Norwich State Hospital

Norwich State Hospital opened on the Preston bank of the Thames River in October 1904 with 95 patients in a single building, and closed in October 1996 with its last patients transferred to the very hospital it had been built to relieve. In between it grew to more than thirty buildings across some 900 acres, linked by concrete tunnels, and held over 3,000 people at its peak in the late 1950s. Its documented history is harsher than its ghost stories: the 1987 National Register nomination records that operations frequently performed in the Lippitt Building included sterilisations and lobotomies, and a state commission found in 1939 that there were 2,904 patients in a hospital rated for 2,450, with one physician for every 200 of them. The abandoned campus became a landmark of urban exploration and was investigated on television in 2010, but it has almost gone: demolition began in 2011 and by 2023 only five of its fifty-six buildings were still standing. The site is fenced, patrolled and closed to the public.

Norwich State Hospital was the second asylum built by the state of Connecticut, and it exists because the first one was full. The National Register nomination is explicit about it: the hospital "grew directly out of a perceived need to relieve crowding" at Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown. The state bought the land in 1903, on the Preston bank of the Thames River opposite what is now Mohegan Sun, and the doors opened in October 1904 with 95 patients in a single building. The name over that door was Norwich State Hospital for the Insane, and the first superintendent, Dr Henry M. Pollock, resented it — the nomination records that he preferred the less pejorative "Norwich State Hospital". The word came off the name in 1926; in 1961 the place became simply Norwich Hospital. The plan was an argument about psychiatry rendered in brick. Cudworth & Woodworth of Norwich, advised by Dr N. Emmons Paine of Massachusetts and H. G. Noble of Connecticut Valley Hospital, built a compromise between the two competing models of the day: Thomas Kirkbride's single vast building, and the newer preference for small separate pavilions. Norwich got separate ward buildings in concentric rings around the administration building, tied to it by a system of concrete tunnels — built for pipes and cables, and used to move patients from one ward to another. There was no wall around the complex, a deliberate break with nineteenth-century practice, and the surveyors noted that "bars and other signs of restraint were minimized". Patients were sorted by sex and by diagnosis into paired, identical buildings: Gallup and Mitchell for the well behaved, Earle and Butler for people with epilepsy, Kirkbride and Ray for the elderly. Men considered violent went into Stribling; men found not guilty by reason of insanity went into Salmon. One building needs saying out loud. Lippitt, opened in 1920, was a psychopathic hospital built only eight years after the first of its kind in the country, at Boston State, with X-ray diagnosis, hydrotherapy and an operating theatre. The federal nomination form, written in March 1987 by Bruce Clouette and Matthew Roth, describes what went on there in one flat sentence: "Frequently performed operations included sterilization and lobotomies." That is not a rumour attached to an abandoned building. It is the National Register's own account of what the state of Connecticut did in that room. The population went from 95 in 1904 to 998 in 1913, past 2,400 by 1930 and over 3,000 by the late 1950s, in more than thirty buildings spread over some 900 acres. The nomination is equally blunt about the distance between the design and the reality: the curative goals were "more of an ideal than actual practice", because "throughout its history, inadequate funding plagued the hospital, resulting in overcrowding, understaffing, and limited pursuit of curative therapies." In June 1939 the Connecticut legislature created the Commission on the Treatment and Care of People Afflicted with Physical or Mental Disabilities, chaired by Dr Creighton Barker, after State Senator Joseph B. Downes told the chamber that conditions at Norwich "stink to high heaven". Norwich was the first institution it investigated. Julianne Mangin, who read the report and the trustees' rebuttal at the Connecticut State Library, sets out the findings: 2,904 patients in a hospital rated for 2,450, one physician for every 200 patients where the American Psychiatric Association asked for one per 150, only two of the fourteen physicians board-certified, and clinical records that were "inadequate", with intervals between physical examinations "too long, and often indefinite". The trustees answered that they had asked the legislature repeatedly for more doctors, nurses, attendants and social workers and had been refused every time, and produced a letter from the US Public Health Service stating that of the 171 state mental hospitals in the country, five met the physician standard. The war emptied the wards of staff, and superintendent Dr William A. Bryan filled them with the two groups nobody else counted. From 1942 selected patients were put to work as "patient attendants". From March 1943 to August 1946 the campus hosted Civilian Public Service Unit No. 68, run by the Brethren Service Committee: conscientious objectors, most of them working as ward attendants. The Brethren Historical Library and Archives holds two photographs taken at Norwich on 23 May 1945 showing Major Havens injecting Dean C. Hoefle and G. Fred Trombley with material bearing infectious mononucleosis agents. Medical experiments did happen on this campus. They happened to volunteers, and they are photographed, named and dated. Then deinstitutionalisation emptied it of patients. By the early 1970s only seven of the original buildings were still in use; a review requirement and a threatened strike pushed the hospital out of many more in 1979; by 1994 there were 649 beds left. It closed in October 1996, and the remaining patients were transferred to Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown — the hospital Norwich had been built to relieve, ninety-two years earlier.

You cannot visit. The 393-acre property straddling the Norwich–Preston line is closed, fenced and patrolled by a private security firm hired by the town of Preston, and trespassers are removed and can be arrested. The Damned Connecticut team, who drove onto the grounds and started taking pictures in April 2010, had two guards standing beside them within five minutes. There is also less and less to trespass on. Demolition began in 2011 and, according to The Day, by June 2023 all but five of the 56 buildings had been taken down; the contractor puts its own total at roughly 1.4 million square feet of buildings removed, along with the connecting tunnel system and more than 200,000 cubic yards of contaminated and clean fill. What is left standing is the 1908 administration building — sealed and weatherized, awarded a state preservation grant, and the one structure the Mohegan Tribe has said it will keep — plus the decontaminated shells of the Gallup, Mitchell and Ray buildings and the chiller building, earmarked as a staging area. The site is not quiet: firefighters from several departments were called to a blaze there on the morning of Saturday 5 July 2025 and part of Route 12 was closed. The transfer of the land from Preston to the Mohegan Tribe, agreed in May 2016 for the mixed-use Preston Riverwalk development, had still not closed at the last report we were able to confirm, and the timetable has slipped repeatedly. Check before travelling. What you can do lawfully: the administration building is visible from Route 12 and from the commuter lot next door — the photograph on this page was taken from Route 12, looking south, on 22 April 2011, the same spring the demolition began. And if you want the place itself rather than its silhouette, the 1987 National Register nomination is online in full and describes every building that used to stand there, and Julianne Mangin has published her family's records from inside it.