Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital

Kirkbride Plan asylum that held 7,674 patients at its peak. Woody Guthrie was committed here in 1956. Demolished 2015.

Greystone was built to hold 350 patients. By 1953 it held 7,674. Wards designed for privacy, light, and careful pacing ended up with people sleeping in the hallways and on the floors of the dayrooms. The Kirkbride Plan was a nineteenth-century theory that the right architecture could help cure mental illness. Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital was built under that theory, and it ran for 139 years watching the theory fail.

The hospital opened August 17, 1876, outside Morris Plains, to relieve overcrowding at the Trenton State Lunatic Asylum. The main building ran 673,700 square feet: the largest single structure in the United States until the Pentagon passed it in 1943. For decades, underground tunnels connected the wings so patients could be moved between buildings without touching the outside world. By the 1950s, those tunnels were part of the problem, dim and unmonitored corridors where staff could do whatever they wanted.

Woody Guthrie was committed to Greystone on May 29, 1956, after he was picked up wandering highways. He had Huntington's disease, a degenerative hereditary condition doctors had misdiagnosed for years. He stayed at Greystone until 1961. The 19-year-old Bob Dylan visited him there in early 1961, before Dylan had signed with Columbia. Guthrie died in 1967.

The rest of the record is worse. Over the hospital's run, files document patient suicides, sexual assaults, and mistreatment at every level. The abandoned wards later drew urban explorers and paranormal investigators who reported the same catalog: dark figures moving through the deteriorating hallways, voices echoing from rooms with collapsed ceilings, temperature dropping hard in corridors that had been warm a minute before. The ghost visitors describe most often is a nurse in white, making rounds as if her shift never ended. A young girl in a pink dress has been seen in corridors that never housed children. Green lights with no source have been photographed in the upper wards.

Preservationists fought to save Greystone. Alma Realty offered to restore the Kirkbride building at no cost to the state. Governor Chris Christie ordered it demolished anyway. Crews began taking the 673,700-square-foot structure apart in April 2015 and finished by October. It was one of the largest single losses of Kirkbride architecture in the country. The 2012 horror film "Greystone Park," directed by Sean Stone, used the abandoned building as both location and inspiration.

Most of the campus is gone now. A few ancillary structures remain. Visitors to the grounds still describe the same sudden drops in temperature, the same sounds without sources, the same feeling of being watched from windows that don't exist anymore. Whatever accumulated inside Greystone over 139 years didn't seem to notice the bricks coming down.