Artist dwells in shadows of dark history

Artist Michael Ramseur's large pastels of Danvers State Hospital are on display at Mingo Gallery in Beverly. (Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff)

Gothic peaks and soaring facades loom over the viewer. Bare trees thrash in the wind. The building itself seems to be alive and threatening.

The pictures emit a distinctly spooky vibe. But artist Michael Ramseur will be the first to tell you that the real story of Danvers State Hospital is more complicated and emotional than his pictures can contain. It has obsessed him for more than two decades.

"I think with this whole project there's a great sense of loss, too, because institutions such as Danvers were created with a grandiose vision, a humanitarian vision," said Ramseur, a social worker. That enlightened approach was abandoned over the decades, at great cost to the patients. "Homage must be paid. There was a great deal of suffering that went on there."

A dozen or so of Ramseur's large pastels of the hospital are on display at Mingo Gallery in Beverly. His obsession also includes three books, a website (ramseursdanversstatehosp.com), and years of exploration and research. He's working on a screenplay.

The giant Kirkbride building at the center of the Hathorne Hill campus has been a landmark for more than a century, looming over Route 1 and Interstate 95. Designed by architect Nathaniel Bradlee, it was built in the 1870s following a plan by psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride to improve the lives of those who were mentally ill, within a healthy community setting.

By the middle of the 20th century, though, the hospital had become a symbol of under-budgeting, overcrowding, and mistreatment of patients. Parents driving past are said to have threatened their misbehaving children with a trip to "the witches' castle," a nickname perhaps started because Salem witch trials judge John Hathorne lived on the hill in the 1600s. (The trials took place in Salem Village, actually present-day Danvers.)

Changing mental health policies beginning in the 1960s - notably deinstitutionalization - led to a gradual shutdown. By the time the final patients were transferred out in 1992, the vast complex was derelict, beloved only by urban explorers and preservationists. A horror movie, "Session 9," was filmed there, referencing its dark past. Now a condominium and apartment complex rules the hilltop and its panoramic views, and only the facades of part of the main building remain.

Ramseur, 61, works at Seven Hills Behavioral Health in Chelmsford. His interest in the facility began in 1986, when he worked at a Haverhill group home. The Kirkbride building closed in 1982, but other buildings were still open when he drove a patient from Haverhill to Danvers one late summer day at sunset.

"I think it was a semi-psychotic experience the first time I went up there. I heard this strange musical tone," he said. After dropping off his passenger, "I was sitting there in the van looking up at the castle, and a patient appeared at the passenger window and asked, 'I'm not going to die, am I?' "

The poor soul repeated the question over and over until Ramseur told him no, he wasn't going to die, and the man wandered off. But that strange scene, the sunset reflecting red in the hospital windows, and the patient appearing at the van have haunted him since.

Ramseur said the pictures must also reflect his unhappy teenage years at a Pennsylvania boarding school, also atop a hill.

On his 50th birthday, he hired a plane and flew over Hathorne Hill, leading to bleak pastels of the hospital from above, with snow in the air.

John Archer went to nearby St. John's Prep and remembers going up the hill with the school's glee club to sing for patients. Later, living in the town of Danvers, he met Ramseur while fighting to preserve the Kirkbride building. Like Ramseur, he is no fan of the new development, even with its preserved facades.

"It was one of the most beautiful buildings in Massachusetts, and probably in the country," he said, driving around the hilltop on a windy October afternoon.

Ramseur captures that past, good and bad, in his pastels, Archer said: "There's a wonderful mystery to them. First of all, they're beautiful. He's created his own sort of place. He captured the feeling of what went on at Danvers."

Archer is building an addition to his home that includes a cupola and other pieces salvaged during the demolition. He also has two of Ramseur's paintings hanging in the office of his Beverly insurance agency.

One former hospital official admires Ramseur's work to the point that he penned a foreword for Ramseur's 2005 book, "The Eye of Danvers: A History of Danvers State Hospital."

"I was impressed mostly I think by the spirit of his drawings," said psychologist Steve Nisenbaum, the last clinical director at the facility, serving from 1986 to 1992. Nisenbaum now works at Tewksbury Hospital, where the last Danvers patients were transferred.

"There's a certain darkness to that whole period of treatment history. . . . [Ramseur's art] captures the sense of isolation of the individual and the way in which the human spirit was in a sense held captive in those kind of conditions," Nisenbaum said. "It's a very dramatic presentation . . . not entirely admiring of the beautiful building, but also [showing] the quality that the place took on, a kind of surreal and extraordinarily exploitative function, which I guess society assigned to it for many years. The good intentions only lasted so long."

Ramseur's pictures are on display at the Mingo Gallery, 284 Cabot St., Beverly, through Nov. 22. Call 978-927-5964.