spookxi:

spookygaysexandspookyspells:

I won’t go into extensive detail in this post, but I can provide any information should any of you need it.

Residents of Chester county and Delaware County:

I like to take this time of year to remind people of the current atrocity that occurs in our area. 

As a few of you may know, in the last few years Randy Bates and Richard Chakejian opened a horror attraction on a piece of the old Pennhurst State Hospital in Spring City, PA. Randy Bates is also the owner of the Bates Motel attraction in Glenn Mills, PA.

Please, please, please do not support his businesses!

His attraction at Pennhurst markets the place as an asylum loaded with crazed doctors and the criminally insane.

Unfortunately, Pennhurst has it’s own dark history as a place where significant abuse took place. It was not an asylum, by the way, it was a state facility for the mentally handicapped (which back in it’s time encompassed a lot more than it does now, my great great uncle was there merely because he was deaf and no one wanted him).

The patients were subjected to deplorable conditions because of a huge lack of funding, and also suffered significant physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of some of the staff.

When the conditions at Pennhurst were exposed by Bill Baldini’s investigative reporting, the site was eventually closed. This was a monumental piece of history as it caused a chain reaction and closed many state hospitals and changed the way our society deals with the mentally handicapped. We are now a society that tries our best to include them rather than isolate them.

Now, Randy Bates and Richard Chakejian make enormous sums of money off of exploiting these people- who have been through enough as it is. These men are ruthless, you should have seen them the day we took this case to court and tried to prevent the attraction from opening. I’m thoroughly convinced that if Auschwitz was for sale today, Randy Bates would be planning to open a Nazi-themed attraction. He has no regard for the true suffering that took place, and this mockery and exploitation of an already-oppressed group of people is revolting.

I would appreciate any signal boosting.

Have a happy and safe Halloween, but please take this to heart. Thank you for your time.

I am never not outraged about this. Everything from desecrating and exploiting a place where countless tragedies took place for years, to making a Halloween attraction based around “OOOOooooOOOOooo, scary mentally handicapped people!” is disgusting. 

If you’d like to learn a bit more about Pennhurst, which is a dark yet fascinating subject, I really encourage you to watch the original news report, Suffer the Little Children, that exposed the institution for what it was:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG33HvIKOgQ