The Dark Story of Medfield State Hospital — The Asylum Behind 'Shutter Island'
The Quiet Wards
150,900 views
In 1896, Massachusetts opened what it believed was the future of mental health care. Not a fortress. A village. Brick cottages on a hilltop overlooking the Charles River, where chronic patients would live in a community, work real jobs, and be treated like human beings.
Within a decade, Medfield State Hospital was overcrowded. Within two, it was burying patients in a cemetery where the graves carried numbers instead of names. 841 people were buried there between 1918 and 1988. Some had lived inside those walls for decades, working the farm, sewing the linens, shoveling the coal. When they died with no one left to claim them, some of their bodies were sent to Harvard Medical School. The rest got a concrete square with a number.
This is the complete story of Medfield State Hospital. From the idealists who built Massachusetts's first cottage-plan asylum, to the overcrowded decades that turned a village into a warehouse. The 1918 influenza epidemic that killed 55 patients and forced the creation of the cemetery. The electroshock units and insulin coma therapy. The attendants who beat patients to death and served three years for it. The World War II staffing collapse that left patients running the institution. The deinstitutionalization movement that emptied the wards. And the Hollywood film crews who found the abandoned campus so unsettling that Martin Scorsese used it for Shutter Island, making it the highest-grossing film of his career.
Today, Medfield is called the last almost fully intact asylum in the whole world. It has been used to film Shutter Island (2010), The New Mutants (2020), Knives Out (2019), and The Holdovers (2023). The buildings are being converted into apartments and arts spaces. But on the hillside, the cemetery remains. In 2005, volunteers finally matched the 841 numbers to names. High school students chose the inscription for the memorial:
"Remember us, for we too have lived, loved and laughed."
These are documentaries, not ghost stories. Where legends have grown over these places, we tell you which parts are folklore and which parts are worse.
📚 REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Thompson, J. "A Short History of Medfield State Hospital, 1890-2016"
https://www.lspa.org/assets/Blog_Phot...
National Park Service - Medfield State Hospital (National Register of Historic Places):
https://www.nps.gov/places/medfield-s...
Massachusetts Department of Mental Health 2003 Annual Report (Medfield closure):
https://www.mass.gov/doc/annualreport...
Medfield State Hospital - Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medfiel...
WBZ-TV/CBS Boston - "Hollywood Likes the Spooky Old Medfield State Hospital":
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/ne...
Bellforge Arts Center:
https://bellforge.org
#MedfieldStateHospital #ShutterIsland #AbandonedAsylum #MentalHealthHistory #TheQuietWards #Deinstitutionalization #CottagePlan #Massachusetts #DocumentaryHistory #AsylumHistory #TrueHistory
20 Comments
We in the US have collectively failed mentally ill people.
We are in desperate need to bring these places back today!
The Dark Story of Medfield State Hospital — The Asylum Behind 'Shutter Island'
The Quiet Wards
150,900 views
In 1896, Massachusetts opened what it believed was the future of mental health care. Not a fortress. A village. Brick cottages on a hilltop overlooking the Charles River, where chronic patients would live in a community, work real jobs, and be treated like human beings.
Within a decade, Medfield State Hospital was overcrowded. Within two, it was burying patients in a cemetery where the graves carried numbers instead of names. 841 people were buried there between 1918 and 1988. Some had lived inside those walls for decades, working the farm, sewing the linens, shoveling the coal. When they died with no one left to claim them, some of their bodies were sent to Harvard Medical School. The rest got a concrete square with a number.
This is the complete story of Medfield State Hospital. From the idealists who built Massachusetts's first cottage-plan asylum, to the overcrowded decades that turned a village into a warehouse. The 1918 influenza epidemic that killed 55 patients and forced the creation of the cemetery. The electroshock units and insulin coma therapy. The attendants who beat patients to death and served three years for it. The World War II staffing collapse that left patients running the institution. The deinstitutionalization movement that emptied the wards. And the Hollywood film crews who found the abandoned campus so unsettling that Martin Scorsese used it for Shutter Island, making it the highest-grossing film of his career.
Today, Medfield is called the last almost fully intact asylum in the whole world. It has been used to film Shutter Island (2010), The New Mutants (2020), Knives Out (2019), and The Holdovers (2023). The buildings are being converted into apartments and arts spaces. But on the hillside, the cemetery remains. In 2005, volunteers finally matched the 841 numbers to names. High school students chose the inscription for the memorial:
"Remember us, for we too have lived, loved and laughed."
These are documentaries, not ghost stories. Where legends have grown over these places, we tell you which parts are folklore and which parts are worse.
📚 REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Thompson, J. "A Short History of Medfield State Hospital, 1890-2016"
https://www.lspa.org/assets/Blog_Phot...
National Park Service - Medfield State Hospital (National Register of Historic Places):
https://www.nps.gov/places/medfield-s...
Massachusetts Department of Mental Health 2003 Annual Report (Medfield closure):
https://www.mass.gov/doc/annualreport...
Medfield State Hospital - Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medfiel...
WBZ-TV/CBS Boston - "Hollywood Likes the Spooky Old Medfield State Hospital":
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/ne...
Bellforge Arts Center:
https://bellforge.org
#MedfieldStateHospital #ShutterIsland #AbandonedAsylum #MentalHealthHistory #TheQuietWards #Deinstitutionalization #CottagePlan #Massachusetts #DocumentaryHistory #AsylumHistory #TrueHistory