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Kate visited here a few years ago. The headstones in this cemetery have no names—only numbers.
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Hi Ray,
Here is a little information regarding the tombstones at CVH. I am into genealogy and was researching a family member who “did a little stint” at this state hsopital many years ago. It all has to do with the stigma that was attached to mental illness years ago. This is from the New York Times.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01EED9163AF936A15752C1A9679C8B63
Great website!
Jim Benson
creepy! have any hauntings or anything been reported there?
That’s so sad dying and having a number on your gravestone instead of a name.No wonder ghosts are thought to haunt the place,they have no peace.
Hi i was wondering if this is open to the public or not? im currenly writing a book about asylums and the mentally ill and history and such and i was wondering if it’s open so i may get photos and such. This would be something that i’d like to add about the history and mistreatment.
This is in my home town. CVH is still a running hospital… This part is open and there are more then one cemetery there. All have that eerie feeling even during the day time. There are also abandon buildings in this area. Along with the # grave stones and the history of how patients were treated back in the day there is a lot of troubled energy in this area. I am sure that police will take notice if a lot of people start poking around though.
is there any place in ct that the police wont get involved? im all for asking for permission but theres got to be some allegedlly haunted place were you can just stroll up right?
Kiba try Green Lady cemetery. Good place to do a investigation and times we were there, no police. See
http://www.ctghostseekers.com for directions on how to grt there.
The scenery seems to go nicely with the pictures. You know, dark cloudy day, dead trees and leaves everywhere. Very nice pictures. Do you have any stories or heard of any rumored hauntings? I would love to know if you don’t mind! Any history about the Asylum?
Love this site!
CVH is patrolled by state police… i was there 4 a month 4 detox-drug rehab and heard they used 2 do all the crazy shit like people speak of at other psych joints… theres old abandoned buildings that r fenced off that were built around 189-sumthing and those r said 2 be haunted- i was told by a staff memeber about this… like fairfiled hills i was also told there tunnels connecting many of the buildings- not all of them i think she said.
Most of the major state hospitals had underground tunnels. Norwich State does for sure, as does Undercliff. It was often the best way to route power etc, along with the fact that moving patients who needed to be physically restrained from building to building was best done out of sight.
This is right near where I live. I live across the river but I know the area and a former high ranking official over CVH. I used to date his daughter and I remember one halloween I asked him about the place. He said they had a lot of eerie things happen but the cemetery itself is not haunted, and that the numbers were used because many of the patients that they recieved did not use their real names, or went under other aliases. Furthermore, a porition are also criminals. As awful as it sounds but a good portion were people who were buried with no family, or familys who were not interested in them, but it truly is sad. Some also lacked record of family things like that. I also want people to bear in mind, not to screw with the story or situation, but it is a state location, and it does have a lot of state plots/cemetaries, a good poriton of the tombstones and things like are almost like tombs of the unknown soldiers, because they just are people who were buried with no place to go in the earlier years of the state.
Nonetheless because I love this kind of stuff I had to visit myself and actually see everything. I went with the daughter of the former owner, who had the house on the road that leads to CVH. We walked down to the graveyards, and a couple of abandoned buildings. The buildings honestly are a lot more spooky than the graveyards, a couple times my ex-girlfriend would grab me tightly because she claimed she hear screams. We go to the graveyard that the wonderful lady took pictures above of. It is indeed a little irking, but nothing out of the ordinary, I took some pictures and in the middle of summer i started to see my breathe. A little offsetting, but we continued on. The state owns a lot of land, but if you walk to far down past the juvenile prison and over to the right off the main road you get to state veterans cemetary. I have family buriend in there so i knew the limits but not far from that road there is another little known plot of land not far from some fencing, where I believe there is another cemetary but I am not sure. It may have been one of the underground tunnel access points but I didn’t bother to check, in the fall this year I plan to visit it again. Regardless all the land near the state prison/mental hospital or what remains of it, is definitily eerie but be careful, I had restricted access, only because of luck, but it is filled with state police understandably now. You need to have sufficient enough reason to be driving through the premises.
Ohh furthermore it is under investigation because of the Kleen Energy Explosion, which is not far from the facility, so I would advice remaining away from the location for at least a good couple of months.
If you do go there please say something nice to anyone who is there and leave some flowers or something on the graves.
I just went there today. I actually have a picture of the tree that is posted, and there are now even more gravestones placed against the tree.
http://tinypic.com/r/2hre6uo/7
Each of us can locate a person formerly an “inmate” in any Mental Hospital for example CT Valley Hospital. At your public library computer, go to AncestryLibrary.com (not available at home). Select CENSUS; select 1930; type in no first name; type in last name JONES. keyword? type in inmate. You will get all pages listing all inmates male and female including: first name, sex, age, race, marital status, age of first marriage, birthplace, parents birth countries, language spoken, year of immigration, naturalization status. This is PUBLIC information not restricted by any confidentialy laws, for ALL states, for each year that the CENSUS existed. If JONES doesn’t not work; type in SMITH, etc. Read all inmate names until you locate kin you are seeking.
