Haunted attractions that will push you to the edge of your sanity is the tagline that greets you on the Pennhurst Asylum website. Like other asylums-turned-amusement centers, Pennhurst’s marketing focuses on the horror of its history. The ghosts haunting the place, waiting to terrify you, are supposed to be those of the people once admitted there. The website includes pictures of performers as ghostly patients in straightjackets, monstrous hospital staff performing lobotomies, and many a stereotypical image of mostly female patients looking crazed—messy hair, dirty faces, wild facial expressions. Last year, USA Today readers voted Pennhurst one of the country’s best haunted attractions.

When I ended up at a psych ward myself, it was just past midnight in the beginning of September. As two nurses took inventory of my naked body, noting my two tattoos and the scar on my right lower leg, my hair was still wet from my attempt to drown myself in Lake Michigan. Still, I had been hesitant to agree to inpatient treatment.

Part of the reason was my lack of health insurance, but when the admissions nurse removed financial concerns as a reason, I realized I was also afraid.  My brain flashed to the images of psych wards in pop culture that are laced with stigma and fear. And then there’s the decades of documentation showing how real mental-illness patients have been kept in unsanitary, unsafe, and abusive conditions, especially at state-run facilities like Illinois’ Choate Mental Health and Development Center.

Because I’m white and live in one of the gayborhoods of Chicago’s Northside, privilege shaped my experience. I knew I was unlikely to be mistreated at the private hospital where I’d been taken. We each had our own room. The staff wore Pride stickers to show their gender and sexual identities, and the office had a large Pride flag. “If you’re going to be hospitalized, this is the place to be,” the admissions nurse reassured me. Private facilities are radically different from state-run ones. Still, urban legends don’t make such distinctions.

Finally, I nodded. I’d be admitted. She said she’d get the paperwork. Another nurse took me to my room.

“One last question,” he said after he’d gotten me set up. “Are you hearing or seeing anyone that no one else can?”

I shook my head, and he smiled as he left. But I was hearing a voice in my head, just not the kind he was asking for. It was more of an earworm—a line from a movie that kept repeating itself. It was a woman saying, “I can fix it. I can fix it.” Her desperate voice was familiar but I couldn’t quite place it, as though the dialogue was a ghost in my memory. The line, both ominous and consoling, stayed with me throughout my five days in the hospital, the mystery of its origin a way to keep myself occupied during my many hours of rest.

A few days after getting out of the psych ward, morbid curiosity led me to look up haunted houses that have an asylum spin. In addition to Pennhurst, in 2016, Knott’s Berry Farm in California opened a haunted VR attraction called “FearVR: 5150”—a reference to California’s code for involuntary psychiatric commitment—that they begrudgingly shut down after just five days due to protests by mental health advocates.

As I scrolled, I realized that as much as they horrify me in the bad way, these attractions also horrify me in the alluring, macabre way the season intends. As Leila Taylor says of so-called “ruin porn” in Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul: “I know the smell of exploitation, and that they ignore the people who live and work and play there, that they romanticize poverty and economic decay, but I keep looking.”

I kept looking, too, because haunted spectacle can be a portal to understanding. That’s also why I’ll admit to wanting to go to Pennhurst—though I want to see the daytime tours about the asylum’s history. You can’t have a ghost without a person who was once alive. A specter of their lived experience remains under the gory makeup.

That tension also made me think of Floria Sigismondi’s 2020 film The Turning, part of my yearly Halloween rotation of ghost story movies. (As a Halloween lover, Halloween Eve starts for me in September.) I turned it on.  

The movie is adapted from the Henry James story “The Turn of the Screw,” about a governess who is haunted by the ghosts of her predecessor and another former employee while caring for two siblings in a secluded estate. It moves the story from the 1840s to 1994, but for most of the film the plot follows James’ story, seeming to make the narrative choice that ghosts are real.

Then there’s a twist.

Near the end, the narrative switches from the perspective of Kate, the governess, to a more omniscient view. We see her disheveled, her hair messy, her eyes red and wide, like the stereotypical crazed women in the pictures on Pennhurst’s site. We realize that Kate is the only one seeing ghosts—because she is mentally ill. She wants Flora, the child she takes care of, to say she is also seeing ghosts. But Flora continues to deny seeing any, even as Kate shakes her by the shoulders and the ceramic doll she is holding drops to the floor.

“I’ll fix her,” Kate says, crying and rushing to pick up the broken pieces of the doll.

There it was. I’ll fix her.

I paused the movie. I had misremembered the line as “I’ll fix it,” but it was Kate I’d been hearing in the hospital. I felt a sense of relief at identifying the voice that had brought me a reassurance that I still wanted to live during those five long days. Knowing that the line came from a character struggling with mental illness made me feel less alone.

During the 1930s, critics and scholars debated whether the governess in James’ story was seeing actual ghosts, or if they were a projection of her madness. If Kate’s psych nurse had asked her whether she was hearing or seeing anyone that no one else could, unlike me, she would have said yes. But one answer doesn’t preclude the other: She can be seeing ghosts and be having difficulty with her mental health.

The fuzziness of that boundary is part of what makes me hold Halloween so dear. Many connect the origins of Halloween to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which is believed to have marked the loosening of the veil between the spirit world and the corporeal one. Being in the psych ward felt like being in this area between worlds. We were ghosts: I knew the rest of the world was there, and many people knew where I was, but we couldn’t communicate with each other. During the 15 minutes of computer time I had each day, rushing onto Instagram felt like using a Ouija board—calling the spirits of friends to me and my spirit to them.

This year, even more than usual, I celebrate the way Halloween honors the space between the two planes of existence—a reality that psych ward patients, and many others, live with daily. Though exploitative haunted houses and other popular culture offerings might suggest otherwise, mental health patients are real people who experience not only illness but also joy and desire.

I think back to the karaoke night we had on the ward. Most participated. Even individuals who didn’t speak or engage with the rest of us because of their psychosis sang. They became present, even if it was just for the few minutes of the song. It feels odd to say we had fun in the psych ward, but we did.

Erasing the stigma around mental illness and psych wards won’t happen all at once. But I’d like to propose a new Halloween tradition to help us on our way: that when we look for the ghosts around us, we pay attention not only to the ghosts’ cries, but to their songs too.