Recalling Danvers, the inspiration for Arkham

Massachusetts' North Shore talks with author Michael Ramseur about Danvers State Hospital, the foreboding gothic institution believed to have inspired H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham Sanatorium and, in turn, Gotham City's Arkham Asylum.

Although the hospital began in 1878 as an enlightened alternative to the traditional treatment of the mentally ill, Ramseur says that by the 1920s, conditions began to degenerate into the stuff of horror stories, largely because of overcrowding:

"On one second shift in 1945 there were only nine staff covering 13 wards of over 2,300 patients," Ramseur says. "What was that night like?" One nurse interviewed by Ramseur remembered patients who had spent all their life in mental hospitals.

"They always got into their beds not from the side but from the end of the bed," he says, "because they were used to such crowded wards they couldn't get in from the side."

To control the patients, the staff resorted to treatments that were regarded as painful but useful, such as cold tubs, insulin, coma therapy and the early version of electroshock therapy. When lobotomies became popular, in the 1950s, the hospital added a psychosurgery wing.

The hospital was closed in June 1992 because of budget cuts within the mental-health system.

Arkham Asylum, created in 1974 by comics writer Dennis O'Neil, first appeared in Batman #258.