Disability Futures

Asylums and institutions have long been a source of fear and curiosity. Asylums, along with other institutions such as soldiers’ homes and prisons, were common tourist attractions in the 19th century, mostly for their beautiful grounds and architecture but also for able-bodied visitors to catch a glimpse of the patients. More recently, asylums entered into pop culture as a setting for scary movies and television shows, including the successful American Horror Story: Asylum. A new development includes using the asylum as a form of haunted house attraction during the Halloween season. Buffalo’s own Fright World features an “Eerie State Asylum” attraction this year, which challenges guests to “escape from the lunatics” and survive the attack of “demented doctors and patients.”

I like a ghost story as much as anyone, but the patients who lived in institutions like Willard and Pennhurst weren’t spooky spirits — they were human beings with complex lives. I don’t find the stories of John or Elsie or the patients of Willard exciting or thrilling — I find them repulsive. As Emily Smith Beitiks has deftly noted, “while the field of disability studies still struggles to gain access to resources in universities and disability activists still have Americas with Disabilities Act compliance denied on the grounds of expense, this commercial playground of fetishized disability thrives.”4 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.