Uncovering the forgotten lives lost at Pennhurst State School and Hospital

His name was William. But upon his arrival at Pennhurst State School and Hospital in 1909, he was assigned just a number: 84.

The state facility in Chester County would one day become synonymous with abuse, overcrowding, and filth — a microcosm of all the ways America failed its intellectually disabled citizens. When William arrived as one of its first residents, it had just opened. But it was already becoming hell.

William was 18 and Black and most recently from South Philadelphia. His parents had both died. So had his 10-year-old brother. No one knows how he ended up at Pennhurst.

Soon, he sat for a screening. William told his examiner he felt targeted by patients and doctors alike: He had no one left to protect him. At night, when the lights went out, he cried.

His screener derided him for trying diligently to solve assessment tests, sorting blocks by trial and error. They chided him in their paperwork for his “rambling chatter” about his past. Like his grief. How he fainted when he saw his father’s corpse. They compared him to an “animal.”

In the end, the Pennhurst examiner dismissed William as “untrainable” even for the smallest jobs. Except for scrubbing. He was classified as an “imbecile,” a scientifically accepted term of the day.

The dehumanizing label amounted to a life sentence amid the horror of Pennhurst.

Like most of the 10,600 souls who passed through the hospital in its 79-year existence, William spent the rest of his days there. When he died alone, decades later, in the infirmary, his body was given to a medical college for research. He was eventually interred without a headstone in a potter’s field.

The scant details of his life, collected in indifferent, ableist, racist language by the caretakers of his day in a slim file, were buried away in piles of yellowing paperwork.

Pennhurst was closed in 1987 after lawsuits and investigations uncovered its torturous conditions. Children strapped to cribs and locked in cages. Patients left naked in their own waste in bare dayrooms. Residents — called “inmates” — endured abuse, from fellow patients and from staff. (Unfathomably, Pennhurst’s new owners transform the grounds into a haunted house attraction for Halloween.)

The grand scale of the suffering at Pennhurst became a national scandal, and the shame helped usher in reform. But so many individual tragedies were lost. The earliest Pennhurst files were stored safely in state archives. But many others gathered dust for decades in rusty cabinets in abandoned rooms at Norristown State Hospital before being moved.

Now, the Institute on Disabilities at Temple University will bring these stories to light for a new multimedia installation entitled, File/Life: We Remember Stories of Pennhurst. They’ve partnered with community archivists, all of whom are people with disabilities or have family members who are disabled, and a range of artists to honor these lost lives — and to imagine them more fully.

The installation — supported by the the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and running April 20-23 at the Arch Street Meeting House — features seven Pennhurst stories and collaborative artwork inspired by them. Two former Pennhurst residents will examine their own history, and tell their own stories. Harold Gordon, 54, lived in Pennhurst in the 1970s and ‘80s. For the project, Gordon, who now lives in Wynnefield Heights with his wife, Linda, returned to Pennhurst. He pointed to the broken-windowed buildings where he once slept in a row of beds and snuck peanut butter sandwiches.

“My heart was pumping and I was outraged,” he said.

The story of Pennhurst has been told by historians and scholars, said Lisa Sonneborn, director, media arts and culture at the Institute on Disabilities. “What felt missing for us was the perspective of people with skin in the game.”

Those working on File/Life hope that centering individual voices can help people better understand not only the scale of the loss at Pennhurst, but how the past stretches into the present.

“This is an opportunity to know the historical roots of stigma — to understand the history we are living out,” said Nicki Pombier, an oral history artist who worked on File/Life, and a parent of a child with intellectual and developmental disabilities. “Here is the evidence. Look at it.”

Some community archivists researched dozens of files before deciding on a life to tell. Other archivists, like Ramona Griffiths, an advocate for families of people with disabilities, opened one and never shut it.

Griffiths, of Northeast Philadelphia, was 64 when she died on March 4 from breast cancer. Her devotion to telling William’s story even in failing health came to represent the emotional heart of File/Life. There was an instant connection: William had died on Nov. 2, 1958, the day Griffiths was born. But there was a deeper pull, too. Griffiths had raised her 18-year-old grand nephew, Marquis, who has autism, like a son. She immediately recognized in William everything the staff at Pennhurst refused to: a human being who could have been someone remarkable if given the chance.

“Allow me to introduce you to William,” Griffiths begins an oral history Pombier recorded for the show.

For her part, Pombier, who lives in Brooklyn, recalled transcribing Williams’ file, with all its dehumanizing descriptions, while her son, Jonah, who has Down syndrome, autism, and hearing loss, sat eating dinner nearby.

“Having that language in my body while being in the presence of my son, when I know all that it takes for him to be self-actualized, for him to be himself, to know what he needs, and the cost of not having it in place, I felt chords of grief, anger, and determination— a sense of purpose to really fight,” she said.

The William they came to know struggled to bear witness to the horrors happening to him. The endless injuries, including broken ribs, a fractured skull, and bad burns (he’d been working as an unpaid laborer at the Pennhurst farm when an open flame caught wind and set his clothes on fire.) Staffers shrugged off William’s complaints of bullying attendants as his “morbid delusions of grandeur.”

Only once did Pennhurst staff write with any compassion for William. And not until 1953, five years before William’s death. The few lines provide clues to who William really was — a “friendly, agreeable, talkative man who relates his experiences quite well and convincingly,” the notetaker wrote. He took pride in caring for a patient who was blind. He had a knack for names, and recalled his favorite refreshments from past Fourth of July picnics. He dressed neatly, and played cards with a friend before the man was transferred to another building. He pined for a pipe, even if the “other boys” would steal it from him.

“I bet you could give me a quarter to go buy a pipe and by Saturday it would be gone,” the notetaker quotes William, one of few instances in the file where his voice shines through.

“Later,” the staffer added, “he asked for a quarter.”

The file contained a single, striking photo of William, which is undated, but may have been snapped at intake. He could be a scholar or a prince. He is dressed smartly in a suit, just his tie is slightly askew. His worried eyes stare out from beneath a furrowed brow.

Only months before she died, Griffiths stood with Pombier at William’s unmarked grave at Mount Peace Cemetery in North Philadelphia. They laid flowers and lit candles. Griffiths prayed for William to find rest. To know that his name was known — and that his story mattered.

“I’ll never forget him,” Griffiths said. “I’ll never forget him.”