This abandoned hospital once catered to children and adolescents with developmental disabilities, and became notorious in the public eye for neglect and abuse toward the residents. Newspaper articles detail ex-employees tales of children without soap, clean clothes, sheets and even food; there were claims that some co-workers would beat the patients. They wrote how the foul smell of urine and feces was constantly lingering in the air, and many residents wore diapers and banged their heads against the walls for attention. A report was also published that a deaf woman, admitted in 1930, had been kept inside the hospital for 55 years, being misdiagnosed as "mentally retarded."

Some kids grew up here in large cribs and left to live in private-care homes when the institution closed, and others left from the small morgue to be buried in an unmarked field, which reportedly washes away from a nearby creek occasionally exposing graves. Another question of media sensationalism or the truth... I have yet to see this.

A federal lawsuit was filed in 1978, ordering the institution to improve conditions, and yet another was placed in the late 1980's - a class-action lawsuit involving 74 residents. The hospital finally shut down in 1991, due to "dangerous conditions." Much of the campus is now used as a drug rehab facility, which resembles a prison in many ways (razor wire, marked and unmarked police vehicles, etc).

A memorial plaque outside one of the buildings reads, "While yet I live, Let me not live in vain."

* Note: the name "Fuller State School and Hospital" is a pseudonym; the real name of this location is currently undisclosed.