Sunday was the first full day with my new videographer, Jackie Zabel, a Kutztown University student of electronic media. She is an amazing find—incredibly organized, knowledgeable and enthusiastic. Despite the heavy snowfall on Saturday, we ventured down to the Pennhurst site but found it gated and locked. Took some shots and footage of what we could see from Brown Drive. The place looks very different in the blinding white snow—less decrepit and abandoned somehow.

From there, we headed to the Burger King to try to find Diane, a woman who worked at Pennhurst from 1980-84. There we got leads to several other places where we might find former workers and residents. We managed to track one resident down, but he declined to be interviewed. I asked him if that was because it was all bad and he said no, but still refused to talk about it. I looked into his eyes and he looked back at me without wavering. He did not want to talk about it. That was that.

We stopped at several diner-type restaurants in Spring City and Royersford to ask around and put up flyers. There we found one man who worked there from 1954 to 1956 as an aide in "Q" cottage. For him working at Pennhurst was more like just a job. He was fresh out of the military and the job promised free room and board on the premises. His rooms were above the old theater. We gave him a short on-the-street interview but the traffic was so loud I doubt we’ll be able to hear him at all. You could tell from listening to him that he hadn’t let the place influence him or bring him down. He agreed to a longer interview next weekend.

I put in phone calls (all went to voice mail) to all the people I'd been referred to. None returned the calls. Now is when it gets complicated. Now is when all the hackles rise up and the doors get quietly shut in your face. Even in 2010 it is still something to be hidden, to keep silent about, to keep in a locked closet. Witnesses will venture out from their shells for a few inches, then think better of it and scuttle right back into hiding. This is not a pretty subject—this is controversy, served up raw and bleeding.

Bill Baldini called Pennhurst "a hangover from the sixteenth century"—have we really progressed beyond? Should I take a survey to see if nice folks today would like a group home made up of the “intellectually challenged” to be built in their neighborhood? Would the mores have changed? Think you know the answer? E-mail me—I'd like to know.

No matter where you are about Pennhurst, it had to be excruciatingly stressful to be confined to live there. There are scars; there is PTSD—how could there not be? Imagine the noise—the screams, the moans, the shouting. Imagine the smell—feces, urine, bleach and over-steamed vegetables. Imagine the fear. I have to keep coming back to Roland Johnson’s prophetically insightful words:

“It sounded like vibrations: crazy people was going out of their heads, out of their wits. 

It just sound like people that needed to belong there... it sounded like -- fear; that something’s not right.

It was just scary -- a frightened, scary place.” 

Quoted from "Lost in a Desert World" by Roland Johnson as told to Karl Williams.