Filming - Day 1
- Kate
- Sep 26
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 3
The first time I visited my dad’s childhood home, a defunct mental hospital in the middle of soybean and cornfields I couldn't sleep well for three weeks after, but probably not for the reasons you might think.
“Hey pop, have you ever seen a dead body?” I asked as a kid after watching the movie Stand by Me. He had—as a teenager. A few, in fact.
I had heard stories from my dad about growing up at The Sheboygan County Hospital, where his parents were the superintendents, and he himself had lived alongside the patients for the first eighteen years of his life.
In the summer of 2024, knowing that over the years various cousins etc. had had the opportunity to go on a tour of the now closed Sheboygan County Hospital, I asked my dad if there was any way I could get a tour too. He said he would see if he could arrange it with the current caretaker of the property.
What I didn’t tell him at the time was that the place had already been keeping me awake and demanding my attention. As a filmmaker it had dawned on me that the building that is now dubbed by thrill-seekers as The Asylum must have been a really interesting place to grow up and that while I have the chance, while I am living in Wisconsin, while some people who lived there are still alive, I should learn more and I should share that knowledge. This is a story that had been whispering in my ear asking to be told for years, but it was now somewhat aggressively shoving me around and demanding to be made into a feature film.
The day before our first visit, my husband and creative partner Rob and I learned that we were not going to be getting a private tour, but that a friend and old classmate at cooking school of my fathers, and his wife, as well as my sister, her husband, and my mom would also all be on the tour. We weren’t sure if we should bring our cameras after all. Nobody would really understand what we were trying to accomplish, they had not been briefed and it seemed almost impossible to be able to get footage without people walking through the shot. Also, I had to be in director mode and I didn't want to be a pain in everyones respective asses. But the thing is, we knew that access to the hospital was extremely controlled and difficult to come by, we didn’t know if we would ever have a second chance to go inside. We decided to bring our cameras, mic up my dad, and “run and gun” as we say in the biz.
The reason I couldn’t sleep for three weeks after this visit was not because the place was creepy, or scary, or evil , paranormal or any of the things that have sensationalized the place in recent history, but for other reasons. Really human reasons. After setting foot inside I knew instantly that the place was very REAL, not just “stories” from my dad growing up that I had created mental images of from my imagination; but that so many other people who lived there had stories of their own too. I could feel those whisperings with every step that I took going deeper into the building. I felt overwhelmed by the knowledge that it was impossible to tell everyone’s story, some are gone forever. Also, everything looked different from how I had imagined it. It took my brain a while to reconcile all of this new input. I felt a sense of quiet sadness that made my heart ache for the long-gone patients who had just been abandoned there by their families.
When people say that they feel "creeped out" there, the feeling that they are perhaps experiencing is grief. I suppose that before I went to the hospital, I went with curiosity, but I had not prepared myself for how I might feel or what effect it might have on me. And now I had a point of reference for the acute, complex, and generational traumas that never had a chance to heal both within my own family and the greater hospital family as well. I instantly had intense empathy for my dad and my aunt in all that they endured while still feeling and claiming that they had "wonderful childhoods" at the hospital and they "wouldn't change anything about their upbringing."
It took over a month before I could bring myself to review the footage from the day. It was all too much. The feeling I had was one of being overwhelmed, but also one of being compelled to move forward on a path with a project that was so clearly going be incredibly difficult for a multitude of reasons. Knowing that sometimes you have no choice but to choose the hard thing.
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