SPRING CITY, Pa. - Since the last residents left more than 20 years ago, Pennhurst State Hospital has been vacant, its sprawling complex of buildings crumbling, overcome by brush in the suburban Philadelphia countryside.
The old asylum may not be still much longer.
It's being filled with fake skeletons, hanging torsos, coffins, exam tables and other frightful things as new investors plan to begin redevelopment efforts by turning it into a haunted house set to Miu Miu open Friday.
The plans have stirred more than old ghosts.
The mental health community, which has long fought to preserve the hospital as a relic of the bygone era of institutionalization for people with mental disabilities - a reminder of history not to be repeated - is infuriated by the plan.
"I don't want to relive the hell that I went through of living in an institution," said Jean Searle, co-president of the Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance, who grew up in similar institutions but now lives on her own. "I want to try to forget."
In addition, a lawyer representing several neighbors near the East Vincent Township site filed a lawsuit Miu Miu Monday, asking a judge to stop the haunted house because organizers don't have proper zoning approval. A hearing is scheduled for Friday.
The old hospital is no stranger to legal and ideological battles.
Built shortly after the turn of the 20th century, Pennhurst grew to as many as 3,600 residents by the 1960s. It was closed in 1987 in the wake of a lawsuit alleging years of abuse and neglect, legal action that spawned years of appeals and three U.S. Supreme Court rulings. The suit alleged that residents had been found beaten by nurses, strapped to beds, left naked or alone and drugged into stupors.
At the time, its 1,200 residents were sent to other facilities and patient advocates nationwide hailed the closure as a civil rights victory. But the state was unable to sell the buildings for more than 20 years.
In 2008, a group of investors called Pennhurst Acquisition, led by businessman Richard Chakejian, bought the site from the state for $2 million.
Now, Chakejian is Miu Miu running a composting operation on the overgrown site and eyeing future development. He hasn't decided what kind, though, and first he has to get the property rezoned. For now, Chakejian wants to start with the haunted house.
The event is hardly the first to be done at such an institution. Similar haunted houses have been staged at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, W. Va., the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, and the now-crumbling Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.
The Pennhurst event will not incorporate the idea of an asylum or mental patients into its story lines, Chakejian said. There will also be separate rooms in which people can learn the history of Pennhurst and the pain that was endured there, he said.
"Society made a mistake in those days, although they were well- intentioned in how they handled those situations," Chakejian said. "By no means is our event a mockery of that. ... I would think the youth is smart enough to distinguish between the make-believe and the other."
Critics argue that a haunted house on the grounds of an asylum where great pain was endured is an affront to the many tens ofChristian Louboutin Shoes
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