A chair sits in front of a barred window in the state hospital’s abandoned forensics ward, where mentally ill criminals were once housed.
Back in 2010, I was in a Barnes and Noble when I found a photo-book titled ASYLUM: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals. The second I opened the book, I was captivated. Its creator had visited dozens of abandoned state hospitals across America, shooting both the interiors and exteriors of the castle-like structures. Through the powerful medium of photography, the book provided a visual history of psychiatric treatment in our country.
But Asylum did more than awake my curiosity and imagination, it sparked a yearning in me to see and photograph one of these old hospitals firsthand. The asylum closest to me was the South Carolina State Hospital in downtown Columbia, a sprawling 180-acre property tucked away from the general public for nearly two centuries. Known statewide as “Bull Street” because its entrance lies at the corner of Bull and Elmwood, the South Carolina State Hospital was the nation’s second-oldest public mental facility, admitting its first patient in 1828. By 2000, however, only a few patients remained, and its buildings sat abandoned and rotting.
In 2010, I drove to Columbia, parked my car on the state hospital campus and snuck into the first building I saw. Perspiration stung my scalp as I inhaled the musty air and gazed at the thick strips of paint peeling off the walls. It was clear the building hadn’t functioned as a hospital for at least a decade, and yet the darkness, silence, and decay trapped inside had an inescapable aura and allure. I thought about the prospects of ghosts, security guards, and homeless people finding me inside, but most of all, I wondered about what had taken place in the hospital when it still flowed with life.
Over the next 18 months, I returned nearly two dozen times to explore and photograph the decaying campus. Along the way, my interest in Bull Street went from curiosity to obsession. As many hours as I spent creeping through the menacing hallways of the hospital, I spent just as many off campus researching the institution’s history. I found it stunning how little had been written about it over the years, especially considering how many thousands of people had been employees and patients there.
For that reason (and to satisfy my own curiosity) I thought it might be interesting to write a newspaper series on Bull Street. Who better to tell the story of the hospital, I figured, than the men and women who’d worked there? So I called the South Carolina Department of Mental Health and asked if they could point me toward any interesting interviewees. Most people gave me the same name— Woody Harris. Around Columbia, Harris had earned a reputation as the state hospital’s unofficial historian. Over a couple hours at his house, Harris relayed stories about the good, bad, and ugly things he’d witnessed during his long career at Bull Street. “To me, it was the world’s most interesting place,” he explained.
Before I left that afternoon, I asked Harris to recommend other former employees to interview. He said, “Elbert and Gertrude Metze.” The Metzes were likely the last living souls on earth who had worked at the state hospital during the first half of the 20th century. Although they were in their late 80s when I met them in 2010, I found them remarkably lucid when it came to describing their respective careers at Bull Street. I interviewed two more subjects that year—former hospital director of budgeting Jack Balling and its former chief psychologist Dr. Jack Luadzers. Both revealed critical details about the deinstitutionalization movement that swept through the hospital in the 1980s and 1990s and ultimately led to its demise.
That four-part news series led me to a closer examination of the current state of mental healthcare in South Carolina, which I quickly learned was deplorable. After publishing several stories on the failures of the system the following year, I slowly gained the attention of advocacy groups around the state. In 2011, I was awarded the Reporter of the Year award by the South Carolina chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
I spent the next six years writing about other things. It wasn’t until 2018 I considered turning the series into a book. On a whim, I took out a Facebook advertisement to locate potential subjects and created a Facebook page named “SC State Hospital Book.”
To my delight, my advertisement garnered responses almost immediately.
One of the first people to contact me was Linda McLamb, who worked at Bull Street during the summer of 1961 as a student nurse. Hers was a harrowing and horrifying tale about one of the more difficult periods in the hospital’s history. McLamb spared few details as she recounted the overcrowding, understaffing, neglect, and hopelessness she observed while working in the Saunders building. The retired nurse gave a vivid account of seeing a patient days after a lobotomy, the much-demonized brain surgery historians have claimed was never performed on the Bull Street campus. My story on McLamb, which ran on May 23, 2018, signified my full-fledged return to the project after five years.
It also restored my hope I’d one day have enough stories for a book.
At first, it was mostly nurses who contacted me, and boy, did they have some stories to tell. In their stories, they described their experiences with suicides, patient attacks, electroshock therapy, and virtually every conceivable mental disorder known to man.
Gradually, I managed to achieve some diversity in my subjects—something I considered essential to any comprehensive study of the hospital. Public safety officers Phil Parker and Sam Alexander worked to keep the peace when patients or staff members got out of hand.
Volunteer Robin Stancik spent half a decade entertaining schizophrenic women whose families had dropped them off on Bull Street, never to return.
Activity therapists Loretta Smith and Kim Grant designed recreational projects and off-campus field trips so patients could have some fun.
Social workers at the state hospital also played a critical role in patient treatment.
John McMaster (the current governor’s older brother) worked with patients who’d been ruled not guilty of crimes by reason of insanity.
Another social worker, Melton Francis, started at Bull Street in 1977 and spent 18 months there witnessing the inherent problems of deinstitutionalization and watching a revolving door of patients go through the hospital.
In 20th Century American culture, state hospitals became symbols of captivity, horror, and chaos. The prospect of losing one’s freedom is terrifying enough, but the thought of losing one’s mind along with it is too grim for most of us to entertain.
The truth is, throughout the second half of the 20th century, the South Carolina State Hospital housed, fed, and treated thousands of patients who were incapable of surviving on their own. In the two decades since it closed, our state’s mentally ill population has suffered the results of inadequate funding, virtually no psychiatric hospitals, and overstretched social workers who can only do so much. Today, a good portion of them roam the streets homeless, occasionally seeking warmth in jails and emergency rooms.
As you’ll read in my book, SC State Hospital: Stories from Bull Street, the hospital wasn’t always a pleasant place. It did, however, employ its share of caring and empathetic professionals committed to making their patients’ time there a little better and brighter.
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