Glass Portrait + USB Cemetery
On the USB Cemetery:
Echoes:
The Danvers State Hospital was meant to be a place of hope, but its history, the lives of those who lived and died there marked it as a site that would be eternally haunted by its past. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House Of The Seven Gables, the way in which a house becomes haunted is through the injustices suffered by those who lived there. To be free of these hauntings, we must destroy our ancestral homes and start anew. Architecture represents the past, and places physical or digital are only haunted because people were there, are gone, and they remain.
The Danvers State Hospital, or what remains of it, is a testament to the opposite being true. An apartment complex now sits on the grounds where the hospital once stood. All that remains is the brick facade of one of its buildings, and the two cemeteries where patients who died and remained unclaimed or had no one to claim them are buried.
Aaron Mahnke mentions these cemeteries in his book and podcast, Lore. He describes what the main cemetery looks like better than I ever could.
“There are no tall tombstones, though. Instead each grave is marked by a small square stone with a number engraved on it.
And there are hundreds of them.
Anyone looking for the cemetery will know they’ve found it when they see a large boulder that marks the entrance. It was placed there in the recent past to explain why all those small square stones are there.
But it’s the message engraved on it, and not the grave markers themselves that communicates everything we need to know.
It simply reads, ‘The Echoes They Left Behind’.”
These people, forgotten in life by those they relied on were denied everything but a number and a small plot of earth in death. For a time they were forgotten by all. Died their second deaths possibly even before they died their first.
The cemeteries were overgrown and forgotten until a woman, Pat Deegan, came across them on a walk. She and many volunteers, a number of whom were once patients alongside the deceased, dedicated themselves to finding the names of those buried there.
By 2002 the group discovered more than 3/4ths of the names of those buried there. Their names are listed on a plaque at the entrance of the main cemetery. If it could be determined where an individual was buried, they were given a grave marker with their name on it. These people claimed those in this cemetery as family, and loved them when no one else did, or had since their passing.
Deegan managed to find a former staff member who had a photocopy of a burial record with roughly 150 names on it. The burial record of those buried from 1878 - 1929 had been permanently lost
Not all of the patients could be identified due to the hospital’s records being lost by the state.
But 626 individuals were identified and resurrected from their second deaths.
They say ‘manuscripts don’t burn online.’ Not so much offline.
Each USB tombstone represents a fragment of data on the internet left behind by an individual as they moved on. Anonymous, like numbered grave markers in a cemetery temporarily forgotten until someone stumbles across them once more.
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Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers — and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.
Frederick Douglass, "Pictures and Progress (1864-65)"
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