In the fall of 1887, 23-year-old American journalist Nellie Bly spent several months trying to get a job at one of New York City's major newspapers. She was no newcomer to journalism: before moving to New York, Bly had written for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, gone undercover in a factory to report on working conditions for women, and spent several months in Mexico as a correspondent. Serious reporting and investigative work, however, remained largely a male domain, while women in newsrooms were far more likely to be assigned stories about fashion, family, and society life.
Bly eventually managed to secure a meeting with John Cockerill, managing editor of the New York World. Instead of a conventional interview, he offered her something closer to a trial assignment: pose as a patient, get herself committed to the women's insane asylum on Blackwell's Island, and report on the institution from the inside.
The asylum had long had a grim reputation. New York newspapers had reported on overcrowding in public institutions and the mistreatment of patients, but from the outside it was difficult to know what was actually happening behind closed doors. Bly could have interviewed administrators, doctors, or former patients, but she did not think that would be enough. Nothing, after all, could replace firsthand experience.
Bly later recalled that the editors had not asked her to manufacture a sensation; she was simply supposed to give an honest account of how the asylum operated and how the women inside were treated. She nevertheless made the decision to become a patient at Blackwell's Island herself. One question remained: how exactly was the newspaper planning to get her back out?
Cockerill promised that they would find a way, even if freeing her required revealing her real identity. Everything else was up to Bly, including convincing the police, a judge, and several doctors that she genuinely needed to be committed to an insane asylum.
How to Convince Doctors You Have Gone Insane
Before beginning the investigation, Bly practiced in front of a mirror, trying to give her face a vacant or half-mad expression. She later rented a room under the name Nellie Brown at a cheap boardinghouse for women on Second Avenue and began behaving strangely from the very first evening: she refused to go to bed, claimed she could not remember her past, stared suspiciously at the other women, and said she was afraid of them. The frightened landlady called the police, and by the following morning Bly was standing before a judge.
The judge concluded that she was probably a lost young woman from a respectable family and called in reporters in the hope that newspaper coverage might help locate her relatives. The papers began writing about the mysterious young woman, unaware that one of their competitors knew perfectly well who she was. Bly was then sent to Bellevue Hospital, where doctors declared her mentally ill and ordered her transferred to the asylum on Blackwell's Island.
Getting there proved easier than Bly had expected. She passed through the police, the court, and several medical examinations, yet no one seriously questioned whether she was mentally ill. A few days later, she was placed on a ferry with other women. When Bly asked the attendant where they were going, he told her Blackwell's Island-a place, he said, she would never leave. Before long, the asylum doors really did close behind her.
Once inside, she no longer needed to pretend. Bly spoke calmly with the doctors, answered their questions rationally, and behaved as she normally did. Her diagnosis did not change. She later wrote that the more normally she tried to behave, the worse it seemed to affect the doctors' opinion of her. Pretending to be mentally ill had turned out to be relatively easy; convincing doctors that she was sane after they had already decided otherwise was much harder.
Cold Water, Spoiled Food, and Complaints No One Believed
For the next ten days, Bly lived under the same rules as the other patients. In her account, she described women being washed in icy water and scrubbed roughly, while the same small number of towels were used by dozens of patients. The rooms were cold, the clothing provided little warmth, and many of the women were constantly freezing. The food was no better. Bly remembered hard dark bread, rancid butter, watery gruel, and meat of questionable quality. Many patients remained hungry, yet complaints were often met with punishment or hostility from staff.
For much of the day, the women were forced to sit on benches for hours without moving or speaking. Bly watched staff insult patients and use physical force against women who argued with nurses or broke institutional rules. She also described nurses deliberately taunting one young patient until she began to cry, then striking her in the face and head and choking her. Several hours later, the woman returned to the common room, and according to Bly, finger marks remained visible on her neck for the rest of the day. On another occasion, Bly saw an elderly woman seized by the hair and dragged from the room; she heard the woman screaming and later reported the incident to doctors, but nothing happened.
Bly learned what happened in the wards for more severely ill patients from the women themselves. One told her that she had been beaten, tied up, and held under cold water until she lost consciousness; Bly separately noted visible injuries and areas where the woman's hair had been torn out. After hearing these accounts, Bly abandoned her original plan to have herself transferred to one of those wards. Even for someone who had entered the asylum voluntarily for an investigation, the risk seemed too great.
Among the patients were also women with whom Bly could have entirely normal conversations and who insisted that they were not mentally ill and had been committed by mistake. Some were immigrants who spoke little English: they were not always able to explain themselves to police or doctors, and when officials failed to understand their speech or behavior, that confusion could become further evidence in favor of a diagnosis. After Bly's investigation was published, interpreters began to be hired for patients who did not speak English.
Bly herself still had one advantage the women around her did not: back in Manhattan, there was a newsroom where people knew her real name and had promised to come for her. The other patients had no such protection and, in many cases, little hope that they would ever leave. Bly later compared the asylum to a human trap: getting inside was easy, but getting out was nearly impossible because doctors were reluctant to reconsider diagnoses or truly communicate with patients.
On the tenth day, the World kept its promise. A lawyer for the newspaper arrived at the asylum and said that friends of Nellie Brown were prepared to take responsibility for her. She was released, and Bly returned to Manhattan. The women with whom she had spent those ten days remained on the island.
What Changed After the Investigation
A few days later, the New York World published Bly's investigation. Her reporting from Blackwell's Island quickly drew public attention, while the story of a young woman whom several doctors had confidently declared mentally ill raised questions not only about the treatment of patients but also about the system through which women were committed to such institutions in the first place.
Authorities launched an investigation after the articles appeared, and Bly was asked to return to the island with the inspectors. Less than a month after her release, she walked through the same corridors again, this time as a journalist, and pointed out the places where the abuses she had described had taken place.
By the time Bly returned, conditions at the asylum had already been cleaned up: the rooms were more orderly, patients had warmer clothing, the food had improved, and staff treated the women more carefully. The investigation nevertheless confirmed the seriousness of the problems and led to demands for changes in the way the institution operated, including better food, more qualified staff, less overcrowding, and stronger oversight. That same year, the city increased funding for the department responsible for psychiatric institutions among its other facilities.
After the investigation, the World kept Bly on staff, and her name became known far beyond New York. She would later travel around the world in 72 days, report on corruption, poverty, and the status of women, and serve as a war correspondent during World War I. Yet those ten days would remain her best-known investigation-the reporting that helped change conditions for patients and forced Americans to confront what had been happening to women behind closed doors for years.
