappan, and Palisades, where artists and writers lived. I was able to find some fairly intelligent kids to hang out with, and these kept me from following my family’s path into the day room. Now all of this is pretty much gone, and replaced with somewhat improved versions of the little boxes that Pete Seeger used to sing about, although probably the people in this area are almost as mas now as they were before. Still, somehow I miss the place even though I only spent about ten years in the house on Haring Avenue and forty in the house on Renfrewshire Drive in Middletown. Then of course there was the Piermont Pier that the soldiers used to march to and from, with the gigantic Gear Box Factory which was just as creepy as the hospital or Camp Shanks. Eventually it was pulled down to be replaced by a bunch of apartments on the pier. You would think that Orangetown actually had human beings living there now.

In the late 70s to early 80 some of this was changed over to a drug and alcohol rehab, but I remember growing up we were always afraid of insane escaping from there. I live within a couple miles of it. We built our own stories and tales surrounding it, but as teenagers, we investigated. In it, under it and through it – I think some of it was sealed or damaged underneath, because I can remember lots of climbing, darkness and tight places.

Myself and some friends were there last month. You actually got a lot of shot we got. It is a amazing piece of history and a beautiful landscape as you had said. However, our pictures show some difference. We walked in the evening and got a eerie feeling as soon as we were on the path to the old buildings. Our pictures were amazing in the sense of Orbs in a majority of the pictures and also personal experiences we had. All in all I feel the place should be kept standing and not to be destroyed. It is still standing after all theses years and now the children’s center is abandon.

I came across this site after reading my recently deceased great uncle’s journal that he wrote while working as an occupational therapist at Rockland in the late 1950s.

So bizarre to be able to see those buildings that he’s writing about, and the grounds that he describes walking through with the inmates only seconds after reading about them. The internet is amazing.

Thanks for putting this up. I work in the film industry too and often scout strange locations around New York. It’s one of the perks that people who aren’t in the industry don’t necessarily think about. We get such cool opportunities to learn about the geography and history of New York and the surrounding areas.

My father, Reynolds Robertson, lived at Rockland from about 1940 to 1966 when he died. Some of you who have responded to these wonderful photos refer to working or living there during the period of his residence. I was a young boy when I last saw my father. If any of you knew him there I would be happy to hear your memories of him (unclerobbie@comcast.net)