Psychiatric Hospitals are Not Haunted (Sorry)
by Kurt White // October 30, 2025
Published in the Brattleboro Reformer on October 29, 2025.
As Halloween approaches, the calls start to come in: “Do you think we could have a tour? What about the tunnels? We’d love to do a story for Halloween.” I have to lean back in my chair and take a breath. My colleagues remind me it’s “just a bit of good fun—the boo tour. What’s the harm in it?” But my internal dialogue tells me that this is actually important.
Persons who sought care—voluntarily or compelled—do not become ghosts when they pass away at any greater statistical frequency than anyone else. Psychiatric hospitals like the Brattleboro Retreat, places that work to help and provide care, do not become “haunted.” If this is an obvious truth, then we should wonder: why are we so compelled to exotify and ‘other’ those with mental health challenges? Why, driven by a century of ‘haunted asylum’ tropes in movies and media, do we choose this over respecting their basic dignity and memory?
Mental health symptoms are, after all, quite common, and can come up at many times in life and for many different reasons – not unlike other medical problems. Thinking of people in my life who are now gone, I remember my mother, the psychologist, who died far too young of pancreatic cancer—a scourge of a disease, then and now. I remember her having psychosis—hallucinations and paranoia—as a reaction to pain medicines and anesthesia when she was in the hospital, confounding nurses as well as friends and family members as she behaved in distinctly different ways than was typical for her.
Or my uncle, who had been diagnosed at different times in his life with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In his case, the all-too-common problem of poor medical care for persons with mental health challenges nearly took his life. When he was young, his severe Crohn’s disease was dismissed and neglected until my grandmother physically carried his emaciated body into a different hospital to get care. For so many others, he was “just a person with a mental health problem” not worthy of their time or attention. There is no eulogy large enough to really capture the scope of his defiance of the stereotypes of these diagnostic labels. Though he always sought care when needed, he refused to let his symptoms define him, and was a loving and passionate advocate for others—at one point suing the town of Flint, Michigan because the sewage lines flooded his and his neighbors’ houses, and winning repair costs for all of them!
My father, too, struggled with a lifelong depression and trauma history that often isolated him, and he survived multiple serious suicide attempts. I choose to remember him as a brilliant labor attorney, who never gave anything less than complete commitment to the causes he took on—even when he would neglect to send a bill afterward! Perhaps he gave the advocacy to others that he couldn’t make use of in his own life.
They are gone now from this world, and I mourn them as family, but never as psychiatric patients. Their struggles made them more human, not less, and it would bring me joy to imagine that the even as I describe them now, that you, as a reader, take the journey into the shadows of history to find them with me. To find them as they were, in their lives as they lived them, with all the messiness, joy, and ordinary tragedy. I am sometimes haunted by their absence, but I would never want to think that their whole lives could be boiled down to a ghost-status, a “haunting” diminishes their humanity in death.
And here, the tradition of Halloween fails us, as it doesn’t naturally invite that sort of retrospection and memorialization. Although it is not my cultural tradition, I have always had a respect and admiration for the practices in El día de los Muertos, including especially the practice of making an ofrenda, a memorial and offering, to remember those who have passed. What a joy to remember those who are gone, and to sense their spirit and presence being with us—even just for a night each year. For me, it brings an immediate emotional stirring that Halloween has never quite managed to evoke for me.
At Brattleboro Retreat, we have a small version of this intention in the form of a memorial garden where staff members engrave bricks in honor of those who have impacted them—family, colleagues, teachers, including many who have struggled with mental health challenges. It’s a beautiful place where I can feel the true spirit of those who are no longer with us.
So this Halloween, please don’t dismiss the humanity of those who sought treatment here, or elsewhere by turning them into ghosts or spectres. They are not wandering our halls, not causing our elevators to malfunction or going bump in the night… at least, not any more than in any other place. The past isn’t a ghost story to be sensationalized; it’s the history of complex, real lives. We honor those who are gone by remembering their full humanity, not by reducing them to specters. The only haunting is the loss of human dignity from stigma and dismissal.
