Forty miles south of the Loop, in the small town of Manteno, sit the remnants of one of the largest state mental facilities in the nation. Most of the redbrick cottages are crumbling, their windows blocked with plywood, and the sprawling hospital wards are surrounded by weeds. The large front windows of the Singer Building, which once housed the pharmacy and other medical services, were smashed long ago. All that’s left of the three-story power station is a pile of bricks topped by a huge yellow crane.
Bland is quick to say the 1,200-acre Manteno campus is full of mysteries she hasn’t solved. Walking through a wide overgrown courtyard, she points to a building that has graffiti across its brickwork. “I can’t figure out why this building was named Hannah,” she says. “Who the hell was Hannah? Why was it named Hannah? There’s nothing I can find that can tell me why.”
Soon Bland was the main organizer of a loosely knit group of around 20, most of whom were professionals in their late 20s and early 30s–teachers, attorneys, real estate agents, photographers, writers. She set up a central Web site for them. “They would send me their stories and pictures, and I would publish them and all that,” she says. “I organized the meetings that were on the second Sunday of every month, and we would get together and talk about, OK, where do you want to go? OK, where have you been?”
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CUE got national media coverage, the CTA threatened to sue, and members were interrogated by the FBI. That set off infighting. One person close to the group who refused to give his name describes Bland as a “mediawhore” who ruined the urban exploration scene by popularizing it through her Web site and by focusing “on flashy artwork and bandwidth hungry flash introductions rather than substance.” A year later CUE members got into an angry debate on their Web forum with local members of 2600, an international computer hacker group Konopka was associated with. Bland deleted many of the postings she felt were over-the-top. A week later the CUE Web files were infiltrated. The site was covered with pornographic photos and words, more than $23,000 was charged to her server account, and obscene e-mails were sent out from her address to everyone in her address book, including her mother. Bland shut down the Web site, and CUE more or less disbanded.
Bland wants to conjure up the people who once filled Manteno, though that’s often difficult because patient records are confidential, sealed by the state. “Superintendents were considered kings when they ran these hospitals–they called the superintendents’ wives the first ladies,” she says. “They had tea parties, and the patients thought it a privilege to get to work at the tea parties. It’s all really bizarre and fascinating–and it doesn’t exist anymore. I realize there’s a lot of bad with the electroshock therapy and misdiagnosis, but I almost have this romantic view that it was like a castle and a kingdom. I don’t believe in ghosts at all–and ghost freaks bug the hell out of me–but if to see a ghost is just to feel a sense of history, then anyplace I’ve explored I’ve felt that. You can imagine the people walking around and working, just doing daily-life stuff in that environment. And now it’s totally abandoned.”
Bland seems to like jobs where she can be like wallpaper, yet she clearly also wants to connect with people, help them, even lead them in some larger project. These contradictory impulses often seem to have led her to take jobs that soon bore her, but they seem perfect for the Manteno Project–she can help people with their inquiries and still remain relatively anonymous and unburdened by responsibility.
