Ypsilanti State Hospital
My topic for my Wikipedia project is on the Ypsilanti State Hospital. This was a Forensic hospital located in Willis, Michigan on Willis and Platt road. I decided to change my topic from the history of 619 Emmet Street because I could not find enough relevant information on it. I stumbled upon the hospital while I was looking around on the internet. I have had been personal experiences in the hospital once it was closed and have wanted to find out more information during its active years.
My sophomore year in high school, my friends and I heard about this haunted place. It was down the road from my school and where I grew up. It is an abandoned forensic hospital and I am fascinated by stuff like this so I thought it was a good idea to go check it out. When we got there we drove around and parked in a courtyard. I immediately got a chill, I felt scared but excited at the same time. My friends and I found an open door and walked in. The place was huge: I remember walking all through it. It had been abandoned for some time and what we discovered was remarkable. There were still phones, pool tables, old patients’ records, and furniture left inside. It looked like everyone just up and left one day. There are lots of stories that I had heard about what happened, but I just needed to know what really occurred. What I remember most about that day was when I walked into the gymnasium. There were basketballs, and when you bounced them it echoed off all the walls. This was one of the scariest times in my life. But what tops it, was when I went back with my cousins a couple of weeks later during the night.
The construction of the hospital began on June 16th, 1930. The architect that had designed the hospital was Albert Kahn. He was associated in a design firm in Detroit, Michigan. A year after beginning construction, the hospital was opened. Over the course of the first year the hospital had admitted 922 patients. The cost of living at this time was averaged out to eighty cents per day.
“At the end of 1936, a plethora of different treatments were being administered to the patients to aide in their recovery. 11,807 hydrotherapy treatments included, "needle showers, fan douches, jet douches, salt glows, general massages, local massages, Sits baths, foot baths, ultraviolet radiations, electric light bakes, cold wet sheet packs, warm wet sheet packs, continuous baths, electric light cabinet baths, bubble baths, hot fomentations, colloidal baths and surgical dressings." 1,522 physiotherapy treatments included, "ultra-violet light, infrared light, electric bake, and diathermy." General paresis was being treated by heavy metals and malaria fever.” (Ypsilanti State Hospital par. 4) This means that there were 13,329 different types of therapy in the hospital within the five years it had been open. Hydrotherapy is a type of treatment based on an assortment of treatments dealing with water. Physiotherapy is a treatment that exposes the patient to ultra-violet and infrared lights. In 1937 the Ypsilanti State Hospital was introduced to several different shock therapies, including electric shock.
After surviving the depression and the end of World War Two, the hospital had built two new wards with over 400,000 patients and brought the hospital over capacity. In the late 1940’s, a new treatment was brought to the hospital. 65 patients were given a technique called “lobotomy,” which is when a surgeon hammers a metal spike into the patients’ skull through an eye socket to slice through connective brain tissue that is damaged. This was a serious treatment and five patients died during surgery.
In, 1959 there were three patients who became quite famous. All three of them believed they were God. They are called the Three Christ’s of Ypsilanti. Milton Rokeach was their physiatrist and for two years he spent long amounts of hours trying to figure out why they believed they were God. He never found out the cause of the cases but the three men stayed residences at the home until perishing.
In 1991, Governor John Engler cut all costs of state hospitals. The hospital was the first to be shut down. A new psychiatric hospital was newly built down the road years later. The Ypsilanti State Hospital was demolished in 2006. The hospital was abandoned for sixteen years. The reasons for the sudden shutdown are because of budget costs but some say that the workers went crazy and started killing patients and just left one day leaving many patients homeless and without medication. The patients were left with nothing. Many of them lost contact or didn’t have any family or friends. They had no choice but to leave without medication or anything. The property is now owned by Toyota and all the remnants of the hospital are gone. Toyota just finished their new plant last year and is now open for operation.
For the actual Wikipedia project, I will add all of this information that I have obtained for this paper and will also add some pictures of the hospital. Information can be found in articles and journals in the library. Most of the information I collected was from the internet. This is a good topic to do a Wikipedia page on because it is interesting to most people and will teach a little bit of history about something that is close to us in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
