09/19/2025
The Fernald School site is not the only place in America where a place of major human rights abuses is having its true history whitewashed in lieu of a true reckoning with its meaning. This month's Believer Magazine profile's Pennsylvania's equivalent of the Fernald School--Pennhurst--which is currently used by a private company that hosts a multi-million dollar haunted asylum spectacle in buildings where thousands of disabled people were locked away, tortured, and killed. It also is the site of America's only disability history museum, which no longer stays open when the haunted asylum tours are going because the visitors were stealing artifacts and pi***ng on the floor.
Here's part of the text (link in comments):
Dennis Downey, a former board member of the PMPA and a professor emeritus of history at Millersville University, disagrees with Stenberg’s, Autumn’s, and the other haunters’ claims that this attraction can really be a site of reclamation. “Frankly, it’s a commercial operation and makes several million dollars,” he said. “Those funds do not go to the survivors, many of whom are still around.” None of the three owners openly identify as disabled. (Strine refused to share the attraction’s current profits but said that it was profitable. In the 2024 season, haunters made fourteen dollars an hour.)
There is no outward-facing presentation or marketing by the company that emphasizes Pennhurst’s history or its disabled staff. There is nothing online recommending that disabled people apply for positions. Nothing even about the accessibility of the attraction. Which, during my visit, required squeezing through tight corridors and climbing up and down multiple flights of stairs in near total darkness.
Alex Green, a lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School and a disability rights advocate, believes that Pennhurst is using the fact that it hires disabled people to “cover the parts of what they’re doing that are really reprehensible,” he said, adding, “If this were really empowering disabled people, [the horror tours] would not play on so many of the most egregious tropes that have historically led to violence against [them]. Let’s not conflate the money with the values.”
To Green, the arguments made by the haunters with disabilities and Stenberg felt reminiscent of those made by showmen, carnies, and performers about the benefits of freak shows for the “freaks” themselves. These shows, which operated from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, displayed people with physical ailments to be gawked at in traveling exhibitions or in museums. Due to the proliferation of unsightly beggar ordinances, today often known as “ugly laws,” which made it illegal for people with a visible disability to be seen in public, these shows became one of the only consistent sources of employment for those with physical disabilities. While now seen as deeply exploitative, the shows were often vehemently defended by the performers themselves. Harvey Boswell, a freak show operator and paraplegic, wrote in the 1950s, “I’m stared at but it doesn’t bother me. Nor does it bother the freaks when they are stared at on their way to the bank to deposit… $100, $150, $200, and even $500 per week.”
Green also stressed to me that the haunters who are reclaiming this space are unlikely to have experienced institutionalization and harm at Pennhurst when it was operating as a state school. Many of Pennhurst’s inmates were nonverbal, had limited to no mobility, and/or required constant care. These disabilities would preclude their working at the attraction, which requires haunters to complete eight-hour-long shifts on their feet in non-accessible and dust-filled hallways. Green believes that a thoughtful memorialization of Pennhurst’s history would take into account the perspectives of people with a range of intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities—but especially those who have historically borne the brunt of the violence of state schools such as Pennhurst.
