Written by Kiara Korten, in collaboration with the 2026 Mansfield Training School Memorial and Museum Research Team.
There is a strange irony that hangs over the abandoned buildings of the Mansfield Training School (MTS). Today, college students slip through broken windows for a thrill, YouTubers film themselves sprinting down dark hallways, and amateur ghost hunters whisper into its vacant halls hoping for a flicker of the supernatural. But decades ago, the people inside those same buildings weren’t trying to break in—they were trying to break out.
There is a stark contrast in the reality of the Mansfield Training school, and how we remember it. If you spend enough time at UConn, you’ll hear the stories. A friend of a friend who swears that they saw movement in an empty room. A girl whose boyfriend spraypainted his edgy art on the inside walls. A quick search on YouTube reveals just how much the abandoned MTS buildings have become a playground for urban explorers. The titles alone tell the story: “DANGEROUS ABANDONED MANSFIELD TRAINING SCHOOL,” “ASYLUM FROM HELL,” “I went alone into the Mansfield Training school…big mistake”.
Long before MTS became a backdrop for ghost-hunting content, it was a locked institution. And like many institutions of its era, escape attempts were part of its history. Archival records from 1943 show that the standard procedure for runaways included having their hair clipped and being “deprived of all entertainment for a period of three months.” Jim Bracken, a former employee, told us that punishment for runaways also included solitary confinement, a practice widely documented across mid‑century institutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
These punishments weren’t just disciplinary measures. They were tools of control. Hair clipping was a public marker of disobedience, a visible reminder to staff and residents alike of who had “broken the rules.” And solitary confinement, placing someone alone, often in a bare room, was a method of enforcing compliance through isolation, fear, and the removal of social connection.
Punishments like these reveal something deeper about institutional life: that confinement isn’t only about locked doors or fences. It operates on multiple levels.
Physical confinement shapes how people move, where they sleep, what they eat, and whether they can leave. Even more powerful is the internal confinement, learning that resistance leads to punishment, being taught that staff know best, losing the ability to make choices. Over time, institutions don’t just restrict bodies, they reshape minds.
When people break in today, they enter a space stripped of its original context. The peeling paint and empty rooms make it easy to imagine ghosts, but harder to imagine the people who lived there, people whose hair was cut as punishment, who sat alone in confinement, who learned to navigate a world where every aspect of life was regulated. They move through what’s left of the buildings, without knowing the daily realities that once defined them.