He died before it was completed. The site opened in 1911 and was a fully functional hospital, with different places for the men, women and children to live. There were a total of 130 buildings and could hold up to 2000 patients. Each housing unit was no more then two stories and only 70 people lived in each house at a time. There were buildings for dining halls, housing for the staff, and a hospital in addition to a gym, theater, Sunday school, laboratory, fire house, boiler house, laundry rooms, a refrigeration plant, bakery, storehouse, workshops, and administrative offices.
Everyone loved it and the village was praised for it's care of the patients but soon, things went very bad. Rumors started of cruelty, neglect, mistreatment, and malnourished patients. But the most shocking rumor of all was horrific experimentation...and mostly on children. The first superintendent of Letchworth Village, Dr. Charles Little, believed in strict segregation from society and from each other in the village community.
Dr. Little referred to the patients as Morons and idiots. He changed how the housing was supposed to go. Instead of 70 people per building, men together, women together and children together, he divided the patients into 3 groups: Middle aged and Industrious,
Young and Improvable and Infirm and Helpless.
Anyone able bodied was expected to work the fields, care for the animals and feed everyone who lived there. If they couldn't learn the job given to them, they weren't allowed to stay. By the 1950s, there were 4000 more people living there than the village could hold. You can imagine how the patients were treated. Patients were buried in nameless graves deep in the woods around the village. It was finally shut down in 1966.
People have claimed to see ghosts roaming around and hear voices. On the third floor of the medical building, pentagrams and other satanic rituals have been discovered. Screams of children can be heard all through the woods. Here are a few pictures
The man who started it all
