On July 1, 1959, three men, each convinced he was Jesus Christ, were brought together in a small room off Ward D-23 at the Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan. The legend that grew around that meeting claimed the men were locked inside to battle over their identities. The documented reality was different, but the story of the institution itself reveals a far darker history. The hospital was never actually located in Ypsilanti.
It sat in York Township, about four miles east of Saline, and took its name only because it was served by the Ypsilanti telephone exchange. By 1929, Michigan’s state hospitals were already overcrowded, and reports suggested they lacked roughly 1,900 beds compared to what was considered adequate. The facility was meant to ease that pressure. The state selected the site for its population density, available land, and proximity to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
That last factor would prove critical. The hospital was designed around a progressive idea: humane, therapeutic, scientific, and economical treatment of the mentally ill. In practice, it became something else entirely. Construction began in June 1930, with buildings designed by the Detroit architectural firm of Albert Kahn.
Work was divided among 35 contractors and completed at a pace described at the time as miraculous. The first six patients were admitted on June 15, 1931, exactly one year after the cornerstone was laid. Within six weeks, hundreds of state officials attended a dedication ceremony. The facility was built to hold about 1,000 patients.
By the end of its first year, 922 people lived there. The original plan called for four years of construction, but it was extended to six, a change that meant beds would not keep pace with demand. The hospital included administrative buildings, large ward structures, staff housing, a power plant, and underground tunnels connecting the main buildings. Patients were allotted about 55 square feet of sleeping space, roughly the size of a 7-by-8-foot area.
With no mandatory reviews and no time limits on detention, commitment required only a family member’s signature and one physician, who did not even need to be a psychiatrist. There were no signatures required for release. In its early years, the hospital operated relatively well by the standards of the time. It had a gymnasium, a nine-hole golf course, a church, and an occupational therapy workshop.
Patients published a newsletter called the Ipsy Slants, covering softball scores and farm news. One item noted that Harry Laimer of Ward B-21 had lost 12 consecutive card games and that his friends were eager to help him practice. That era did not last. By February 1937, only six years after opening, a local newspaper reported the hospital was already overcrowded, with beds exceeding capacity by a third.
A statewide series that same year found Michigan’s mental hospitals needed more than 5,500 additional beds. The patient population continued climbing, reaching roughly 3,500 by 1947 and more than 4,000 by the mid-1950s. When staff shortages hit during World War II, the hospital turned to conscientious objectors. From March 1943 to October 1946, a Mennonite-run unit provided 75 men to serve as ward attendants, most working as nurses.
They received a $50 monthly allowance, from which $35 was deducted for food, housing, and laundry, leaving them $15 a month for working in violent wards. Overcrowding defined daily life. One women’s unit designed for 50 beds held 115 women in the 1950s, meaning more than two women per available bed. Employees remembered patients sleeping on wooden oak benches along the walls of dayrooms.
Some people spent their entire institutional lives on those benches. Patients included people in the final stages of untreated syphilis, alcoholics admitted in large numbers in the late 1930s, and, by the mid-1950s, more than half diagnosed with schizophrenia. By 1951, more than 1,000 patients had no contact with any relative or friend. A circle of friends and relatives was formed to care for them.
Among the first six patients admitted on opening day, only one remained ten years later. The other five had died without improvement. By 1975, a journalist was told some female patients had been in the hospital since it opened more than four decades earlier. The hospital also became a site for medical experimentation.
In December 1942, 102 physically active men on one ward were given an experimental influenza vaccine. The vaccine was grown in fertilized chicken eggs and killed with formaldehyde. On May 4, 1943, every man in the group, whether vaccinated or not, was sprayed with live influenza virus through a nasal atomizer. Half a cubic centimeter took four minutes to administer.
The study, published in 1944, was co-authored by Thomas Francis Jr. and a young researcher named Jonas Salk, who later developed the polio vaccine. The work was supported by the Army Commission on Influenza and a Rockefeller Foundation grant. No documentation has surfaced showing that any of the men consented.
