A Place of Healing—or Something Else?
The land that became Manteno State Hospital was just farmland before the state of Illinois stepped in.
In 1927, the 55th Illinois General Assembly authorized a new psychiatric facility, one meant to relieve the overburdened state hospitals in Kankakee, Elgin, and Chicago.
The location—flat, open, and far from the city—seemed ideal. Patients could heal in a peaceful setting, away from the pressures of urban life. That was the plan, at least.
Construction moved fast. By November 1929, the cornerstone of the administration building was set in place, a symbol of what the state called “a new era” in psychiatric care.
One year later, in December 1930, the first group of patients arrived. They came from Kankakee State Hospital, some of them transferred against their will.
The hospital’s early days were quiet, orderly, and hopeful.
The design was different from older asylums—no looming, gothic structure but instead a collection of smaller cottages, each named after famous psychiatrists.
The buildings spread across 1,200 acres gave the place the look of a college campus rather than a mental institution.
The hospital was a town of its own. It had its own police force, fire department, post office, and even a power plant.
Patients worked the hospital’s farm, producing meat, dairy, and vegetables to keep the facility running.
The idea was that labor could be therapeutic, giving patients a sense of routine and purpose.
Some did find structure in the work. Others, already deep in psychosis, were simply put to task, whether they understood why or not.
By 1939, Manteno housed thousands. At its peak in the 1950s, it would hold over 8,000 patients, one of the largest psychiatric institutions in the country.
But that promise of healing? It had already begun to crack.
The War Inside—A Hospital Pushed to the Brink
Manteno State Hospital filled up fast. By the late 1930s, the staff was already struggling to keep up and then came the outbreak.
In the summer of 1939, typhoid fever swept through the hospital. It started with a handful of cases, then dozens. By the time it was contained, over 50 people were dead—patients, nurses, attendants.
The hospital’s water supply was the culprit, contaminated by a leak in the sewer system.
The state called it an accident. The newspapers called it a disaster.
The war years only made things worse. When World War II began, doctors and nurses left to serve overseas, leaving Manteno short-staffed.
The state hired anyone willing to take the job—farmhands, housewives, teenagers fresh out of high school.
Most had no medical training. Patients who needed care got routine instead: bathe, eat, sleep, repeat. Some never left their wards, some never spoke again.
By the 1940s, the hospital was no longer just a place for the mentally ill. Some patients had schizophrenia, some had depression, and some had simply aged out of their families’ care.
Others were veterans, shell-shocked and abandoned. Then there were the experiments.
U.S. Army doctors conducted malaria tests on psychiatric patients—deliberately infecting them with the disease to study fever treatments.
Some recovered. Some didn’t. Official numbers were vague.
In 1954, Manteno reached its peak—8,195 patients, a number far beyond what the hospital was built to handle.
The wards were packed, the halls crowded, and treatment was whatever the staff could manage.
That meant electroshock therapy for some, insulin coma therapy for others, and for the worst cases—lobotomies.
The hospital carried on like this, full but fractured, until the numbers started to drop.
The Decline—When Walls Couldn’t Hold the Secrets Anymore
By the 1960s, Manteno wasn’t growing anymore—it was shrinking. New psychiatric drugs were making it possible to treat patients outside of hospitals, and the state was looking for ways to cut costs.
Thorazine, introduced in the mid-1950s, changed everything. It calmed patients enough to make long-term institutionalization seem unnecessary. The state saw an opportunity.
Deinstitutionalization started as a slow trickle. The ones left behind saw the hospital change.
Wards closed, staff numbers dropped, and the grand self-sustaining village that Manteno once was began to fall apart.
The farm, which had once fed thousands, shut down. The once-full hallways started to empty.
Then came the stories—allegations of abuse, neglect, and violence. Some patients were overmedicated, left in beds for days, barely able to move.
Others suffered in silence. In 1975, the state renamed the institution Manteno Mental Health Center in an attempt to modernize its image.
It didn’t help. By then, mental hospitals across the country were shutting down, and Manteno was next in line.
In 1983, Governor James R. Thompson made it official—the hospital would close.
It took two years, but by December 31, 1985, Manteno was finished. The last patients were transferred out, and the gates locked behind them.
The hospital that had once held thousands stood empty, its future uncertain, its past impossible to forget.
Ghosts of Manteno State Hospital: What Remains of the Hospital Today
The last patient left Manteno State Hospital on December 31, 1985. The doors shut, the staff left, and the buildings stood silent.
But an empty hospital doesn’t stay empty for long. Over the next few years, the property was divided up, sold off, and repurposed.
Some of it became the Illinois Veterans Home at Manteno, which opened in 1986. Another section turned into the Diversatech Industrial Park, drawing in companies looking for cheap space.
The old hospital grounds weren’t wasted—they were repackaged.
Still, parts of Manteno never saw redevelopment. The hospital’s cemetery, a stretch of land to the east, holds hundreds of unmarked graves.
Some headstones bear numbers instead of names. Nobody comes to visit.
The morgue remained abandoned for years, its rusting equipment a reminder of what happened inside.
Morgan Cottage, one of the last remaining buildings, stood until 2015 before it was demolished.
And then there are the stories. People who walk the old roads at night say they hear voices, doors slamming where there are no doors.
The site became a magnet for ghost hunters, drawn in by rumors of spirits lingering in the tunnels beneath the hospital.
Paranormal groups have spent nights in the remaining structures, recording whispers, shadow figures, and sudden drops in temperature.
Some call it an urban legend. Others aren’t so sure.
The redevelopment efforts continued into the 2000s, with new housing and businesses replacing more of the hospital’s footprint.
The golf course, Manteno Municipal, now covers what used to be patient wards.
The land changed, but Manteno never really disappeared. It just faded into something else.
The Patients Who Never Left
Some patients at Manteno got better. They took their medicine, attended therapy, and eventually left to live outside those walls.
Others didn’t. Some never had visitors and never saw the world beyond the grounds again.
When deinstitutionalization swept through the country in the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of long-term patients were released—many with nowhere to go. Manteno was no different.
For years, the hospital held elderly patients who had simply aged out of society, veterans with no family left, and people whose conditions made them unable to care for themselves.
When the hospital shut down, many were transferred to nursing homes, state-run facilities, or back to families who were unprepared for them.
Some were placed in halfway houses. Some disappeared into the streets.
The ones who died at Manteno were buried in the hospital’s cemetery, a field of numbered graves.
No flowers, no names—just numbers. Relatives later claimed some remains, but many were left where they were.
Manteno’s closure was part of a larger movement, a push away from institutional care toward community-based treatment.
Some say it was progress. Others point to the thousands of former patients who were lost in the system, unable to adapt to life outside.
The hospital is gone, but for those who lived there, the past never really left.
