King’s Park Psychiatric Center

The day started off early. My alarm went off at 5:30, and I instantly regretted going out drinking the night before until 1 a.m. Mckinnon texted me at 5:35, concerned that I’d want to push back our departure time, but I decided to soldier on no matter the early hour. I headed out and picked him up, and we began our 170 mile journey to King’s Park psychiatric center on Long Island, the longest single journey I’ve ever driven.

We headed due north on the Parkway which was fairly easy, if not a little droll. The only real action was a Dodge minivan that decided it was his life’s mission to situation himself directly in my blind spot for the duration of the drive, as if testing me and trying to keep me aware for the journey.

Eventually we left the smooth and straight Parkway for other less than stellar highways, one of which was the Staten Island Expressway. The road surface was rife with potholes and shoddy patches that became large bumps that made me cringe every time I went over one. My car isn’t particularly low, but on a few of these bumps I was worried that I’d be leaving pieces of the bodywork in New York City. We were hemmed in on all sides by city traffic, and at a point we were stuck behind a van with cryptic Asian writing on it and two arrows pointing to either side. Unclear what the words meant we decided to blow past on the right, throwing caution to the wind. As we passed high above the city we were even with the tops of the apartment buildings that flanked the raised roadway, and I wondered aloud if I could launch my car into the living room of one of the apartments if I cranked the wheel hard enough to the right. Mckinnon implored me not to try, so my curiosity remains un-satiated. The Staten Island Expressway did afford us a nice view of the New York City skyline in the distance off to the left. I wanted to stop and take pictures, but we were on a mission and the city and the towering spire that is the Freedom Tower would have to wait for another time.

We made our way off the highway and to our ultimate destination, the abandoned psychiatric center . We entered the park, encountered more rutted and destroyed roadway, and found an inconspicuous place to park. We clambered out of the car, stiff and sore from the roughly three and a half hour journey, and were immediately greeted by the oppressive heat of the day. When we left it was 6 a.m. and chilly, and nearly four hours later it was humid and muggy. As I walked around and stretched my legs and waited for Mckinnon to equip himself with his camera gear I took a few shots of building 93 through the trees, with a nice cloud cover overhead.

The clouds quickly moved off however and robbed my shots of the moodiness that they lent.

We looked around and decided our first course of action was to scout out the buildings and decide which ones we wanted to try to get into. We headed off towards a few of the smaller buildings off to the side of the gargantuan building 93. Along the way we saw a cat lounging in the shade under an overgrown bush. It regarded us with mild curiosity, until we came within ten feet and then it slinked away, uninterested in finding out our intentions.

The first building we came to was building 94, a smaller building, only about three or four floors, used for cleaning the laundry from the facility.

It was unfortunately recently locked back up, with a new chain and lock barring the door and fresh plywood covering the windows.

This did not bode well. I never break into a place, I only gain access if someone else has broken in before. Exploring inside these buildings is not exactly legal, and breaking in is a much more serious charge than simply trespassing, and when a place is newly locked back up it means that the owner knows that people have gotten in, and cares enough to pay money to have a crew come out and bar the doors and windows.

Undaunted though we moved on to the next set of buildings and tried to find a way inside.

The next building we scouted was building 44, the storage building for the facility.

On our initial scout of the outside I found a few reams of old dot matrix printer paper fluttering in the bushes. When I examined them I saw that they were census rosters for the facility, dated 1988. It had accountings of all the patients in each wing of the facility, and their status. As I examined the papers I read the names of the patients that had been housed there.

Beside their names was their current status, and for a few it simply read “escape”.

There was some slight charring on the edges of some of them, showing that someone had tried to burn some of the records. I wondered if it was vandalism, or if when the facility closed they tried to burn the records so that no one would know what had transpired in this place. As we were about to move onto the next building I noticed a door with the bottom broken in, which looked wide enough to slip through. We waited until a man walking his dog disappeared from view, and ducked through the door and stepped into the darkness. Now our real exploration had begun.

The building room we stepped into was shrouded by darkness.

As our eyes slowly adjusted we could make out large generator turbines that were used to run the large freezers that were used to store frozen food for long term.

Papers and manuals were strewn about the floor, along with strips of metals that resembled the rib cage of a long decayed animal.

As we moved further into the building we encountered the freezers, large imposing rooms that spanned a long corridor. My original assumption when I found the freezers was that their purpose was to store bodies in case of any large numbers of death at the facility. Storing food is a less a slightly less dark purpose I suppose.

After we trekked down this hallway we entered into a large open area filled with old rolls of rotting insulation strewn about the floor. The paint was peeling off the walls in great rivulets, the years of neglect and abandon having taken their toll.

