All week, people have been telling us that we need to go to "the Glore." That is local speak for The Glore Psychiatric Museum. We've heard several people say "you won't find many towns with their own psychiatric museum," and that is definitely true and this museum was one of a kind.
The museum covers the history of mental health treatment and the history of St. Joseph's Lunatic Asylum No. 2. When it was in operation, it was called St. Joseph's Lunatic Asylum but when it was converted into a museum, it was named after George Glore, a hospital employee who had patients create some of the first exhibits as part of their therapy.
I don't want to say that the museum was insane because that seems cliche but it was out there. It started with a video that covered some of the history of mental health care in America, but to me was notable mainly because they talked about a facility in Worcester, MA and pronounced it "War-chester" (it's Wooster or Woostah if you're really, really hardcore Bostonian). You can actually watch the video online and the offending portion is at the 1:25 mark. We then got to see some of then some of those first exhibits I mentioned and then the morgue. There was a lot of creepy stuff there -- like a display of thousands of metal objects that a patient had swallowed in 1874. We also got to find out about lobotomies and other barbaric and sketchy treatments used back in the day. As Jas said after we left, it wasn't exactly a fun museum but it was an important part of history. Afterwards, people kept asking us if we'd enjoyed ourselves and "enjoyed" definitely wasn't the right word to use.
As I said before, it was definitely one of a kind!
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