Pennhurst Asylum

Baldini's 1968 'Suffer the Little Children' exposé closed it in 1987. A red ball rolls on Mayflower's second floor. Bite marks in the tunnels.

In 1968, NBC reporter Bill Baldini spent five days filming inside Pennhurst State School and Hospital and came out with something that would become one of the most damning pieces of local news ever made in Pennsylvania. Children tied to beds. Adults rocking silently in hallways. Wards with one staff member for sixty patients. Baldini's five-part exposé, Suffer the Little Children, ran on WCAU Philadelphia and did exactly what he wanted it to do. It broke the place open.

Pennhurst kept going anyway. It had opened on November 23, 1908, built on 1,400 acres in Spring City as the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic. At its peak in 1950, it warehoused 3,350 residents, most of them children with intellectual or developmental disabilities who had been institutionalized for life. The beds were full. The staff was not. Abuse was routine.

The lawsuit that finally closed Pennhurst, Halderman v. Pennhurst, started with a woman named Terri Lee Halderman who kept coming home from visits with bruises nobody could explain. The federal courts eventually ruled that conditions at Pennhurst violated her constitutional rights. It was the first institution in American history ordered closed on those grounds. Nine employees were indicted for assault in 1983 for beating patients, including some in wheelchairs. Pennhurst closed for good on December 9, 1987.

Then the buildings sat empty for 23 years, which is where the haunting lore came from. The current owners reopened the property as a seasonal attraction and haunted house in 2010, which angered disability advocates who argued that monetizing the site trivialized what actually happened there. The argument is legitimate. It's also not the subject of this page. The ghosts are.

Ghost Hunters filmed at Pennhurst in 2008. Ghost Adventures did a lockdown. Extreme Paranormal too. The investigations have produced specific, repeatable accounts. A red and blue rubber ball has been seen rolling across the floor of Mayflower Hall's second floor, accompanied by a child's giggle, by visitors on unrelated tours. One investigator walking through the flooded service tunnels beneath the campus felt a sharp pain in her cheek and heard a little girl laughing. A bite mark appeared on her face and stayed for two days.

Mayflower is where most of the children's stories land. The feeling staff describe on the second floor, especially in the former dormitory rooms, is the same one visitors describe. Heavy. Present. A sense of being watched from the corners of rooms that are empty.

Personal electronics fail at Pennhurst in ways technology people find interesting. Fresh batteries drain mid-recording. Cameras shut off. Phone apps freeze in specific rooms, usually the same rooms across different visits. A group visiting in the late 2010s reported that one of their members had to be taken to a hospital after developing symptoms he couldn't describe. He didn't return to the site.

The operators run tours for paranormal groups year-round now and haunted attractions in October. The programming is separate from the remembrance. A small museum on the property documents the abuse, the lawsuit, and what institutional care looked like in 20th-century America. Whether you take the ghost tour or not, the museum is worth the time.

Pennhurst is a complicated place to recommend. The people who died here were failed by the state, by their families, and by a system that warehoused them. Read Baldini's reporting first. Watch the ball roll if it rolls. Then think about the children it used to belong to.