Cameos

So it seems that while I have a huge engineering project and this wise project to do, I also have been helping bunches of other people with their projects. Most predominately, I'm walking in Lina Lee's fashion show and modeling her outfits, and yesterday was spent training the rest of her modeling how to properly walk on the runway. It fine, I consider it part of my duty as a model to do this, and Lina is my best friend. Besides that, I've helped do makeup for Aidan Bate's film, and helped my freinds Noa Davis and Jelle Shukken film on countless days. It always turned from " Katie can you hold this for a second?" To, " Katie can you get a nice panoramic shot of this?" And me fling for the next three hour block. Plus, Mr.Reiff will probably notice my small cameos in the videos, as serial killers and reporters etc. Pictured below is a fitting for Lina's fashion show. 

My mind is on WISE

Today's agenda contains me evaluating Kathleen and Lauren's presentation, this will be the second out of six presentations I will be attending, and the first I am evaluating out of four. Why does everyone want me to evaluate them? Hopefully seeing all of these presentations will give me better insight into how I should structure mine. Thinking of hosting it at my old house in the old meat locker if my mom permits it. 

Ithaca gun factory

So as I said I've been exploring lots of abandoned places, the old Ithaca gun factory is one of them. Seems to be a popular place for kids to go get stoned. This place has also been where I've been practicing the majority of urban artwork. Unfortunately, not too many actual buildings remain, just one and the smoke stack. It would be interesting to come here at night and take some EVPs. 

Have you found any ghosts?

This question always cracks me up. It seems to be the only thing anyone ever asks me. To be blunt, the answer is no, I have not. I have been relying on the use of my photos and film to try and capture something, as I do not have acess to professional equipment. What is a ghost anyways? What are you people expecting from me? So far this project has been me wandering and photographing abandoned buildings and contemplating the existence of ghosts, and that's basically what I expected. You people you don't even believe in ghosts, why are you badgering me about them. 

Here's a photo of a goose I took. 

Ghost Stories of Willard

Willard is famous for its hauntings, which is easy to believe. The buildings architecture just screams "creepy abandoned place", and its probably one of the most reportedly haunted places in the state of New York. I had the rare opportunity to hear firsthand stories from the staff, things you cannot find on the internet. Most of the people, if not all, who work there are volunteers with a love of history. These people are more skeptics than believers, but they all have their fair share of stories to tell. Most often they involve objects moving, footsteps one the second floors of buildings when no one else is there, and dark shadows moving through rooms. One woman recalls being upstairs in one of the condemned buildings, she had ventured up there without the rest of the staff, probably out of curiosity. All of the sudden, a rocking chair stared moving back and forth. Others then experinced the woman running down the stairs yelling " Who's fucking with me?!?" Nobody has confessed to fucking with her yet. 

Conditions at Willard

While on my tour of the facilities, we were assured that this was a cruelty free hospital, and that this was one of the first psychiatric hospitals to focus on rehabilitation on patients rather than locking them away. I can't seem to agree with this statement. The buildings that we were taken inside of were ones that were actually still in use, meaning they were nice and displayed qualities of psychiatric hospitals today. I on the other hand, was able to climb through the window of a condemned building to get an actual look at what they didn't exactly want us to see. My first post about willard contains my photographs from this experience, and in my next post I will upload the footage I took. What I saw were restraint  chairs, electrodes for electro-shock therapy, and restraint bath tubs for hydro-therapy, in which you were stuck into a boiling hot bathtub and left there. What I saw was actually strikingly similar to season two of American Horror Story: Asylum. My other reason for my disbelief is the Willard cemetery down the street. Over 7,000 Willard patients are buried there, each with only a small piece of metal with a stamped number to signify that they were there. No way to tell who they were or when they died. These patients were probably not even put in caskets. The morgue on campus still reeks of formaldehyde, a smell I'm all too familiar with from my AP biology dissections, and is full of refrigerators for bodies. Just the fact that over 7,000 people died there, over a short period of time, offers proof of the cruel treatment of the facility. Mental patients, even up until the 70s, were treated like animals, and locked away to die out of the eye of the public.

Reflections on Willard

As far as trips to Insane Asylums go, I guess this could be considered ideal. While the immense amount of people there wasn't perfect for investigation, I did get in on a legal basis. I found that most of the tourists were from out of state, and unfortunately rather out of shape. This worked in my favor though, as I was able to walk at a steady pace to the front of the group of about one hundred people, offering me the opportunity to actually talk to the tour guide. He was a volunteer who worked with the historical society, and seemed a bit overwhelmed by the number of people and the chaos they were causing, but was happy that I was asking real questions about the place. First I had to ask about previous investigators that had been there. He told me that in the past, people from the Travel channel had come to investigate, but unfortunately got into some actual records of people staying at the Drug Treatment Center nearby, a violation of HIPPA. Thus, quacks like these people are not ever allowed back, meaning that this would be my only chance to actually be inside these buildings, unless I were to sneak in ( which I wouldn't).