This is the sixth in a series about Pennhurst Asylum in Spring City, PA.
Part 6: Memory as Moral Obligation
Pennhurst–aka the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic— is not a relic to be romanticized. It is a warning. It stands as a testament to how easily a society can abandon its most vulnerable when convenience outweighs conscience.
Walking through its corridors, the peeling paint and crumbling walls are not simply signs of age. They’re evidence of a collective forgetting. And forgetting is dangerous. The moment we allow memory to fade, we risk repeating the same quiet cruelties under new names and in new institutions. Even in 2025, the questions that Pennhurst raises remain painfully relevant. Debates about mental health funding, disability rights, and institutional versus community-based care still echo across the country. Institutional abuse is not just history, it continues in different shapes, behind different doors. Pennhurst has become both indictment and memorial, a charged symbol that reminds us of our moral responsibility to pay attention.
Memory and Gratitude
As Thanksgiving approaches, I find myself thinking about gratitude. Not the kind that glosses over discomfort, but the kind that insists on awareness. I am grateful for the people who fought to close Pennhurst. For the survivors who spoke, even when their voices shook. For the advocates, journalists, photographers, and ordinary visitors who continue to bear witness so the story doesn’t slip into oblivion. Gratitude, in this sense, is not soft. It’s a form of resistance. To remember Pennhurst with gratitude is to say: I see what was done, I acknowledge the harm, and I vow to do better. It’s to be thankful for the chance to learn from the past, even when that past is painful.
And perhaps that’s the real moral lesson of Pennhurst, that remembrance and gratitude are intertwined. We honor the suffering of others not by averting our gaze, but by meeting it with empathy, awareness, and action.
A Writer’s Responsibility
Personally, my visit changed me. I returned to my writing with a sharper sense of duty. The stories I tell, even when fictional, must carry traces of truth, compassion for the unseen, respect for the silenced, a refusal to turn away. I felt an obligation to remember, to bear witness, to let the darkness of that place sharpen my own commitment to empathy.
As a writer — or as a reader — I hope you feel that same quiet urgency. When you stand in a place like Pennhurst, let the silence speak. Take your photographs, yes, but also let the experience mark you. Let the smell, the light, the absence settle into memory. And when you leave, carry that awareness into your work, your art, your voice. That is how memory becomes moral, by being used in the service of care.
The Weight of Remembering
Pennhurst is not simply a haunted site. It’s a mirror. What we see there reflects who we have been, who we are, and who we still have the power to become. The moral obligation of memory is not about dwelling in darkness, it’s about using that darkness to light the path forward. This Thanksgiving, when gratitude is often reserved for comfort, I am grateful for discomfort, for the stories that unsettle me, for the histories that won’t let me rest. Because those are the ones that matter most.
Carrying Pennhurst Forward
Over these few weeks of posts, I’ve dreamt of Pennhurst’s architecture and silence, its ghosts and its warnings, its beauty, and smell, and its unbearable weight. Visiting changed how I see the world, and how I write within it. What began as a photographic exploration became a meditation on memory, empathy, and the moral duty to remember.
As I turn now to my next project — a gothic women’s fiction novel inspired in part by my time at Pennhurst — I carry those lessons with me. The ruins remind me that stories matter most when they give voice to what history has tried to bury. I hope these reflections help you see that remembering isn’t just an act of the past, but a promise to the future.
