Undercover in the Asylum: Nellie Bly, Daredevil Reporter

One fall day in 1887, the New York police were contacted by the worried inhabitants of a women’s boarding house. The cops soon arrived and picked up a disturbed young woman named Nellie Brown.

The next day, the New York Sun ran an article asking, “Who Is This Insane Girl.” Nellie Brown was a “modest, comely, well-dressed girl of 19” who is “probably suffering from hysterical mania.” Other papers quickly caught the story. The New York Times described her as a “mysterious waif” with a “manner of good breeding” and a “comely appearance.” Details of her face, mouth, nose, and chin were all commented upon. The contrast between her beauty and her “haggard… paleness” titillated readers.

Several days earlier, this “waif” had walked into the New York World’s managing editor’s office and demanded a hearing. She was a reporter out of Pittsburgh, named Nellie Bly. (Actually, this was her journalists’ nom de plume; it was unseemly for female reporters to use their own names. Her real name was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane). Bly had loads of sellable ideas. She offered to go undercover as an immigrant and ship over from Europe in steerage. If the editor was not interested, she curtly informed him, she’d be happy to shop her proposals to the competition. He wisely chose to keep her on retainer while he mulled over what to do with her. Soon enough an idea sparked. Bly would feign insanity as “Nellie Brown” and get sent to the infamous Woman’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island.

Located in the East River, Blackwell’s had a horrible reputation. Most of the patients were destitute immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, an already despised group. Charles Dickens had visited there in the 1840s and had reported a dismal place. Bly called Blackwell's a “human rat-trap.”

Bly started her journey by discarding all forms of identification and practicing looking “crazy” in a mirror. Then she checked into the Temporary Home For Women on Second Avenue and launched her operation.

After convincing her fellow boarders, and then a Bellevue doctor, that she was insane, she was shipped over to Blackwell’s on the East River. Her published account proved irresistible to a prurient public. She describes “coarse” female attendants who “expectorated tobacco juice about on the floor in a manner more skillful than charming.” The insane residents keep her awake “day and night.” They are a collection of “senseless, chattering lunatics.” There follows a virtual checklist of horrors: the stripping away of all liberty; the cruel keepers; the atrocious food; physical and mental abuse; and the fact that if a patient claimed to be sane, it would be used as evidence that they were completely out of their minds.

Bly's “escape” was effected by her contacts in the outside world. The newspaper sent an attorney who claimed friends would “take charge” of her, and she was released. Her story broke big, thanks to Joseph Pulitzer, the media tycoon who owned the World. The tale of “The Pretty Crazy Girl” turned Bly into a sensation. She had fooled medical authorities and had entered the abyss, only to return and shed light on psychiatric horrors. She had gone from helpless “waif” to avenging angel.

Bly’s undercover adventure inaugurated a new persona—the daredevil investigative reporter. She went undercover again almost immediately, first as a maid, and then as a desperate single mother. Her book on her madhouse adventure sold well, and her later circumnavigation of the world, inspired by Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (she “beat” this, her book titled Around the World in 72 Days), was such a hit that she received a parade down Broadway upon her return.

Bly’s legacy is a bit murky, however. Though she essentially sparked a new profession, and she boasted that her investigation helped spur reforms, one cannot escape the way in which she did it. She “acted” crazy based on the stigmatic prejudices of a public inclined to quarantine and punish deviance. Then she served this same public a salacious tale that reinforced fears of "mad" patients and immigrant hospital workers, not to mention evil/incompetent medical professionals. Her mixed legacy summons to mind what a former mental patient once told me about journalists who go undercover in psychiatric wards—that it is like going on a roller coaster and then telling everyone what it is like to be in a car accident.