For those of you who know me, you know I’m a lover of ghosts and ghost stories.  I have read ghost stories since I was a kid, gone on ghost tours and watch tons of paranormal shows on the Travel Channel.  It’s a thing.  So the other day, I switched it on and the ghost hunters were in a place called Pennhurst Asylum, formerly the Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Spring City Pennsylvania.

The stories of what happened at Pennhurst are horrific, adults and children suffering from physical and mental issues basically being thrown away, abused and allowed to die during their time at the asylum.  As I watched, I kept thinking that the name sounded strangely familiar.  Surely it was because some other ghosthunters had done a show about it.  And then it hit me.  

In 1946, a 21 year old man named Elmer married a 20 year old woman named Margaret in Philadelphia.  In December of that year a child was born – Thomas Elmer.  What should have been a joyous childhood was anything but.  Diagnosed with a mental deficiency (epilepsy), little Thomas passed away in March of 1955 at the age of 8.  The death certificate lists his cause of death as cardiac decomposition due to prolonged diarrhea, at Pennhurst Asylum, where he had been for several years due to his “mental deficiency”.  Within four years, Elmer and Margaret divorced, Elmer remarried a woman named Barbara and I was born.  Thomas was my half brother.

When I realized where I had heard about Pennhurst, as I heard the stories and saw the old buildings, I cried.  It’s all fun and games when you’re listening to stories about other people, you feel sorry for those who suffered so terribly, but when it’s your little half brother it shakes your world a little.  I didn’t know of him most of my life – my dad never spoke of him to me during his lifetime.  I saw a picture of him once when I was a kid and my mother explained who he was, but I’m not sure I understood.  I didn’t put it together that my dad had been married before and it wasn’t until I was about 40, when my mom wanted to join the Catholic church and my dad had to get his first marriage annulled in order for her to do it that I learned of Margaret.  It wasn’t until mom died almost eight years ago that I found the papers with the cost of Thomas’ burial that I finally put things together.

Ancestry has helped fill in the blanks which is where I saw Pennhurst.  The original name of the place where Thomas died was the Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic.  It opened in 1908 and was almost immediately overcrowded.  For the next 79 years it was surrounded in controversy, a five part news report exposing the conditions in 1968 and a lawsuit that took nearly 10 years to close the place in 1987.  It is a place for ghost hunters today having been named the #1 Haunted Attraction in America.  It makes me wonder about Thomas.

It also makes me wonder about a young Elmer and Margaret, just kids themselves, having a child with health problems so difficult that they were directed to send him to this place.  He did not survive and neither did their marriage.  It’s no wonder it was never discussed.  I can’t even imagine.  However, when I think about it some more, had Thomas survived, had Elmer and Margaret’s marriage survived, I would not be here.  There’s a strange sort of guilt as I wonder why this child had to die so young, so horribly and why I was allowed to exist.  A question for God at some point.  It does make me think that I complain way too often and that perhaps I should be doing more with my life.  It tells me that everyone experiences hardships that we don’t have a clue about and that I should be more patient.  So many great lessons from a brother I never met who is no longer here.  Thank you, brother Thomas.