SandraFrazier.com
The Official Web site of Sandy Frazier
Artist,
Musician and Writer
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EXORCISING MADNESS by Sandy Frazier "My own mind is perfectly unprejudiced and
impressible on the subject of ghosts. I do not in the least pretend that such
things cannot be..." - Charles Dickens Dickens and the Octagon Tower Roosevelt Island is where the big, gray dome (the Octagon
Tower) that was once the New York City
Lunatic Asylum stood erect ("out on the edges of town, on the East
River island, behind stone walls and high hedges") abandoned and
boarded-up surrounded by a fence with "No Trespassing" signs posted
everywhere. I'd discovered this building was declared a landmark and that a
popular novelist, E.L. Doctorow, had written about (in his novel, The Waterworks) the structure having been inspired by Charles Dickens who
had visited the Asylum in 1842. Dickens wrote of his admiration for the
architecture as well as his painful observations there. That's when I knew
Dickens must truly be a great mystic artist of the most unusual kind... that
there must have been some other reason for him to have visited the Asylum. Though he became known as one of the greatest writers of ghost
stories and was very fascinated with all things supernatural, Charles Dickens
was basically a skeptic. Most of us remember his most famous story of Scrooge
- A Christmas Carol. But he wrote dozens of other ghost stories
inspired by "the grim and the ghoulish through the stories told to him
by his nursemaid, a remarkable young woman named Mary Weller, whom he
referred to in later life as Mercy, 'though,' he noted, 'she had none on
me.'" Mary helped fuel his imagination and shaped Dickens' young mind as
did young Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein (whose fascination
with the life force contained in electricity and a recurrent dream inspired
her famous novel). In the six years Mary Weller spent with the young,
impressionable boy, she horrified him with her stories and spoke often of her
fascination with death and ghosts. While A Christmas Carol is a happy,
wintry Christmas story, meant to "haunt their houses pleasantly,"
it is mainly a story of change, transformation and conversion. Spiritualism interested Dickens a great deal and was very
popular during the latter part of his life. He was very skeptical on the
topic of contacting the dead and published many articles on the topics of
mediums. After his death, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock
Holmes) who was, himself, a dedicated proponent of spiritualism related in an
interview September, 1927, that he had spoken with Dickens' spirit at a
seance. He had used something similar to a Ouija Board. He asked him how he
intended to end his unfinished story... * * * Since I'd read about the asylum and then actually visited the
site the previous 4th of July, I'd been curious about it and had had visions
of long ago when horrible punishments were inflicted upon the misunderstood
mentally ill. I was very curious about Dickens' concern for the Asylum and
just how he may have picked up on some very deep inspiration there. So I
asked my mother to go to the island with me and pray over the great stone
edifice, to perform an exorcism of its demons. Upon arrival, we crossed the main street on Roosevelt Island
and walked around the outside of the structure where we stood scanning the
grounds trying to elucidate our impressions, picking up on some of the
vibrations that lingered. "I'm seeing a woman hanged," was the only
thing she said before the prayer and exorcism: "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit -
Father, we ask you to bless this place and to take all the spirits that are
troubled and send them into the Light and into your arms. We ask you to clear
this [place] of any people or spirits that have been here that have not been
able to go into the Light. Clean the whole ground and the whole hospital...
and this whole island, as a matter of fact, of negative spirits and help each
one of those people and lead them into your Light. Catherine [of Siena], I
ask you to send your friends - the saints and angels - and yourself to this
place and bring all these people into the arms of God and help them to go in
peace. We ask you to clean this whole area out of all negativity or torment
or pain. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we pray.
Amen." After the prayer, she said, "These people were piled
in there - like maybe twenty beds in one room. They had no privacy whatsoever
and had no dignity. All their dignity was taken away. So how could they get
well when they had no dignity? There were people hanged by their necks
in there, who got out and tried to run away; but didn't have anybody looking
out for them - a family that they had to go to." Then she said she saw
the spirit of a little old woman with long, thinning, straight hair running
out of the building down the front stairs wearing a night gown. I saw her,
too - in my mind's eye. I picked up on each of the woman's characteristics
right before she described her. But she vanished... and so did the haunting.
