a massive red and maroon presence in

the fading light, the blue sockets of its turret

windows catching a flicker of reflected sun.

Gothic arches were etched repeatedly,

and in retrospect, it seems compulsively,

into the warp and woof of thebuilding's design.

I could imagine a sound --a bizarre musical tone--

emanating from the strange nineteenth-century asylum.

I first encountered Danvers State Hospital on a hot and sultry evening in the summer of 1986. As a part of my job as residential counselor in a Haverhill, Massachusetts, group home, I was driving a van, returning a resident who had been out on a pass. The sun had not yet set, and the main hospital building, which had been shut down for four years, cast its dark shadow across the curving brick driveways and the burned-grass campus.

My obsession with "the Castle" began that evening in 1986. I had been an innocent drawn up the hill to be confronted with the terrible beauty that lay waiting at the top, and now I had entered another world, a world purposefully separated from the community below. Since that first encounter, I have tramped the grounds, drawn Danvers's buildings from every angle, explored its labyrinthian depths, pored over its records, and interviewed former employees and patients.

I have never worked at Danvers nor been a patient there. I was raised some three hundred miles away in Connecticut and have not had any family or close friends hospitalized there. Yet, the Castle is far and away the most influential building in my life. The words from the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, come to mind from his classic, "The Masque of the Red Death": "And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock" (Poe 1975, 271). The building at Danvers is a constant reminder of "the striking of the clock." My imagination has fed on the texture and pattern of Danvers--its time-stained brick, rusted mesh screens, decaying vents and turrets, and its tar-stained roofs with their green copper valleys, their elaborately designed brick eaves. Its distinctive architecture, now far along the road of decay, marks "the Castle" as a special place--almost a perverted holy place.