Haunting the South: Bryce’s Shadow Over Alabama

“Oh man, this place has got to be haunted.”
Bryce Hospital is one of those places that ends up on those ghost hunting shows, where “paranormal experts” scream insults and taunts, ostensibly in hopes of making them angry enough to come out and play. And maybe they do come out to play — surely something does.
When my class visited Bryce, maybe it was just too bright out to bring out the noisiest of ghosts. Maybe it was the industrial fans, failing to keep the late summer heat at bay and our clothes unstuck from our skin; or the way we walked from room to room, tiptoeing through halls that had only known sunlight and the flashlights of drunken freshmen looking for a thrill; or the laughter and photos, the sometimes-doubtful stories told by the guides who would lead the destruction of the institution.
Despite whether or not I personally believe in ghosts, there is something unsettling about Bryce.
We trekked up staircase after staircase, listening to the guide shout over the roar of fans that merely pushed around hot air and dust. Alabama heat means business, after all, and we couldn’t escape it even indoors. Sunlight trickled through tall windows, windows covered in translucent tarp. It was a dizzying height, but you could see most of the campus sprawled below.
“It was revolutionary for its time, you know. They put in these windows because it was believed…”
The University of Alabama has a troubled past with — Well, with the past. For years, they did not know how to memorialize the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door,” and the building, Foster Auditorium, where former governor George Wallace once stood for segregation was unmarked until 2005. Forty-two years passed before we could talk about the segregation of the campus. How much longer will it take to talk about mental illness and the institutions that still cast a shadow over the university?
The walls were splattered with paint — or, at least, the girl next to me hoped that was all, with a nervous giggle. The fireplaces, one in nearly every room, were collapsing, jagged piles of debris where once there would be heat and light. We wandered upstairs and down, heads craned, eyes wide despite the early morning, despite the sleepy mugginess weighing down every step along the creaking boards.
This is not the Bryce that many people are introduced to, during the campus tours that focus on the best and brightest things to grace each building. Bryce, like many mental institutions, was once a shining example of the vast strides made in treatment, in care, in attention. Despite the limited understanding of mental illness during that time, the patients were treated like humans: central heating and gas lighting were implemented during its building, shackles and straitjackets were discouraged, and the patients were allowed to involve themselves in work programs and the newsletter The Meteor.
But this Bryce did not last forever.
We fell quiet when we entered the basement area of the hospital. We ducked beneath beams, our feet dusty-red with hardened Alabama dirt, and ahead of us were rows of dark entryways. They were once rooms for the employees’ use, the guide told us, leading us into the pitch-black darkness of these little alcoves, lit only by flickering flashes of phone cameras, arches as far as the eye could see for only split seconds.
One of the construction workers joined us, waving us over to show us a hole carved into the stone walls. “Once the hospital started to go downhill, they put locks down here, iron doors and everything, for the violent patients. These holes, we’re pretty sure, are where they would loop the chains to keep them under control.”
In the 1970s, Alabama fell to last place in mental healthcare rankings, a trend that has seen only minor improvement: currently, Alabama ranks 47th in the nation. In the 1970s, Bryce got the attention it deserved, attention for the mistreatment of its patients, for the cruelty brought upon the people brought there with or without a mental illness, for the abandonment of the people who needed help and found only suffering and horrors that haunt the campus to this day.
Eventually, the University of Alabama took over the building, moving the patients to the currently-open facilities. For years, it has been part of a new tradition: nearly every student, it seems, has a story of sneaking into Bryce in the night, seeking out ghosts, seeking out memories of the tragedies that they can only ogle at through the stories others tell. We tell each other lurid stories of the horrors patients endured, the torture that came in Bryce’s later years.
The University never seems to have a good idea of how, exactly, to handle this. Much like Foster Auditorium, left to rot with its plaque reminding us of the horrors of segregation until only recently, Bryce lingers over the campus like a sore, a scar that we can’t quite seem to look at directly. Only through sidelong glances and memories of the fresh, smooth skin that used to be there can we address the mistakes of the past. To remember the transgressions and pains of bygone times would simply be too much.
Now, there are talks of renovations, of turning the hospital into a new home for the Theatre and Dance department. I walked through the halls, stepping quickly over a board that sags a little too much, and I struggled to imagine a dancer here, pirouetting between the clear tarp curtains that sway in the sudden breeze. I struggled to imagine the walls whole again, re-painted, filled with students listening to lectures on music and history and form. I struggled to imagine a Bryce scrubbed clean of the past, scrubbed clean when all those little reminders linger elsewhere among the campus, in names and plaques and forgotten buildings hidden by grand gestures of wealth and power.
I don’t know whether or not I believe in ghosts, honestly, despite childhood stories and campus tales. I don’t know if I believe that we linger here after our bodies have given up. I don’t know that I believe that those ghost hunters in those late-night shows have ever really spotted anything at all. But I do know that Alabama is haunted. If not by the spirits of the people lost here, then it is haunted by its own sins, hastily covered with a new coat of paint and a new name.

We stopped at the chapel near the end of our tour. It was a wide-open room, all but one rickety chair emptied out for the start of the remodeling and the tearing down and the loss of one of the last reminders of what happens to those at the bottom rung in Alabama. It was empty of everything but that chair and the sunlight that tingles at our skin, that turns the air into a thick haze. I looked above the windows, though, and there it was: above the windows that must have once lit up a pulpit, there in chipped paint is the Lord’s prayer, clinging as a last reminder of what once was.
A few weeks later, the wing we toured was demolished as part of the reconstruction and re-purposing of Bryce Hospital. And yet, there are still stories. There are still memories and reminders left behind in the aftermath. Even then, something haunts Alabama, and until we address it head-on, it will linger like stubborn, chipped paint.
