During the first few months of 2010, a friend of mine somehow talked me into writing a project based on the assumption that the 12/22/12 craze had some momentum. She had explained that it was quite a hot topic and I should jump on the bandwagon and run with a story about the end of it all. I thought I could take the concept and put a new spin on it: I wanted to find out what exactly the world would look like after time ceased to exist.
Pennhurst State School and Hospital, michellerlane.blogspot.com
As an avid reader or anything I can get my hands on, I scoured the internet, trying my best to locate sites that had viable information. Since it goes without saying you can’t trust everything you see or read on the internet, I had to wade through a good deal of nonsense before I finally located several websites that not only looked good but had decent information available. One of the things I was searching for was pictures of abandoned places so I would be able to describe to the reader of the project what the world looked like once almost everyone was gone.
The story that I began centered on eight survivors of a cataclysmic meteor passing through Earth’s atmosphere. In searching for these pictures of abandoned places, I happened to come across a site that was begun by a photographer based on the East Coast. I thought, after looking through this site, that I would be able to use the photographs this artist had taken to describe the world these eight survivors now lived in.
The site itself was done beautifully, with both color and black and white photographs of the locations the photographer had visited. Although he had trespassed on most of the properties in order to get the pictures, it was the subjects I was interested in. After going page by page through the site and reading the small bits of history the photographer included about each location, I was getting toward the last page when I located the lead picture for Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Spring City, Pennsylvania.
At first I looked only at the photographs of the location. Unlike some of the other locations, the posting on Pennhurst had quite a bit of history to it, with photographs from the time it was opened in 1908 to its present state of decay. I’ll admit that I was a bit intrigued by the architecture of the buildings, in part since I had never seen anything quite like them before, and partly since they simply looked creepy.
After going back to this page for about two months, trying to get my descriptions right on how things looked once people were no longer part of the equation, I found myself going back to the Pennhurst posting more and more. I began to read about the history of the place that the photographer had posted, and the old photos that he had posted along with shots he had taken seemed to cement in my head that this place was pure evil. I decided after about a month of reading just the history on this site that I would try to find out as much as I could about Pennhurst since the wheels in my head began turning at an unbelievable pace. The more I learned about the location, the more another story started forming in my head.
Most, if not all, of the stories I had read regarding any kind of hospital were all written from some perspective other than that of the patients. As I read about the treatments that were available for the patients at Pennhurst, I began to think to myself that it must have been absolute hell for them. There were treatments at Pennhurst that were outdated by decades that still occurred with alarming regularity such as electroshock therapy, hydrotherapy, lobotomies, etc. As I read and learned more and more, it became an obsession, of sorts, that I find out as much as possible about the location so I could write what would later become Someone Save Me.
As I read about Pennhurst on different sites such as Wikipedia, I came across a video clip that I almost couldn’t finish watching titled “Suffer The Little Children”. This video was posted on several of the sites I had been to, and it was this that made me decide for certain I had to write about it. In 1968, a Philadelphia reporter named Bill Baldini caught wind about Pennhurst and went to the hospital to do an exposé on the conditions the patients lived in. This event, in turn, was the beginning of the end for Pennhurst. Mr. Baldini’s report went on the six o’clock news for five nights, outraging the community and the nation. The number one question that arose in the minds of the public was how on earth could this be happening right under our noses?
In the beginning, Pennhurst State School was only meant to house 400 patients. Within two years of opening the doors, the hospital had taken in nearly twice that. By the early 1920s, just over ten years after opening, the hospital was already swamped with overcrowding and a shortage of staff.
As I watched the video and learned more and more, I came across a forum on Pennhurst from urban explorers who had actually been to the hospital. Since its closure in 1987, the buildings have stood in ruin and decay, with little or no security. People were free to come and go as they would, until the late 1990s. It was on this forum where I learned the most about the hospital from the people who had been there. Most of what I was learning, however, was just events being recalled by different people. I got to thinking about it and wanted much more. I asked around and ultimately wanted to get in touch with Mr. Baldini. Unfortunately, that never happened. What I ended up with was much better.
Through talking with the moderators of the forum, I wanted to get in touch with someone who had possibly worked there such as a nurse, orderly, or anyone who had day to day interaction with the residents. After hearing about one person in particular that knew the site better than anyone, I figured it would be him that would be best to talk to. It took close to two months of emails back and forth to two different people before I was finally introduced to Dr. James Conroy, who is part of the Center for Outcome Analysis.