A few disused workbenches lined the rooms, but nothing much remained.

We kept moving further into the building, and came upon the stairs leading upwards and downwards. The stair case was an imposing feature, with fencing surrounding all sides to prevent anyone unintentionally plummeting to their death below.

We decided to head up first, saving the darkened basement for now. The next floor was where they had stored the records, as they were strewn all about the otherwise empty room in great piles, one of which someone had attempted to light on fire.

Reams and reams of these old dot matrix printer papers covered the floor and came spilling out of a darkened storage room. Out of morbid curiosity we looked through many of them, in an attempt to see if anyone had died while in the care of this massive facility, but found no records of death.

In an adjoining room we found numerous employment applications, showing that once this facility was a place that people wanted and clamored to work for.

We also found a large number of graffiti murals lining the walls, showing that tagging this place seemed to be a rite of passage for many artists.

Having exhausted everything on this floor we descended into the darkened basement, fully expecting to have some sort of encounter, but we saw nothing.

I had forgotten to bring a flashlight, so I wandered around with only my phone to illuminate my path, but there was nothing to see. Slightly disheartened we left this building, and moved onto another one of the numerous buildings.

The next building we scouted was building 5, which had been the laundry building before building 94 had been built, but served as another maintenance building for woodworking, plumbing, and the locksmith.

The bushes and vines had completely ensnarled the building, blocking much of it from view. As we rounded the back of the building we saw a window that’s covering had been torn aside, and we climbed through. The room we stepped into was large, with high ceilings and support columns spanning the length of it, and an improvised rope swing made from a pipe and what looked like a length of fire hose.

Old worktables were still all around the room, covered in a thick layer of pigeon feathers, the only permanent occupants of this long disused building.

As I examined the work tables Mckinnon moved off into one of the adjoining rooms. I followed into the room, but he was gone. Slightly perplexed, I took a few pictures of this little workshop and moved on into the next room.

Hearing footsteps above I called out, but received no reply. I assumed it was him moving around upstairs, so I climbed the stairs into a storage room, with a plethora of shelving units placed around the room, utterly empty save for a few left over electrical components long since abandoned. He was in this room, looking out a door that opened into nothingness. He confessed that he had slipped through a hole in the wall in an attempt to scare me. We continued our exploration of this building, finding nothing of note aside from some poetic graffiti in the darkened hallways and more work tables.

We climbed back out the window that we had used to gain access, and moved on to what was our ultimate goal, building 93.

Building 93 was built in 1939 and totaled 13 stories.

It is the most famous building in the park due to its architecture and size. It was originally intended to be the hospital for the facility, but was used as patient housing. As we surveyed the building we found a hole cut into the fence, and we quickly ducked through the opening, excited that we would be able to get inside. The doorway that seemed to be the most popular egress to the building itself had been covered with a fresh sheet of plywood, barring our path.

We kept searching for an alternate route in, but we had no luck. One of the main entrances had been bricked over, and the windows were barred. I looked in one of the windows, and saw a room filled with beds from the facility.

There were a few windows that had bars that did not cover the entire opening, but on these old windows they had taken old rusty lawn mower blades and welded them over the opening to stop anyone from gaining entry.

As we circled the building and found every potential point of entry locked up tightly I wondered why they were so adamant about keeping us out. Perhaps it wasn’t that they were trying to keep us out, perhaps they were trying to keep something in. We would not be getting inside building 93 on this trip.

Thwarted, we took a break and drove into town to get some food. After obtaining some much needed sustenance, we returned to kings park with the goal of scouting more of the buildings. On the way in I blew through a stop sign, with a cop parked right nearby, but luckily my traffic transgression went unnoticed, or he simply did not care. The park was much more crowded at this point, with numerous people out walking around or riding bikes. We parked in the same area, and headed towards building 90, which was originally a nursing school with rooms housing the students. It later became an office building, complete with a bank in the basement.

The front was locked, so we went around a fence and circled around the building, but came upon some small houses behind 90 that we decided to examine first.

The vast majority of the staff lived on site, in houses spread across the park. Doctors lived in these houses, which have been completely gutted.

Very little remained within, save for more graffiti and peeling paint.

We examined one of the long vacant homes, finding a rotting couch and destroyed TV, the only real remnants of the former inhabitants.

On the outside of one of the houses someone had scrawled a message that the house now served as a drug den, and we decided not to investigate the claim.

We left these houses and circled back to building 90, finding a way in near the back. We stepped into a darkened foyer, with large fireplaces on either side of the room with ornate mantle pieces. Moving further in we saw more peeling paint and numerous offices, but as with all the other buildings most had been cleared out, and very little remained.

