Most Haunted Places in America: Metropolitan State Hospital – Waltham, Mass.

Metropolitan State Hospital was conceived as a place to house the overflow of mental health patients in the growing Boston metropolitan area. Construction began in 1927 on land purchased from the towns of Waltham, Lexington, and Belmont. It was large place, complete with its own morgue and power plant. The hospital was built with a capacity of 1000 patients, and within two years it was running over-capacity.

The hospital closed in January 1992, and the entire structure fell into a state of rot and disrepair. Each of the three municipalities that contributed land to the metropolitan State campus has different plans for their property when the hospital is formally demolished. A cemetery does exist on the grounds, made up of at least 480 anonymous graves.

Metropolitan State is infamous for some decidedly non-paranormal tragedies. In 1978, a patient named Anne Marie Davee was murdered by another patient named Melvin W. Wilson. He dismembered her with a hatchet, buried pieces of her throughout the hospital grounds. He did keep seven of her teeth for himself, though; they were found on his person by hospital employees. Despite this information, no action was taken against Wilson until two years later, when State Senator Jack Backman led an investigation, armed with the Wilson information and 19 other charges of negligence against the hospital and its’ workers.

There is also the sad fact that in the early 1960s more than two dozen children died and were buried on the grounds. The general consensus is that they were poisoned by strontium that doctors were adding to their milk, believing that it was a way to treat their mental illness. The ghosts of these children are said to still haunt the property.

Because mental health wasn’t an exact science during most of the 20th century, conditions at mental institutions were notoriously horrific, and even though it was seen at the time as a cutting-edge institution, Met State was no different. Psychotropic drugs and electro-shock therapy was abundant. When all else failed, the hospital serves as a holding place for the unfortunate souls that no one knew how to help. When social services were gutted by Reagan in the 1980s, hospitals like Met State were severely overextended and understaffed, making things much worse.

Paranormal events started getting reported while the hospital was still in operation. Residents and hospital employees reported seeing shadow figures move through the halls, passing through walls, appearing in locked rooms, and disappearing into thin air. People have also reported hearing disembodied screams, especially in the areas of the facility used for electro-shock therapy, and dead residents have been seen by nurses in their now empty rooms.

In the years before the gradual demolition of the complex, it became a popular destination for urban adventurists and paranormal enthusiasts, as all such abandoned structures do. They still report the disembodied voices and shadowy apparitions, as well as whispers and a feeling of malevolent oppression in the network of tunnels that runs underneath the grounds.

Related posts:

1. The Spirits at Peoria State Hospital
2. Ghosts at Northern State Mental Hospital
3. Patients Haunting Fairfield Hills State Hospital
4. The Haunted Tunnels of Anoka State Hospital
5. The Haunted Elgin State Mental Hospital