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DAVID GARFINKEL |
 This is Chestnut Lodge. You say it doesn't look like an insane asylum? What do you want---folks in strait jackets, hanging out the windows? |
Chestnut Lodge asylum:
A very spooky setting
By DAVID GARFINKEL
for TheColumnists.com
I once had a night job working in a semi-famous mental hospital, Chestnut Lodge, near Washington, D.C. The 1964 movie “Lilith” with Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg was shot on its 20-acre wooded grounds, and the book and 1977 movie “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” were based on a patient’s experience there. Famous people, including Washington Post co-owner and publisher Philip Graham, were also patients from time to time.
My job was switchboard operator. I was trained on an old PBX that required the operator to insert quarter-inch plugs into jacks to answer the phone and connect calls.
The big thrill of the night came when my timing would “accidentally” be off. Normally, a person calling in would hear: “ring-ring-click-static-“Chestnut Lodge.” But when my timing screwed up, they would hear ring-ring-click-static- and a particularly cheerful “…Nut Lodge!”
I worked alone in the reception area and mostly did my homework, as I was in high school at the time.
I never met the doctors and I only saw one patient who, I guess, was allowed to wander through the lobby. She would glare at me but say nothing as she walked slowly by my station and up the stairs behind me. All the while, bent over from the waist at nearly a 90-degree angle.
Chestnut Lodge was a dark and mysterious place. Who knows how much of its atmosphere contributed to the stark, brooding nature of “Lilith”? Critics hated the movie--so much so that director Robert Rossen, Oscar winner for "All the King's Men" in 1949, pulled it from the Venice film festival, put off its release in the UK for two years and never made another movie.
There must have been something in the air that encouraged me to act up with the way I answered the phone. But my pranks were child’s play. Something far more edgy was going on all around me.
Internet rumors abound that the CIA used some of the facilities on the sprawling property as one of its locations to conduct its infamous MK-ULTRA mind-control experiments. CIA doctors reportedly induced people into states of raving insanity, using LSD and other drugs. They wanted to see how much people in unstable states could be swayed.
In one alleged experiment, test subjects were given a “reversible chemical lobotomy” with LAE, an LSD derivative. The idea, apparently, was to induce schizophrenia and depersonalization.
Another story concerns biochemist Frank Olson. He was scheduled to be treated at Chestnut Lodge after the CIA had already experimented with him using LSD. Olson cancelled the visit by checking into a New York hotel and jumping out of a 10th-story window.
One person who lived near the asylum reported: “We used to hear screams...my son calls it ‘Hannibal’s House.’”
I never heard screams myself, but then, I was inside a sturdy brick building and the windows were always closed.
Meanwhile, less than a mile away from Chestnut Lodge lived James W. McCord, Jr., a former CIA operative. A few days after I graduated from high school, he was involved in one of the biggest pranks of all time-the bugging of telephones at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex downtown in Washington.
Because he gave prosecutors information that helped convict other Watergate conspirators, his one-to-five-year prison term was reduced to a mere 69 days.
I never met Mr. McCord but his son Mike
and I were arch-enemies at Richard Montgomery High School. He
was president of the student council; I was a representative
who once introduced a motion suggesting that unless the student
council could come up with a plausible reason for existing, it
should immediately dissolve.
I lost, but I bet I made a few people sweat before the votes
were counted.
Now, in the chilly atmosphere of 2008,
pranks like mine could cause suspension, arrest, or, for all
I know, being spirited away to Guantánamo Bay for questioning.
Students don’t have nearly the latitude to test the boundaries
as we did. Say the wrong word or wear the wrong shirt, get booted
out of school. It’s a shame.
Fortunately, no one got hurt by my pranks--as far as I know--and
more than a few people got a few chuckles. But those days are
long gone. To quote Simon and Garfunkel from the song "Bookends":
“Oh, what a time it was!”
©2007 by David Garfinkel. We recognize the help of staff columnist Michael Johnson in arranging this column. This column first posted on Jan. 7, 2008.
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