THE DOVER MENTAL CAGE
Sitting on a hilltop alongside Hurd Park in Dover you can see something quite unexpected: A full size iron cage, complete with bunk beds. It appears to be a jail cell of some type with one of its two compartments still locked! The local population seems to have the opinion that this cage was used to keep undesirable patients from the nearby hospital at bay. As one of our readers writes:

“There is a cage that was built to keep the violently insane. It was far enough from the original hospital so the patients couldn’t hear their screams and yells. The cage still stands, no roof, no running water, just roughly an 8’x8’ cage with a steel wall down the center and a bunk that folds up on each side. One door is slightly ajar so you can enter, as long as you don’t have too much around the middle. Trees have grown up through the bars—it is a real eerie sight and a dark mark on the history of mental health.”


A staff member at the hospital wrote this letter to us after reading about the cage in of Weird NJ:

“I've worked at the nearby hospital, St. Clare’s Dover, for about a year, and many of the workers there, including me, didn’t know of this thing until issue #15. I decided to go check it out. Instead of hiking up the hill in Hurd Park, it’s just a short walk through the lobby parking lot from the hospital, behind the daycare. My friend and I were digging around, when we discovered an old rusty butter knife. It appeared to be from the kitchen where we work. We ran back with our discovery to show our co-workers, since everyone thought we were crazy to go check this out on our break. After calming down, we went to go have a smoke in the lounge, and asked a PCU nurse about it. She tried to cover up by telling us it used to hold oxygen tanks for patients. She said they’d put the patients in the cage so they wouldn’t mess with the tanks. I don’t know about all that, but I’m gonna keep asking around to see if I can find the real use. I just don’t want to know why they held the patients in the middle of the woods, and why when they built the parking lot they stopped paving 5 feet before the cage. Maybe there’s some sort of curse.”
- Diane G


In actuality, the Hurd Park cage has nothing at all to do with the nearby hospital, or the mental ill. Dover historian George Laurie told Weird NJ that the cage was originally the first lock-up for the neighboring town of Wharton. When the Wharton Police station was remodeled, the antique jail cell was donated to the Dover Historical Society, and moved to an old mansion which used to stand where Hurd Park is located today. The wooden mansion subsequently burned to the ground, and the only thing left standing was the old iron hoosegow.