Fernald is a plainly terrifying place--the abandoned buildings are still there, and you can visit them[0]. It's a separate, isolated city from the rest of Walth

Fernald is a plainly terrifying place--the abandoned buildings are still there, and you can visit them[0]. It's a separate, isolated city from the rest of Waltham--on a map, you can see the 186 acres with no other exits other than the main one [1]. It actually operated until 2014 due to a court-order that the remaining residents (now adults) get top-of-the-line care for the rest of their lives, due to past abuses; this cost over $1M per patient per year, mostly since the whole "city" isn't connected to the grid, and has to run its own power plant. It's a chilling place full of wild animals--you can barely tell where the roads used to be--and surrounded by several layers of fencing topped with barbed wire. The state maintains a huge number of archives relating to Fernald; you can view most of them, including almost every annual report, on the Massachusetts archives website[2]. This whole area of Waltham is truly haunted--just across the street, there's a forest cemetery with 298 unmarked graves, shared between Fernald and the abandoned Metropolitan State Hospital. A high school project recently dug through the records and figured out who most of the buried patients are[3]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDYkDiNeS8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDYkDiNeS8s [1]: https://goo.gl/maps/H6HGkDwhHEDaKFVf8 https://goo.gl/maps/H6HGkDwhHEDaKFVf8 [2]: https://archives.lib.state.ma.us/handle/2452/214027 https://archives.lib.state.ma.us/handle/2452/214027 [3]: https://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2018/12/11/metfern-cemetery-fernald-metropolitan-state-hospital https://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2018/12/11/metfern-cemetery...