Destination Fear - Fourth Season

This could be our final stop ever.

This is out of my nightmares.

We are going to the nation's most infamous psychiatric hospital.

Hello?

I don't like it in here.

Are you mad at us? Are you? Battery!

Battery? What does that even mean?

BLEEP, look, dude, my camera just BLEEP shut off.

What? What?

Hello. I am freaked out.

Our stuff is destroyed.

Holy BLEEP. Someone's here.

Just go!

Wait, this is a dead end. It's a dead end, this is a dead end!

My name is Dakota Laden.

I'm leading my sister and two best friends

on a road trip

exploring the most haunted locations in America.

Oh my gosh!

Go, go, go, go, go. I'm freaked out.

Experimenting with fear and how it affects

our interaction with the paranormal.

Each night, we separate and sleep alone.

The catch is, only one of us knows where we're going.

This is it. It has all come down to this.

From the very start of this road trip,

I wanted to take us down some of the darkest, bleakest roads,

the types of places where all of your instincts say,

"Do not go in there."

And now it's time for our final stop.

So, how do we wrap up this terrible journey?

Well, by exploring a place that's so diseased with dark history

that it's unrivalled by any place we've ever been to.

We are going to the nation's most infamous,

disturbing and deranged psychiatric hospital.

What remains of this massive property is treacherous.

Falling apart piece by piece from years of neglect and vandalism.

The buildings look like they are straight out of the apocalypse.

A place where the experimental treatments

were medieval at best, and to the patients,

suffering can only be described as grotesque and inhumane.

If the sight of this place does not send shivers

down the team's spine,

then I think the hauntings definitely will.

People report being physically touched,

others are overcome by an overwhelming sense

of being unbalanced and wanting to escape.

Audible whispers, giggles, and violent screams

have been heard throughout the property.

We truly have travelled down a dark and twisted road on this trip.

If we really lean into the darkness

in all of its forms, deprivation, no light source,

unexplored locations,

will that bring us closer to the paranormal?

Will that scar us or scare us?

In the darkness, is the truth revealed?

Well, we'll have to find out because our biggest test starts right now.

This is it, you guys.

We are on the last leg of the journey.

How are you guys feeling,

are you guys ready to take on the final stop?

I am running on fumes right now.

This has been a long trip so far.

All of our experiences, all of our fatigue,

our emotional drain is all coming to this point.

Do we have what it takes to finish this road trip strong?

How do you feel taking away the flashlights

has affected this trip and affected you personally?

It spiked my fear up 10 times more.

You don't have any security,

you have no confidence in the spot that you're at.

What's next? What have we not experienced yet?

This place has been on my radar since the very beginning of our days

when we used to urban explore and we finally got access to it.

It's going to be one of those nights

where we are as far apart as we've ever been.

We're going to be dealing with some intense, negative hauntings

and we're going to need every single thing

we've learned on this trip to get through this.

Once we read the packet,

I think everything will start to make sense.

But I am going out with a bang.

This could be our final stop ever.

You think this might be the one to do us in?

This is it, that's our last packet read of the trip.

I am so curious.

Here you go, Chels.

Norwich State Hospital? Norwich State Hospital?

I've heard of this place.

This place is notorious.

I can't believe I didn't put two and two together.

I don't think we will ever find a location

in America as brutal as this.

Norwich State Hospital.

Withering along the side of Route 12

in southeast Connecticut are the decrepit remains

of the most notorious mental hospital in the United States.

When you first pull up and you see how big it is,

it's creepy, especially at night.

It's been locked up for so long, no one's been in it,

so when you get in here, everything just comes to life.

Though most of the staff tried their best

to treat those in their charge,

the nearly 100 years of alleged mistreatment,

radical procedures and horrific deaths

have cemented Norwich State Hospital in infamy.

Norwich State Hospital has been a facility

to treat the mentally ill since 1904

and they closed its doors in 1996.

The majority of patients were for schizophrenia, depression,

epilepsy, which they deemed as a mental illness at the time.

We also had the criminally insane.

Over its 90 years in operation, the campus grew to 900 acres

with over 75 buildings.

But while the acreage allowed them to take in more patients,

it also spread the staff thin,

allowing patients to be neglected and abuse to run rampant.

Overcrowding was a big issue. The hygiene conditions

were really atrocious and really got worse

into the 1930s in the Great Depression.

In 1939, a state senator visited the facility

and alleged that the hospital was mistreating patients.

He noted that their food and clothing

were woefully inadequate.

The doctors were incompetent and that it stunk to high heaven.

That's horrifying. That's absolutely disgusting.

We've been to a lot of asylums,

but this, this is a whole new level of neglect.

The treatments were experimental at best and many of them

were first administered on a grand scale

in the Lippitt Building.

It provided lobotomies, hydrotherapy.

The first electric shock therapy treatments

that were conducted caused such violent reactions

from the patients that they would dislocate their spines

and injure their shoulders.

So, they would be doing these and it would continuously

break their spine and fracture their jaw.

Yeah, from the seizures they were having.

And they kept going? Mm-hm.

Very disturbing.

One truly brutal treatment was Metrazol shock therapy.

Metrazol is a stimulant that they used to overdose a person into coma.

There was a lot of injuries as a result,

there were deaths.

But the most heartbreaking and deplorable treatment

to be carried out was forced sterilisations

known as eugenics.

This horrific practice was designed

to prevent psychologically or morally unfit people

from reproducing in hopes of improving humanity

through better breeding.

Sterilisation was something

completely out of any patient's hands.

In the 1920s, there was a superintendent here at Norwich

who expressed the idea that a person

should be euthanised after say, 15 years of unsuccessful treatment.

Along the same lines was sterilisation practices.

From 1909 to 1963,

Norwich State Hospital sterilised 559 people.

Dude, it's like equally parts disgusting and disturbing.

And this is like non-voluntary.

That is something you thought only happened in Nazi Germany.

This might be the most brutal place we've ever been to.

A thousand people died here.

You always hear about unmarked graves.

Most of the time, the relatives didn't really want the bodies.

Once they got, they dropped them off, they wanted nothing to do with them.

It's a shame.

Thousands. It makes me really sad.

We tend to pick up on energies,

this might be one of those nights that's equally as sad and upsetting

as it is scary.

The most active areas include the nurses ward.

Across the street from the Lippitt Building,

this was staff housing for nurses and their families.

Many people report feeling watched and followed in this building.

Booming audible noises are heard

and people have been physically touched.

I was by myself.

Down the end of the hallway, I heard talking

that came from the large room.

The closer I got to the end of the hallway,

it turned into a whisper.

My arms were starting to go numb.

I felt as if I was really sick, really weak.

The Bryant Building.

A former tuberculosis ward,

it operated as an orphanage and geriatrics wing for the hospital.

The basement has the darkest energy.

People report feeling unbalanced

and have an urgent need to flee the area.

What I saw, I would say it's demonic,

wanting to get your attention so much it might hurt you.

One of my volunteers was scratched down her back

and she had blood coming off of her back

and you'll feel jabs in your stomach, you'll get headaches.

This energy, whoever it is,

is not fond of women being down in the basement.

The Lippitt Building.