“Glore, Golem and Ushpizin” or My date with Troy

We’ve been going stir-crazy lately. The weather, our limited finance, the constant chaos that is teenage boys has left little time for “date nights”. But Saturday all the stars aligned and Troy and I found ourselves headed to St. Joseph Mo, with time on our hands and 50.00 in our pockets.

We hit a small snag as we drove up and down Fredrick looking for this famous Maid Rite we’d heard so much about. Finally we gave up and stopped at a small red and white restaurant called Crumbly Burger. Turns out Maid-Rite closed in September and is now Crumbly Burger. I wasn’t really that impressed. I’ve never had a loose meat sandwich and I thought it would be like a sloppy joe, but this was a rather dry sandwich of tasteless ground beef on a bun. The place itself was quaint and reminiscent of a 50’s diner. It was also packed so I guess the locals think it’s the bee’s knees.

Then we headed to the Glore Psychiatric Museum. We had heard about it for years but this was our first visit. From the moment we drove in, we knew we’d found a treasure. The State Hospital which used to be called State Lunatic Asylum #2 but has since been turned into a prison. Driving past the high security fences topped with barbed wire you park with a view of the prison to your right and the museums to the left.

There are three museums housed in this building, A Native American museum, A Black Archive Museum and the Glore. (All for five bucks!) While I found the first two more interesting than I would have thought, we were there for the Glore.

It was such a surreal place. The building itself was extremely institutional as it is in the original the building that had once been used as the admitting ward and the clinic for hospital patients. Apparently George Glore himself used to give self guided tours until the 90’s.

It was eerily quiet and the heels on my boots echoed throughout the empty halls as we made our way from one disturbing exhibit to the next. Strange mannequins dressed in vintage polyester were strapped to the therapeutic (torture) devices that were at one time used in the hospital. There were displays of fascinating artwork from schizophrenic patients. A display of the some of the 1,446 non-food items that a female patient swallowed (she died during surgery) and an array of medical devices that would make even the most die hard horror fans squirm, because unlike the Hollywood gore that we’ve become accustomed to, this was real.

The last stop at the museum is the still functioning morgue. When patients were left at the hospital, there families were told to send clothes for them to be buried in because most would never leave. Due to the shame of mental illness, most of these patients were left and forgotten and died alone. I was told that my Great-grandfather died in a sanitarium, but that’s all I know. I stood in the quiet room looking at the cold metal slabs and wondered if he was ever in this room laying in one of those refrigerated boxes. If not this hospital it was probably one like it. The gloom of dehumanization hangs thick here.

After buying a couple postcards and two cherry mashes (total of 80 cents) we left the Glore behind and started on our way back home.

With $40 still burning a hole in our pocket we took a side trip to Gladstone to shop the D.A.V and Goodwill. We came away with a pretty good collection of Blue Ridge Pottery, some black motorcycle boots and two new CD’s. SCORE!

We listened to one of our new treasures ,Golem, a Klezmer Punk band, which kept the insanity theme alive on our drive home and made a quick stop by Sam’s Club for beer and frozen White Castle burger (Like I said, insanity was the name of our date and no, we weren’t smoking anything)

We got home around 7pm and found a new Netflix movie in our pile of mail. Ushpizin an Israeli film that threw us into a culture and religion we had never had much exposure to and enjoyed immensely.

The evening ended sitting in the dark relaxing to our 2^nd Goodwill purchase, Giant Squid. Drinking our beer and listening to 20 minutes doom metal songs in our PJ’s. Sweet dreams of bleeding leech jars and the mystical Golem dancing the hora in our heads. My dates with Troy are never boring.