In 1995, the New York State Office of Mental Health closed the Willard Psychiatric Center in a town called Willard in Seneca County in western New York State. During a process of assessing what items in the building could and could not be salvaged, a Willard employee named Bev Courtwright unlocked an attic door and was confronted with an astonishing sight: 400 suitcases containing the possessions of mental patients from decades earlier, suitcases that had been long forgotten.
Information on the suitcases, the objects within and their former owners is scant. The suitcases cover the period 1910-1960. The people who owned these objects were committed to institutional care many, many decades ago, and many of them never set foot outside the hospital for the rest of their lives—some are buried in a nearby cemetery. It is safe to assume that in many cases the patients brought the suitcases with them with some expectation of future use, but then the Center took them away and stored them—in other words, never to be seen again by their owners.
Suitcase of ‘Carrie L.’
A while back the New York State Museum in Albany acquired the suitcases and eventually tasked Jon Crispin with documenting and photographing the suitcases and its contents. So many of these suitcases testify to a life interrupted, presenting a stark boundary dividing an exciting or dramatic life, perhaps lived during the Jazz Age or the Depression, and a far less eventful existence lived under medical care. The suitcases show evidence of familial attachments to children, parents, siblings as well as perfectly normal tastes and predilections that anyone you know might share, but these affections and connections ceased to have the same meaning after the inmates were effectively cut off from regular society.
Some of the suitcases had stuff inside, some did not; all present a fundamental mystery as to the former lives of the inmates, and what caused them to be treated at a facility like Willard.
You can see many, many more of Crispin’s pictures of the Willard Suitcases here.
‘FJL’
‘Anna G.’
‘Carlos S.’
‘Leo R.’
‘Fred T.’
‘Vrginia W.’
‘Helen R.’
‘Josephine L S’
‘Mary P.’
‘Pearl B.’
‘Vrginia W.’