By James Donahue

A recent story in a Salem newspaper about a vacant and very haunted brick Victorian castle on a hill near Danvers, Mass. caught my eye.

It seems there is a battle between local historians and artists who want to preserve this classic landmark and a developer that wants to tear it down so the land can be used for something more profitable.

Of special interest was the fact that this massive five-story structure with its peaking towers presents an eerie gothic appearance complete with real-life stories of haunting and negative energies that curl the hairs of anyone that dares to walk its halls.

And small wonder. Not only was this building once used as a medical hospital, it also was, for years, a state-run mental institution. There are alleged stories of tortures, beatings and screams in the night during the years in which it operated.

All of this reminds me of a Scottish gentleman I once met in a small Michigan town during my years as a newspaper reporter.

This man drew me to his home for many a fascinating night because he was, for want of a better word, a sensitive. That is, he sensed energies, had visions of future and past events, and appeared to have been possessed by one of the 72 Goetia spirits.

I personally believe the demon in him was Dantalion, the spirit of heads and knowledge, due to the way in which it appeared to have taken over and manipulated the man’s life. He was an uneducated man with a head filled with volumes of information, much of it seemingly useless but extremely detailed.

The man said the entity asked him to write a book about the earth. When he tried to explain that he was a mechanic who worked on heavy construction equipment and knew nothing about the world, he was suddenly entered by what he thought were thousands of heads. After that he was filled with knowledge and possessed an awareness to the world about him that surpassed that of most average people.

I tell about this man because of a story he told that links with the Danvers hospital ghost story.

He said he had visions and sometimes hated to leave his home after the demon entered him.

One problem he had was that his daily route to work took him past a large county hospital. He said that just getting near this facility brought terrible visions of people screaming in pain and writhing in agony. He thought they were ghostly images of people that died there, but was never sure.

Consequently, he said he took a long route to work that directed him far away from the hospital so that he did not have to have these disturbing visions.

For those of us that have spent any amount of time in a hospital, we understand that they are not pleasant places. People indeed go there to die. And doctors, who are committed by law to preserving life now rather than comforting the patient, find themselves using modern techniques to keep dying people alive much longer than they should have to.

Consequently hospitals have become terrible places of pain and suffering. Some patients are left hanging in limbo, unable to speak or protest, but their brains still alert and functioning and nerve endings screaming, as machines pump blood, oxygen and bodily fluids into them.

They might remain in this state of horror for weeks if not months before they are reach the blissful state of death.

This is why old hospitals are haunted places. For many who died there, the recorded memory of what happened to them is replayed again and again for years.