It is cleansed now for others to move in so no poltergeist or terrors from
beyond may harm or hinder. We later discovered that the big dome circular building called
Octagon Tower, which served as the administrative center and main entrance
hall of the New York City Lunatic Asylum (one of the first institutions of
its kind established in this country, opened in 1839), is slowly being
stabilized through State grants before rain, wind and sun take their toll,
and may one day be renovated to become a gallery or museum. Doctorow, the
novelist, "is campaigning to ensure that a ruin remains ruined" to
preserve the mythology of its original purpose. "The Lunatic Asylum was
erected in response to the desperate need for proper accommodation of the
insane. Previously, these cases had been assigned to a few overcrowded and
poorly maintained wards in Bellevue Hospital. In the middle years of the 19th
century, the attitude towards the treatment and care of the insane underwent
significant and progressive change. Recognition that they required medical
assistance, not merely custodial restraint, led to the founding of such
institutions... [Appalling as it may seem] in the early years of the Lunatic
Asylum, patients were supervised by inmates from the penitentiary under the
direction of a small medical staff!" Yet I wondered what Dickens was doing there and what he
actually saw. I think Dickens, as a mystic, knew something he wasn't telling us.
Just as my mother had told me, it was reported that the asylum was
"plagued with difficulties, primarily due to overcrowding." The
patients' diets were inadequate; diseases were running rampant... "Charles Dickens was rowed across the East River in an open
boat manned by convicts who, as he wrote, 'dressed in striped uniforms of
black and buff' and 'looked like faded tigers.'" He was taken on a tour
of the Asylum where he admired the architecture, [the interior of the rotunda
with its spiral staircase] calling the building 'handsome' and the Octagon an
especially 'elegant' feature. But he further noticed some appalling
conditions. "I cannot say I derived much comfort from the inspection of
this charity," wrote Dickens in American Notes. "The
different wards might have been cleaner and better ordered; I saw nothing of
the salutary system which had impressed me so favorably elsewhere; and
everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air which was very
painful." Dickens found the Almshouse, with its thousand inhabitants,
"badly ventilated, badly lighted, not too clean and... very
uncomfortable." I found it interesting to read about Nellie Bly. Goaded to
action by continuous reports of abuse in the Asylum, Nellie… "feigned insanity and had herself committed in 1887. In Ten
Days in the Madhouse, her article published in the New York World,
she detailed her harrowing experiences. She found it hard to believe that so
much cruelty and mismanagement could exist under one roof... Reports of
criminal activity, overcrowding and favoritism in the institutions were
continuous sources of scandal." "The Octagon needs an angel," stated the president
of the New York City Historic Districts Council. Many envision converting it
and its surroundings to a meditative park in honour of those who suffered
there. Others propose to build pagodas and dedicate parts of the island
across from the United Nations "to remind diplomats from around the
world of the need for world peace." Roosevelt Island, itself, is a curious place. Since its
discovery in 1637, it has been sold and renamed many times and now is a
"residential community surrounded by overgrown and deserted parcels of
land where four majestic structures, now in ruin, built by eminent nineteenth
century architects" remain. The hospitals and "other institutions
for the sick, the insane and the destitute were all built with stone quarried
on the island by prisoners from the penitentiary" (which has since been
demolished to be replaced by the prison on nearby Riker's Island). The islands of the East River appeared "to have been
divinely arranged as a home for the unfortunate and the suffering, and a
place of quiet reformatory mediation for the vicious." Now the desolate
site looks like "a door into another time, one left slightly ajar...
What remains has become a powerful reminder of an earlier time when
substantial public funds were used to benefit the city's needy." As Le
Corbusier wrote, "There are living pasts and dead pasts. Some pasts are
the liveliest investigators of the present and the best springboards into the
future." d
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