Got in on Halloween 2010 after a really long walk on the railroad tracks. Some of the tunnels are caved in and the admissions building has a motion alarm. That is what cut our visit short. We didn't get caught and didn't see any security, but we left anyway. We will be back!!!

As a senior in high school in North Babylon I was enrolled in a program where we worked half a day at Pilgrim. Earned a Certified Nurses Aide Certificate there. We worked in all of the different areas...pharmacy, occupational therapy, recreational therapy, and numerous buildings. I also worked full time the summer after graduation (1967) I was accepted to Nursing School there, but chose to go somewhere else. I don't remember ever seeing abuse of patients, even though it was a very difficult ,sad and depressing job. If I remember correctly it was mandatory to take a certain amount of vacation a year because of that. On occassion there were young patients who were sent there to have medical procedures done and also sometimes the criminally insane. The saddest was the elderly who were placed there by children who did not want to take care of elderly parents with perhaps mildly confused. I never liked going down into the underground tunnels that connected some of the buildings. I saw and learned a lot during that year, but never any abuse. That being said...it was an awful place to be.

I go to school in one of these buildings. The school's called Eastern Suffolk School of Practical Nursing. Tonight the place was esp eerie, foggy and haunting. When I got home I had to go online immediately to research this place. I really didn't think it was this amazing place and story. I sensed something strange about the place from the beginning. A peculiar sense of eeriness. It's definitely spiritual. Thank you for this site.

Neal, My family lived at Pilgrim on "The Circle" from 1948 -55. I am the youngest of three kids with two older brothers. Perhaps we played soccer, red rover, or statues in the Circle together on summer evenings before our mothers called us in for supper. Hide and seek in the "garbage bushes " near the garages was also popular.

I am still in close touch with my "best friend" Susan from Pilgrim. It may have been her TV you remember as I also remember assembling there in the afternoons.

We were probably also together at the bus stop every school morning waiting for the yellow bus to take us to Brentwood public school.

I, too, remember my "state hospital" days very fondly.Pilgrim was the third of the five at which we lived .Although difficult for outsiders to understand, life for the patients who were chronically ill, delusional at times, but not agitated, was a great deal more pleasant, safer, and much less threatening than conditions for the mentally ill are today where prisons, squalid nursing homes, and the streets have replaced the chronic care facilities.

Count me in

This is true art. Great angle.

These pictures are fantastic. Did you have to get special permission to take photos of this?