"Four Miles North:" A Photo Essay
Visiting the site of my mother's commitment for the first time
CN: involuntary commitment
In 1873, Northern State Hospital for the Insane opened its doors, four miles north of so-called Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on the edge of what came to be known as Asylum Bay.
Because of its location relative to the town of Oshkosh, the asylum became colloquially known as “four miles north.” If someone in the community wasn’t “acting right,” there’d be whispers among the locals that they’d be heading “four miles north.”
In the 1930s, the name was changed to Winnebago State Hospital, and the old, Kirkbride-era institution was torn down to make way for new buildings.
Then the institution changed names again in the 1970s, rebranding as the Winnebago Mental Health Institute.
That’s the version of the place where my mother would have been detained, on two separate occasions over 1978-1980. Five months of her life, wasted behind those walls.
In February of 1978, she took the cops on a high speed car chase after receiving some terrible news at one of my custody hearings. “Ms. Harris indicated that this occurred on the day her daughter was taken away and that she was subsequently very upset,” reads a letter I have from the chief of service on the Forensic Observation Unit to the judge on the case.
Her time at Winnebago was spent waiting to be “restored to competency” to stand trial for her crime of fleeing an officer. She was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity, and let out in January of 1980. But the criminal case and Winnebago was the beginning of the end of her long battle to retain custody of me. Soon after that, I was sent from Milwaukee to Pennsylvania to live with my grandparents permanently.
The drive to Winnebago was mostly taken up with a long, monotonous trip up highway 41, through miles of farmland and countryside. I imagined my mother traveling this 90-minute route—no longer herself allowed behind the wheel, but forced to be a passenger. Shuttled back and forth to this place, awaiting her fate.
I wonder what she thought about as she looked out the window at a scene that couldn’t have been so different from what I was witnessing from the driver’s seat.
Well, maybe except for the billboards. This stretch of Highway 41 was lined with billboards advertising everything from a strangely high number of brick-and-mortar sex shops (that also sell CBD products), to pro-forced birth signs like a giant photo of a fetus in utero with the words “I AM A PERSON” below it, to a former cheese billboard converted into a gun store ad. You could glean this history because the outline of the letters “C-H-E-E-S-E” was still visibly protruding at the top of the billboard, above the massive image of a semi-automatic rifle and a pistol.
My first stop was Asylum Point Park, located on Asylum Bay in Lake Winnebago. As I drove onto the promontory, I noticed all of a sudden that one of my mom’s favorite songs, “Here Comes the Rain Again,” was playing. I had to laugh.
Her timing is always impeccable.
The skies, which had been partly sunny on my drive up from Milwaukee, turned overcast around the time I arrived, creating a somber feel over the bay and its deep grey water. The water’s edge was lined with dusty pink clusters of milkweed.
I made my way across the newly-replaced bridge to the Asylum Point Lighthouse, located on a little island just off the tip of the promontory. Back in the days when they believed in giving people fresh air, it is said that those psychiatrically incarcerated at the institution used to picnic here, or somewhere nearby.
A few fun facts: The lighthouse was built during the Works Progress Administration era of the 1930s, but deemed unsuitable for navigation, and so was never operational. In 2007, some incarcerated folks at the Winnebago Correctional Institute were forced to do renovations on the exterior. Strange to visit a lighthouse that was never lit, yet it feels fitting for a place like this, on these carceral grounds.
The past and present superimpose in layers, a palimpsest that keeps building and building as time passes.
Thanks to the instructions given by a ghost-hunting blogger, I was able to wind my way through a trail in the woods to the cemetery where approximately 870 souls were buried over the course of a hundred years, including 15 babies. I didn’t come here out of a morbid fascination, but a desire to pay my respects to the people who lived and died within asylum walls, buried with a number and not a name.
I walked as respectfully as I could around the edge of the cemetery, where I saw a few grave markers, quickly becoming overgrown with grass and moss. There was an American flag waving there in the center of the cemetery, which felt obscene.
By the time I was done looking around the cemetery, it was about time to visit the Julaine Farrow Museum. It’s one of just sixteen psychiatric institution museums in the entire country.
The only reason it even exists is because the psych nurse who it’s named for rescued all the artifacts when the newest version of the institution was to be built atop the old. But she saved as much as she could, sometimes literally rescuing photos and other objects from swept piles on the floor destined for the trash bin, storing it all carefully away until such time as the Superintendent’s Home would be converted into a museum to house the old asylum’s memories.
One of my favorite display cases held keys made by people trying to escape (or “elope” in hospital-speak).
A fair amount has been written about the museum being haunted. A guitar made by a patient that is heard playing itself. A third floor light that goes on at all odd times, annoying the security guards who have to go up there and check it out. A couple of faces appeared in a large, arched window when a staff member snapped a photo from outside at night. Security guards were asked after this to take photos of this window at all different times of night and conditions, and the faces have never been replicated.
Sherman Hall, now the admissions building, is also said to be haunted after someone took their life there.
I snapped this photo of Sherman Hall from my car. I felt too nervous to walk around taking pictures, as there were a lot of people and security vehicles about. Still, almost 30 years after my last hospitalization, there is this fear of being locked up.
The building is dated 1966. Surely that’s where my mother was brought after the long drive up Highway 41. I felt a large stone pressing down on my chest, as it always does when I think of her in places like this.
I always love a good ghost story. But I have to marvel at the ghost-hunters’ preoccupation with asylum cemeteries and spirits roaming the halls, when what is far scarier to me is this history that won’t stop echoing loudly into the present. The history is, itself, undead.
After my time at the museum and institution, I drove back to Asylum Bay, sitting with the gray skies and the gray water and the milkweed blooming. I sat there for a long time in silence, processing all I’d seen while listening to the waves lap against the shore, before finally making my way back down Highway 41 to Milwaukee.
As I drove along the highway, the sun began to shine again. I imagined my mother’s final trip home from that place. I felt her joy at being out of there for good, mixed with the unfathomable grief of knowing that she would likely never get me back again.
This is beautiful, Leah. I once visited a museum in Oregon at the state hospital there. It was horrifying but important.
I am moved and inspired by your piece- the photo of hand made weaponry went in deep, bravo 🙌