Contradiction and fear at America’s only physical museum of disability
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DISCUSSED
Pennhurst State School and Hospital, Paranormal Investigations, Autism, Eugenics, Dr. Henry H. Goddard, Suffer the Little Children, Roland Johnson, Demon-Auctioneer, Limerick, Speaking for Ourselves, The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Nathaniel Guest, The Halderman Verdict, A Moldy Baby Doll, The US Haunt Industry, Randy Bates, Bloody Straitjackets, Lost in a Desert World, A Doghouse
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I arrived at Pennhurst on an unusually warm fall day. As I walked across the parking lot, the administration building was the first thing to greet me. An impressive redbrick monument of Jacobean revivalism, it towered over the rest of the campus. The midday sun struck its copper cupola like a spotlight. A flight of stairs, sheltered by an intricately carved granite awning, led to thick wooden doors. It was a statement of power, of permanence.
Huddled around it was a series of smaller but similarly designed buildings in various states of disrepair—rootlike cracks crawled across their facades, and plywood was stuffed into the gaping jaws of their window frames. At the center of the campus was a large field, empty except for a metal slide and a swing-less swing set that lay bent and rusted in the freshly cut grass.
The administration building, nine other dilapidated structures, and around 120 acres of land are all that is left of the formerly grand and ever-infamous Pennhurst State School and Hospital. From 1908 until 1987, this Pennsylvania state institution, located in Spring City, less than an hour outside Philadelphia, incarcerated and often abused over ten thousand inmates. Most of those held there were people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, whom the institution initially labeled as “feeble-minded,” and, later, “mentally retarded.” Today, the remnants of its once-1,400-acre campus have been repurposed into Pennhurst Asylum, a multimillion-dollar Halloween attraction that brings tens of thousands of guests each year to be scared, as advertised, “to the limits of [their] sanity.”
For six weeks every fall, over a hundred employees—including performers, makeup artists, costume designers, security guards, and line wranglers—descend on Pennhurst to transform this century-old campus into a professional horror operation. Pennhurst Asylum offers four attractions, but its central feature and namesake is “The Asylum,” a haunted walk inside the imposing administration building. Visitors are led through its peeling halls, where the horrors of medical violence quite literally jump out at them. Performers in torn and blood-smeared lab coats, scrubs, and gowns leap out at guests from under operating tables and creep behind them to tickle the backs of their necks. A cacophony of screams fills the building as visitors stumble through the fog-filled dark, where nightmarish scenes—an operating theater in which a rusty blade saws into an exposed brain; a cramped room full of bile-covered patients chained to their beds, howling for their parents—greet them at every turn.
By day, however, Pennhurst Asylum’s focus is not on fear, but memorialization. In addition to its attractions, the company owns and operates the Pennhurst Museum, currently America’s only physical museum of disability history. Located in Mayflower Hall, a former residential ward adjacent to the administration building, the museum claims to document the same dark history of institutionalization that the attraction’s nightly performances caricature as entertainment.
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Soon I would get to experience the haunted halls of “The Asylum” for myself, but the beginning of my day at Pennhurst was much less scary: I milled about in a crowd of eighty visitors in sweat-stained T-shirts as we waited for the museum to open and the history tour to begin. Shielding myself from the sun under a swaying, still-green oak, I found it hard to imagine Pennhurst’s evening persona. A pair of sisters wearing matching witch hats and black-and-orange-striped leggings played tag in a field. An old couple nursed bottles of lukewarm Dasani in the shade. A family took selfies in front of a dilapidated building.
But there were hints of the horrors to come: a sound check of eerie music floated over from the administration building, and signs warned guests about the dangers of strobe lights. The visitors flipped through books and eyed merch at the pop-up gift shop. One T-shirt featured a simple outline of the administration building and the words PENNHURST STATE SCHOOL in clean blue block letters, while another depicted a ghostly white face and beneath it the words I SURVIVED PENNHURST ASYLUM scribbled in dripping blood.
Directing the cars in the parking lot was the museum’s unlikely director: a twenty-three-year-old recent college graduate named Autumn Werner. With the expertise of a veteran air traffic controller, she answered my questions cheerfully while directing drivers where to park and speaking cryptic instructions into her walkie-talkie.
Autumn grew up nearby and spent her childhood on the Pennhurst property; her father, Jim Werner, was hired there first as a performer (or “haunter”) in 2012 and became the operations manager in 2016. Autumn joined the company the year of her father’s promotion, when she was just fifteen, as a makeup artist and haunter. Though she now performs only on occasion, she hasn’t completely abandoned haunting for history: In addition to managing the museum as the company’s history coordinator, she acts as the lead makeup director for the attraction. Later that night, I watched her expertly airbrush leprosy lesions and streaks of blood onto a demented nurse.
While Autumn acknowledges the possible contradictions of running a disability history museum by day while working at a Halloween attraction on the same property by night, she insists that her priority is to honor the lives of those who suffered at Pennhurst. Autumn, like many of the haunters I spoke with, believes it is a sacred place inhabited by the spirits of its former inmates, which she is responsible for protecting. She tells guests on ghost-hunting tours (or, as the company refers to them, “paranormal investigations”), which she runs year-round, that “you have to be nice to our ghosts… If you hear a growl or grunt, it’s probably not a demon trying to eat you. It is likely a nonverbal person trying to communicate with you.”
Autumn’s connection with disability is not superficial: She has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder affecting connective tissue that causes chronic pain (and that also allows her to dislocate her joints to contort her arms forward while crawling on all fours—one of her signature moves when she used to haunt). In addition, she is a caregiver for her two younger sisters, who have autism.
For Autumn, this personal connection is important, and she attests that it’s also what makes the attraction unique; many of the haunters identify as disabled themselves: Her estimate is 60 to 70 percent. This fact transforms Pennhurst for Autumn. Instead of seeing the attraction as a place that callously perpetuates harmful stereotypes, she sees it as a refuge where disabled people can find work, opportunities, and a close community they likely won’t be afforded anywhere else.
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