Mount Pleasant Center

Michigan · United States · Hospital

The Michigan state hospital held patients committed for the most serious offences, on open grounds with no fence and no locked doors. A great many walked.

Mount Pleasant Center in Michigan operated for decades as one of the state's most heavily used hospitals for patients committed as criminally insane, holding people whose offences ran to the most serious in the statute book.

What makes the site unusual among American asylums is how it was run. There was no perimeter fence. There were no electrically controlled doors. Patients moved about the grounds largely as they wished. The predictable consequence followed, repeatedly, and escapes are the main reason the institution's name is remembered in central Michigan at all.

Staff housing stood a few hundred feet from the hospital itself, which put orderlies and their families inside the same open grounds as the population they supervised. Accounts from the closing years describe incidents in those houses that the institution was not equipped to prevent.

The hospital is shut now. The buildings that remain draw the usual traffic, and the reports gathered there are the usual ones for a closed institution. The documented history of how the place was managed is considerably more disturbing than anything visitors have described seeing in it.

FAQ

Where is Mount Pleasant Center located?

Mount Pleasant Center is in Michigan, United States.