Chasing Away The Ghosts Of

Fairfield Hills’ Reputation

It was not long after the state emptied the buildings of its mental hospital at Fairfield Hills in the early 90s that the abandoned facility became a vessel for the imagination. In the ten years that various official study groups and ad hoc committees have been imagining possibilities for making the campus a positive asset for the town, others have been busy with unofficial imaginings that have local officials worrying about the liabilities of the place.

This week we have a report on how the Fairfield Hills campus has become an attractive nuisance over the past decade with the help of mass media and the Internet. Most notably, the 1996 movie Sleepers and MTV’s Fear helped raise the profile of Fairfield Hills as a sinister, scary place by filming on the campus. As a result, Fairfield Hills has been featured subsequently on dozens of websites as a hotspot for paranormal activity. Not surprisingly, the abandoned mental hospital has become an important destination for nocturnal thrill seekers who have found it relatively easy to break into the buildings and gain access to the “haunted” tunnels under the cover of darkness.

There is danger at Fairfield Hills, but it is not what the intruders imagine. With so many of the buildings crumbling and in disrepair, the potential for serious injury to someone running around in dark, unfamiliar spaces is quite high. So is the potential liability to the town once it takes over the property from the state, which could be as early as this week.

The town’s new Fairfield Hills Management Committee is quite right to establish campus security as its top priority. The police department and the firm currently managing the property for the state have agreed to cooperate with renewed efforts to keep intruders out. But more has to be done to eradicate the ominous and frightening aspect of the place that lingers in misguided imaginations that still insist on associating mental illness with forces of darkness. The planned demolition of nine vacant buildings at the site — especially the Yale Laboratory, which served as a morgue for the hospital — and the eventual renovation and reoccupation of the remaining facilities should chase away the “ghosts” of its mental hospital past. But that will take a lot of money and a long time.

In the meantime, the town should institute a new policy at Fairfield Hills: no more film crews.