This is the Third in a series about Pennhurst Asylum in Spring City, PA.
Part 3: Writing for Those Who Couldn’t Speak
Every abandoned building at Pennhurst Asylum–aka the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic–holds its ghosts. But Pennhurst’s spirits are not the kind that drift through walls or rattle doors. They are the voices that were never allowed to speak. They are the men, women, and children silenced by a system that believed their lives had less meaning.
When I walked through the wards, the silence was suffocating. The walls hummed with the residue of voices that had once filled these spaces. Sounds of laughter, crying, perhaps even song are all absorbed into the peeling paint. I found myself wondering what their stories might have been, had anyone thought to write them down.
Pennhurst opened in an era when society thought institutionalization was compassion. The so-called “feeble-minded”could be “trained,” “rehabilitated,” and “protected.” But those ideals were quickly swallowed by the realities of underfunding, stigma, and neglect. Many of the over 10,000 souls who entered Pennhurst never left, often because no one came back for them. Also, in many cases, because the state of Pennsylvania refused to let patients go. Families were told to move on. Records vanished. Names were lost.
Standing there, camera in hand, I realized how easily people disappear from history, not just through death, but through indifference. And I thought about how writers, artists, and storytellers have a duty to remember them. I also recently returned from a trip to Central Europe where I visited Prague, Vienna, and Budapest–three cities who also still suffer the pain of the people stolen and murdered.
Why We Must Write the Forgotten
To write about the forgotten is to resist erasure. When we tell their stories — even imaginatively, even symbolically — we restore the humanity that history denied them. For centuries, literature has given voice to those who couldn’t speak for themselves: enslaved people, institutionalized women, lost children, people murdered during world wars, the marginalized and misunderstood. Gothic fiction, in particular, has always carried this torch. Beneath its haunted corridors and decaying mansions are questions of justice: Who is confined? Who is silenced? Who gets to tell their stories?
In Pennhurst, that gothic inheritance feels painfully real. The patients who lived and died here are not metaphors. They were people who laughed, loved, and feared. When a modern writer steps into such a place — even with trembling hands — there’s an opportunity to turn empathy into witness. Writing about them is not exploitation. It’s reclamation. We can’t undo the past, but we can give it voice, shape, and meaning. We can take what history flattened into statistics and breathe it back into the realm of story, where readers can feel the heartbeat of what was lost.
What the Camera and the Page Share
As I photographed the empty rooms, I noticed how light entered through broken panes and lingered on the floors. The light never reached every corner as some stayed in shadow, unilluminated. That’s what stories can do. They shine light into places history left dark. Writing, like photography, becomes an act of remembrance, an act of framing what remains and honoring what cannot be restored. When I look at these images now, I see evidence of resilience, not just ruin. The walls are cracked, but they’re still standing. The air is heavy, but it still moves. That persistence is the echo of the lives that passed here.
A Writer’s Responsibility
If we, as writers, do not remember them, who will? Every generation risks forgetting what came before, mistaking silence for peace. But peace cannot come without witness. To write about Pennhurst is to stand against silence, to refuse the comfortable lie that what happened here is over. When we write about the forgotten, we remind the living that every story matters. Especially those stories about those who society once tried to erase.
I left Pennhurst with my memory card full of images, but my heart felt heavier than my camera. The people who lived here are gone, but their absence demands acknowledgment. I want my writing — and maybe yours too — to speak where they could not. Because memory is fragile. And forgetting is far too easy.