Hey Jim Benson, me too! I am so curious by this I went by CVH today, several buildings still stand, so eerily, and there have to be tunnels, that standard of old mental facilities. But yes, the staff and police will chase you away simply for peaking in windows, but do it anyway, its so worth it to see how it was all just left. And yes, CVH was known for its experiments on people.
You want a story eh? Its only a story if is hear say right? Anywho, this girl I paled with in high school told me of a time her and a few others broke into the old place. Among many common odd things happening, they found a doctor’s office with viles with what appeared to be brain or tissue suspended. Missy my friend, took one, and left. She said it had a name and patient number, mostly illegible, but the last name began with H. The next morning her thumb (not sure which) hurt badly and she ran to the bathroom to see a bloody red ‘H’ rising out of her thumb! Freaked she told her mother who said if they went to a hospital, she’d be locked up for self-mutilation, so Missy came clean. At Mom’s insistance she returned to the same building and placed the vile back; a few days later her thumb was just fine…I was in love with Missy cuz she was so cool, and not at all accustomed to lying let alone making up such a detailed story.
I was attending outpatient at Rushford, which is on CVH grounds. Another client and I visited this cemetery and discovered Lizzie Borden’s gravestone is there. There’s a large, communal headstone at the entrance of the cemetery with all of the patients’ names and their corresponding gravestone numbers listed.
http://i.imgur.com/2pIsh.jpg
Whoops, nevermind. There are two Lizzie Bordens — the famous one is buried in MA.
I was a patient there in the summer of 1972. I went to the cemetery with a friend that I played tennis with. We put paper on the gravestones and copied by rubbing a pencil on the writing on many gravestones. As I remember they all had names and dates.It was fun. I thought it was a very happy safe place to be(CVH),but I missed my family and was feeling abandoned no matter how many times they would come to visit me.
I remember the addictions building,the Hitler and Napoleon building and the place where the criminally insane were. The nurses or patients I was with told me they had to keep them busy 24 hrs. a day. I remember the place where the kids had helmets because they were constantly hitting their head or face …really hard.
I was there this weekend and walked around pretty much the whole campus and couldn’t find the cemetery, maybe I was being blind but can anyone direct me to where it is on the campus?
A set of 3 memorial stones was erected several years ago with the name, grave number and age at death of all those interred. The most complete list of those interred can be found in the Godfrey Memorial Library site at http://www.godfreydata.org/cvc.html
Also, Findagrave.com has a less complete list at http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=cr&CRid=1994377
A memorial service has been held every year since 1998 at the cemetery where 100 names are read aloud. The 15th service was held May 29, 2013. The services will continue until all 1686 names have been read aloud, which should be 2015.
The CVH Cemetery is located on Silvermine Road east of the main CVH campus. Take Bow Lane east past the State Veterans Cemetery on your right. Proceed a bit farther and turn left on Silvermine Road. For those traveling south on Rte. 9, take exit 12, turn left onto Silver Street and go .7 miles, past CVH and the Connecticut Juvenile Training School. Turn right on Silvermine Road and you will come to the cemetery.
I worked at CVH the first 15 years of my state service under the Dept. of Mental Health and Addiction service.When I first became aware of the cemetery and visited it I was fascinated by it and it’s history. I remember taking a day long inservice once facilitated by an individual who was very knowledgeable about the history of CVH. This individual even took us on a tour of some of the cubby holes in basements where clients were physically restrained in the early history of the treatment of the state’s population that were treated before the use of medication. Yes, it is correct that one can travel throughout the extensive campus under ground. In fact, early in the history of CVH, it was a working farm where clients/patients worked. Later, that part of treatment was considered inhumane.
why do you people insist on glamorizing and romanticizing places like CVH. societies have always dealt with the mentally ill in one way or another. all this hospital represents is how it was done at one particular point in time. all this ‘spooky’ ‘eerie’ nonsense is in your heads. it’s the stuff of stephen king books and bad movies and it devalues the lives of the patients who lived here. there was ‘creepy’ stuff done at EVERY hospital 75 years ago.
CVH is still a functioning, state owned mental health facility. the public is not welcome to just go tramp around and take pictures. patient privacy rights, remember? that’s why the gravestones had numbers – so gawkers like you couldn’t go and hold seances over someone’s grave.
Please, people, respect that
Please, people, respect that this is a place where people go for treatment when they have brain diseases that can’t get help in the community. Not all the buildings are boarded up, nor the grounds restricted for patients to walk around and be outside. Would you want someone who has nothing to do with treatment peaking at your hospitalized family member if they had a heart attack? There are enough other great cemetaries in this state to wander through — leave this one alone.
whiting forensics
I was a patient at whiting forensics for 10yrs and the facility is awful. Many years ago patients here were chained to walls and tortured. There have been many reports of supernatural activity all over it’s historic campus over the years. To be honest it is still a creepy campus today. I happen to like the campus do to the fact you get a vibe and feel energy there. X-Files even filmed an episode there.
wow
umm..10 years at Whiting? wow.
whiting
Yes. 10 tough years!
Can you point me in the right
Can you point me in the right direction how i can find information about the horrors that went on here? I spent time at the hospital as a kid and witnessed some very disturbing things. I know there are others out there who have similar experiences and i would like to here their story.
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