About the Author - Megan Bland Todd Cottage "Day Room", October 6, 2003 Photograph Courtesy Rob Johnson I was born on August 10, 1968 and brought up in the once, small town of Greenwood, Indiana, located approximately 12 miles south of Indianapolis. I graduated Greenwood Community High School in 1987 and attended Indiana University’s Herron School of Art from 1987 to 1991 where I studied art history, fine arts and majored in painting. In 1991, I grew restless and bored with my studies, so I packed up my VW van, and fled the “bible belt” only to drift for many years, throughout the southwestern United States. I stayed a few months in Ft. Collins, Colorado, then Los Alamos, New Mexico. I lived in my van for about a year, wandering about New Mexico and eventually settling for an adobe apartment in Santa Fe where I stayed for about 2 years. After being visually starved by the desert, I moved to Denver in 1994 but by the new millennia the prairies and mountains had lost all their appeal so I moved to Chicago, Illinois. After a very busy 3 years, I became burnt out with living in the big city and moved again. I have come "full circle" and now reside in my peaceful, quiet hometown. I have also limitedly traveled abroad to England and most favorably, France. My past is riddled with an odd assortment of occupations, including, but not limited to the areas of graphic design, accounting, gravestone design, carpentry, modeling, fine arts, food service, carriage driving, medical library, inventory control, database administration, sales and construction. Although seemingly chaotic, it has been a zealous adventure of delicious perplexities, each of which I have gained knowledge or learned my lessons from. I am not a professional or really an intellectual, but I spend my time learning from others, investigating, researching and reading. I do not have the credentials of a psychologist, psychiatrist, sociologist, anthropologist or historian, thus I do not feel that I can write about Manteno State Hospital from any authoritative point of view. I am only one person who passionately writes, as a human transfixed with telling a story that I feel is an important part of human history and which ultimately runs the risk of being lost forever. Why, Manteno State Hospital? I will tell you the poetic story of how I came to Manteno State Hospital one cold February day and how her crumbling walls pleadingly whispered to me to save her and to tell her story to those who would listen. I failed her in one aspect, but I vowed not to fail her in the other. I became obsessed with MSH because I have read the story of her birth, though never yet solving the mystery of her conception. I have been on her grounds and walked within her still and silenced halls. I have been within her wards and looked out through her shattered eyes. I have envisioned the long lost struggles of everyday life within her and the microcosm of human existence. I have trekked a mile in her damp dark tunnels and I have seen pieces of her that sadly, no longer remain. I have read the stories of life and death, and the changes over her years. I have watched her crumble beneath the overwhelming power of callous machines, which like bacteria, chew at her flesh until there is nothing left but rubble. I have mourned her remains, but never quite gotten over her somber and haunting beauty…and I continue to watch her pine away. I ask you, does she not have a story worth telling?