We examined all three floors, but did not find much, so we moved on.

At this point we were tired and a little discouraged. We had embarked on this trip hoping to find amazing ruins and remains of a once thriving hospital complex, but so far we had not found much. We had expected to have some sort of encounters with ethereal apparitions, but this place was seemingly un-haunted. Many psychiatric hospitals are very dark places, owing in part to the harsh and often inhumane practices of the facilities, but this was not one of those places. The facility was well maintained and used humane practices, treating the patients fairly well. They did frontal lobe lobotomies and used electrical shock therapy like most psychiatric hospitals of that era, but they did so only for a short time. Some have claimed to have had encounters with otherworldly spirits, but either we did not get into the proper buildings or the spirits were being quiet on this day. We sat in the grass on a hill across from building 93, and weighed our options.

Do we call it a day and begin the long trek back home, or do we soldier on and continue exploring these buildings? The facility was so massive that we had no hope of being able to see everything it had to offer on this trip, but we wanted to put in a valiant effort. We decided to take a break, and both took a nap in the shade from the leaves of a massive oak tree.

After our nap we decided to head to the hospital, the second largest building in the park, buildings 7, 21, and 22. We headed over and found a way in through a loading door in the perimeter or the courtyard that had been cut through with a grinder. Somebody had really wanted to get inside, and a metal gate would not dissuade them. As we were crossing the courtyard we encountered a fellow photographer equipped with gear to shoot long exposure videos. Keen to get some insights and inquire about whether he had any success getting into any of the building I cheerfully said hello as we crossed paths, but he kept his head down, mumbled a garbled hello in return, and kept walking, clearly uninterested in sharing his insights. Slightly annoyed by his rudeness we continued on, and made our way into the first wing of the hospital, building 22. We were greeted by a darkened labyrinth of corridors and rooms.

We had to be cautious not to get lost within this maze. We scouted around the corridors and patient rooms, but again as with all the other buildings we found little other than graffiti and peeling paint.

All the rooms had windows with massive bars covering them, to dissuade any patients from escaping or jumping to their deaths in the courtyard below.

We found a dormitory at the far end, with a pile of playing cards discarded on the windowsill, covered with paint chips.

We found the kitchens, where meals were prepared for the inhabitants of this facility. Long stainless steel tables lined the walls, and there was a board in one that had letters stapled on that read “Ho ho ho it’s off to Pilgrim we go”. When this facility ceased operations in 1996 the remaining patients that could not be released were transferred to the nearby Pilgrim Psychiatric center that still operates today. We continued upwards, and encountered some other intrepid explorers. I smelled cigarette smoke and assumed it was either a ghost getting his nicotine fix or other explorers were in the building with us. Not wanting to startle them in a darkened corridor we stood in the main day room on this floor and waited. A few moments later a man wearing a sweatshirt and a dust mask and carrying a book bag most likely filled with spray paint cans poked his head into the room followed by his female companion, waved hello, and retreated back out of the room. Clearly he had not expected to find us during his search for the proper place to leave his tag. I looked out the window of this room, and saw more people on the roof of the building.

Keen to get up there and have a look around we decided to find the stairs upwards.

When we got to the roof we were afforded a view of the main hospital building, the second tallest building on the property, Building 7. Building 7 is also the newest building in the park, and the last to receive power when the park was closed down, as it used to house the transmitter for the local police.

I took a few shots, and then approached the people I had seen from the window earlier. One of them was laying on the ground in the shade of the small room that housed the gears for the elevators, wearing full military fatigues, down to the boots. He had a hat draped over his face, and was clearly resting. A graffiti artist was in the midst of creating his permanent mark on this building, and he paid us no mind as we watched him. I wanted to take his picture, but I was unsure of how he would react. As we circled the small building on the roof, we could hear more people inside tagging the building and smell the noxious fumes from the spray paint. One of the artists saw us, and ran out at us, clearly trying to intimidate us to leave. Not wanting to get into a fight on the roof with this deranged man who had clearly let the fumes get to him, we slowly walked away, taking our time. The man in the military fatigues tipped up his hat to survey the situation, but clearly did not wish to be bothered, so he resumed his nap. We trekked back to the staircase, and headed back down.

It took us a bit to wind our way out through the labyrinth of corridors, but we made it back to the ground and decided to call it a day, as we didn’t like how crowded that place had been, and it was getting late. We got back into my car and headed home, which aside from sitting in traffic for an hour waiting to cross the George Washington bridge was uneventful.