Tales From Fairfield Hills

By Nancy K. Crevier

This is the first in a series of Tales of Fairfield Hills, stories shared by local residents who worked and lived there when the property was a functioning psychiatric institution. Now owned by the Town of Newtown and being re-created, the property’s past has been the subject of stories, some of which may be laced with truth, some which may be purely fabrication. These tales, though, come from the hearts of those who knew it best.

 

“It was a nice, homey atmosphere. It was a great place to work.”

“I loved that job. I learned a lot.”

“It was good money, good benefits. It was a good experience working there. You loved going to work.”

They are not comments one would expect to hear about an institution whose web and television reputation is of ghosts and torture and mayhem, where underground tunnels were supposed to be haunted, and where there is no doubt that electroshock therapy, hydrotherapy, and lobotomies were the tools utilized to subdue a troubled population.

The Fairfield State Hospital (it was later renamed Fairfield Hills Hospital) opened in late June 1933 to great fanfare. Thirty-two patients were transferred there June 21 from the Connecticut State Hospital in Middletown, and hospital and town officials entertained in the cafeteria that evening and inspected the buildings, then considered to be the most up-to-date of their kinds.

Further busloads of patients arrived shortly after, relieving the other state institutions of overcrowding, until, according to The Newtown Bee June 23, 1933, article, “500 patients have been received.”

The hospital would become a source of pride to the town and provided employment to hundreds of local people during the 60 years it operated as a psychiatric hospital. It was not until its later years that tales of ghosts and tortured souls would become fodder for sensation seekers, and not until the filming of Sleepers on the campus grounds in the mid-1990s that the tunnels would gain notoriety.

With the closing of the hospital in 1995 and abandonment of the already neglected buildings, Fairfield Hills became fair game for ghost hunters and heavily embellished stories as the state, and then the town, pondered the future of the once stately buildings and grounds.

But many who worked at Fairfield Hills Hospital in Newtown, from the maintenance level to the professional level, recall their time in the workforce there as a positive experience, and a time in which staff used the best tools for the time to provide what they believe was the best care available for the patients.

 “I was never fearful. There was always someone around,” recalled Joyce Staudinger of Sandy Hook, who clerked at the hospital from 1983 to 1995. “It was a nice atmosphere. The nurses and social workers were very pleasant,” she said.

Working there was much like any office job, said Ms Staudinger, except that she was locked into her office. As a ward clerk in Kent House, she sat in a little cubicle right on the ward.

“The office was just a small square, big enough for a few nurses and the files. The patients were outside of us, all around,” she said. After a while, it was clear which patients “to watch for,” Ms Staudinger said, but security was so good, she was never afraid.

Mostly, she felt bad for patients, some of whom were affected by medications in a way that left them staring up at the ceiling and walking in a daze. Other times, it was witnessing the handling of out-of-control patients that caused her grief.

“One time, a very young boy who was a patient there ‘went off’ and it took four guys to hold him down. He had picked up one of those oak chairs and tried to throw it. I felt bad for him, being held down by all those big guys,” Ms Staudinger said.

Oversized charts were kept down in big cages in the tunnels, so her job occasionally required her to go into the dank, cement tunnels that connected all of the buildings. “There were no ghosts, but it was very, very eerie, and boy, could you get lost. A couple of times I worked nights,” she said, “and had to go into the tunnels. We were locked into the cages there, because they did sometimes move patients through the tunnels, but I was more afraid I’d run into a rat than a patient,” she declared.

Her cousin Diana Reiff, a lifelong Newtown resident, worked as a psychiatric aide at Fairfield Hills from 1962 to 1964. It was a brief but memorable time for the woman, who was not yet in her twenties then. Like any work place, not every moment was ideal, and not everything about the place of employment was optimum.

A year of training was provided to learn to care for the patients on the ward. “At my first training session,” Ms Reiff remembered, “I went into a room and the patient was dead. It was not a good beginning. I had never encountered a dead body before, and I had to take the body down to the morgue, through the tunnels. I was scared stiff.”

Seeing her first epileptic seizure was also terribly frightening for the young woman. “I’d never seen that before. He was down on the floor and everyone was standing around. They used to put a pencil under the tongue so they wouldn’t bite their tongues then, but they just let him go,” Ms Reiff said.

In the early 1960s, she said, medication was not widely used for psychological intervention. “It was only custodial care. There was some medication when I was there, and shock treatment. You’d send a patient off and they’d come back a zombie… I guess it helped some people, though. It seemed to me that the new meds were hit or miss as to who they would help and who would be like a zombie,” she said.

“I liked all of the different people there,” Ms Reiff said. “You’d look in their eyes and wondered what caused them to be there? We were never told,” she said.

“Later, it was different,” Ms Staudinger put in. “In the 1960s, patients were expected to just live out their lives at the hospital. By the 1980s, the patients had a doctor assigned, and a social worker. It was more about [patients] transitioning back to the real world,” she said.

Ms Reiff worked in Cochran House, on the ward, for the first year, then worked with the alcoholic patients in the building she believes was called Greenwich House. Her career there ended, she said, when a patient swiped her keys from her and locked her in a seclusion room. “That,” she said, “was my last night on the job!”

Still, she noted, “It was quite an experience to work there. It was like family, the people who worked there.”

The cousins recalled moments outside of work, of the days when Fairfield Hills Hospital was a functioning mental hospital.

“I remember a big horn would go off if a patient escaped. You’d hear it, and you’d call your kids in,” said Ms Staudinger.

“My mother, Hazel Sedor, lived on Taunton Lake Road,” Ms Reiff said. “One night, she heard a noise on the porch, opened the door, and there was a naked guy who had walked there from Fairfield Hills! My mother was quite a character. She held a shotgun on him till the cops got there,” chuckled Ms Reiff.

Both women rued the closing of the hospital in 1995, not only for the job losses it meant, but because they feel the patients’ best interests were not looked after.

According to a December 8, 1995, article in The Bee, “the psychiatric institution, which once housed about 3,000 patients” was preparing to close the following week. “Implementing Gov John Rowland’s decision to close the facility, the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) will transfer the fewer than 100 patients remaining at Fairfield Hills to community settings or to Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown.” The article goes on to note that 485 workers there received layoff notices in the fall, with approximately 150 workers not reassigned to other state jobs.

“I felt bad for the patients when [Fairfield Hills] closed,” said Ms Staudinger. “They shouldn’t have been outsourced. I didn’t think some could live on their own.”