It took some major convincing on my part to have Dr. Conroy believe I wasn’t writing a story to shame or ridicule anyone with a disability of any kind. Once I got that out of the way, I was nearly flooded with more information about the place than I would ever have expected. Many of the events that occur in Someone Save Me are directly related to things that Dr. Conroy explained to me, such as patients being left restrained and alone for hours (and sometimes days) on end, the food had to be cooked to nearly mush since many of the residents didn’t have teeth (a punishment for those that bit others) and several other things.
Right as I started writing the first draft of the story, I caught wind of a popular television show that had to do with paranormal investigators heading to the reportedly haunted Pennhurst State School. This was a new twist to what I had been reading and learning about the location. After everything I had found out about the hospital, it came as little surprise that it could possibly be haunted. Given the nature of the hospital and the patients, I found it completely plausible that it could be haunted since there was such a negative energy that surrounded the place. It goes without saying that I watched the episode, completely enthralled by what I was seeing.
Up to this point, everything I was learning was from pictures of the place, with very few available of the inside of any of the seventeen buildings. This show had the investigators going into all of the hot spots, so to speak, and interviewed both Dr. Conroy and Mr. Baldini. To hear them talk about what they first experienced when they arrived at Pennhurst in 1968 was amazing. Everything I had learned was coming full circle with what they were telling the investigators and the scenery in which they were talking about it. Their interviews happened both inside and outside buildings on the hospital campus, and more than once my eyes grew wide with wonder.
It was during this show that I learned the names of a few of the explorers that went to the location every chance they got. I got to writing on Someone Save Me, and I often queried them as to what the insides of certain buildings were like. The more I learned about the insides of the buildings, along with watching reruns of the same show, another story began to take shape in my head. I hadn’t even completed the first story yet, and the next part of it was taking form in my head nearly daily. For every one event that happened in Someone Save Me, I was thinking about a flip side of it and how it could be seen years later, from the perspective of a ghost hunter.
From start to finish, Someone Save Me took just over five months to complete. If research time is included with that, it took just short of a year to learn everything I felt would make for a good story and put the ideas into writing. For the next endeavor, to put my thoughts and ideas into action and write the next project, I had some other things to learn first. I had wanted to write a project about a group of ghost hunters long before I ever saw a program on television about them, and after seeing that one I was able to get it done.
I watched every episode I could get my hands on that dealt with anything paranormal so I could learn what equipment did what, how it was supposed to react, what it was used for, etc. I looked up information online about the different equipment, things that could happen while doing an investigation, what to expect, what to do, etc. Between November of 2010 and August of 2011, I devoured everything I could find about anything paranormal. The idea had started forming in my head nearly from the start of Someone Save Me about having a team of paranormal investigators go to the hospital where Someone Save Me took place.
Once I got started on The Eidolon Tempest in September of 2011, it was written faster than any other project before it or since. I was finally done with Someone Save Me, having it sent to a publisher during the summer of 2011. I waited a few months before starting on The Eidolon Tempest, getting all the ideas I had in line for the story and how I would make it come together. As I started it, I had two ideas run through my head – one was that two of the three main characters would be siblings and the third would be a female. The second idea was to have the team have some experience with investigating, but not enough to prepare them for what they experience.
I had an absolute blast writing both of these projects. I had to send each project to the ones that helped me with them, on the off chance that I didn’t get something just right or omitted something important, so I could get it included. It just so happened that, during the times I was on the forum learning about Pennhurst I also gained several new friends. Each of them helped out in some way, some with one story or the other, others with both. One friend I gained that helped out didn’t tell me until after she had read them both that she was a paranormal investigator in her spare time and couldn’t believe I had never stepped foot on the Pennhurst grounds or ever done an investigation before. I explained to her that everything that was included in the stories were first-hand accounts of things that had happened and I looked forward to the day when I could meet up with them all and take a tour of the place.
While I still haven’t met any of the people I have been in contact with while writing these projects, their impact has been amazing. Without Dr. Conroy helping with Someone Save Me, there’s no telling where the story may have gone. There was a natural progression that followed Someone Save Me; since the location that story itself is based on is still standing and being used today, The Eidolon Tempest was almost a must-do project. Both of these stories can stand alone as a novel; read in sequence, the reader gets the full story on the before and after, and unfortunately, as in the real world, there was no real happy ending.
Recommended Article: The Eidolon Tempest – a Review
