The Forgotten

There are a lot of people who crack jokes about asylums, including the entirety of the horror movie industry, and how terrible they are. I am no different. Looking back on the first time I saw the clock tower building at the edge of town I distinctly remember saying it looked like an old asylum. Honestly I meant that it would make a good scene for a horror movie, little did I know that I wasn’t far off. It was a behavioral health clinic in its prime. Once I actually moved to Topeka I started taking a more in depth look into the old asylum and its property.

Being right next to The Governor’s Mansion means that even after getting abandoned the grounds have always been well maintained. Additionally there are beautiful hiking trails winding through the woods behind the clinic and the mansion. It was those trails that largely encouraged my intrigue in the history of the property. I would take people there and show them the astounding scenery, plus it was, and is, a great place for walking dogs. On one of many hiking explorations my husband and I met an interesting lady who changed how we saw the trails. It redirected the focus back to the old asylum.

On one of the dog walking expeditions we saw a lady who was gathering different items from the foliage surrounding the trails and putting them in her bag. Our curiosity was peaked, so we asked her what she was doing. In response she opened her bag and showed us some old glass bottles. Apparently some of the glassware from the old clinic had found its way into the woods, collecting in some of the ravines. She told us that she sold the whole bottles to thrift stores and what not for some spare cash. It honestly just made us wonder what could be created out of the old glass whole or not.

It wasn’t long before we decided to make a trip out there specifically with the intent to see what we could find in the brush. There were tons of pieces for various glass fixtures both medically oriented and from table ware, such as plates and glasses. Being crafty and seeing the possibilities for the forgotten pieces, so we decided to gather some of the truly broken and forgotten pieces. The whole time we were gathering materials we couldn’t help but speculate maybe some of the stories behind what we found and wonder how they had come to be abandoned and left to get buried by nature. It was that line of questioning that sparked my research into The Menninger Clinic.

Of course when initiating my research I turned to the computer to find what basics I could dig up. The more I dug into it the more I came to understand that unlike the asylums of horror movies; Menninger’s was actually one that went above and beyond without getting into debatably torturous practices. Several journalists referred to the clinic as a jewel of northeast Kansas. It was a ground breaker in psychiatric care and served to set the standard among mental health facilities. There was a lot of indisputable history about the facility and staff and even when they moved to Texas and sold the property to St. Francis medical, however what I still couldn’t find a reasonable answer for was why so much of the glassware from the building had been piled in the woods to be completely forgotten.

I decided to look further and at the time I worked for a retirement home that happened to house one of the Menninger’s who had at one point been president of the clinic. One day we sat down and talked about what I had learned thus far. He and I did agree that some of the discarding could have been due to vagrants and delinquents but that didn’t explain the sheer volume of discarded materials. When the clinic moved to Texas everything was packed up with them, and what was left was still in great condition when the deal was signed. I gave him one of the bottles that we found and it just made his day because that had been such a big part of his life. Nobody I asked could ever tell me what had happened to make the Menninger legend fall into forgotten history.

Even empty and broken, The Menninger Clinic encourages imagination and storytelling in various facets. The forlorn and abandoned building on the edge of town acts as a landmark, not just for the trails, but for the town itself as it can be seen from multiple directions for miles to come. The woods where the paths intertwine clearly hide an abundance of history and even more untold stories. Over the years the withering of the property leaves much to be rebuilt but we can never forget what was. Surely there are still stories to be found from not just the staff, but the locals who grew up with the clinic as an environmental factor and the patients who stayed there.