A widely shared blog post later claimed Salk and his colleagues vaccinated 8,000 patients at Ypsilanti and Eloise hospitals and deliberately exposed hundreds to the virus. Records show a single ward and 102 men. The larger number has no verifiable source. The real number was smaller, but the men involved could not leave a closed hospital and were deliberately infected.
Other treatments included malarial fever therapy for patients with syphilis-related psychosis, insulin shock, metrazol-induced seizures that often caused spinal fractures, and electroconvulsive therapy. By the late 1940s, lobotomy became more common. In 1953, 65 patients underwent the procedure according to a journal article by hospital staff. Five died, and only about a third improved enough to leave or need less supervision.
In the 1950s, the first antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs arrived. They had serious side effects but were safer and more effective than earlier treatments. For the first time, staff had to prevent patients from attending dances and movies because so many were well enough to go. A later director said the drugs allowed staff to eliminate straitjackets.
The institution’s most famous chapter involved a ninth form of treatment: another human being. Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist from Michigan State University, was frustrated that his field only studied beliefs people could abandon without cost. He wanted to test the limits of identity itself. He found three men at Ypsilanti who each believed he was Jesus Christ and arranged for them to live together.
The first meetings were stormy, and arguments more than once turned physical. Clyde Benson, around 70, a former farmer with a history of alcoholism, insisted the other two were dead and that machines inside them spoke for them. Leon Gabor, 38, a World War II veteran who had left college, rejected his given name and insisted his birth certificate read “Dr. Domino Dominorum et Rex Rexarum,” shortened by researchers to Rex.
Joseph Cassel was a French Canadian by birth, a failed writer in his 50s who had spent about 20 years in the hospital. He believed he was English and that the hospital was an English stronghold. He called the superintendent “Papa. ”
The research team orchestrated letters to manipulate the men.
Leon received letters signed “Madame Yeti Woman,” expressing love and suggesting small changes to his routine. Joseph received letters forged to appear to come from the superintendent. The study ended on August 15, 1961, after more than two years. Rokeach published The Three Christs of Ypsilanti in 1964.
In a later edition, Rokeach added a confession, writing that he had no right, even in the name of science, to play God and intervene around the clock in their daily lives. He admitted he failed to cure the three men of their delusions, but that they cured him of his. Joseph Cassel died in 1976. No grave marked his real name, which was never publicly revealed.
Change finally came from outside. A patient sued the state, and courts agreed Michigan’s commitment laws were unconstitutional. A new Mental Health Code took effect on August 6, 1975, limiting commitment to people who posed a serious threat to themselves or others or who could not meet basic needs for food, clothing, or shelter. Simply not being wanted was no longer enough.
By then, the hospital was in decline. A state survey in 1969 concluded the buildings were functionally obsolete, designed for custodial care of insane people rather than a treatment program. The facility had been renamed the Ypsilanti Regional Psychiatric Hospital in the early 1970s. Under director Vernon Stehman, who took over in 1971, more than 300 patients left each year, most to community care facilities.
On Saturday, April 13, 1991, the hospital was officially closed. The remaining 250 patients were transferred to hospitals in Northville, Coldwater, Westland, and Pontiac. Others were placed in group homes or released to live on their own. There was no riot, no fire, no investigation.
A place that once held thousands simply ended on a spring Saturday. Years later, a housing survey found that 42 percent of homeless people interviewed reported having a mental illness. A local paper concluded the county jail had become the only guaranteed residence for low-income people in the community. A small forensic psychiatry center remained on the property behind barbed wire, where the state sent people accused of its most serious crimes for evaluation.
The old buildings eventually fell to weather and vandals. One reporter who entered in 2005 found peeling paint, leaking ceilings, birds flying inside, rooms full of filing cabinets and abandoned kitchen equipment, rusted bed frames, and broken glass. Graffiti on one wall read “Death is here. ” The tunnels still connected everything, some so long that a flashlight beam could not reach their end.
In April 2005, Toyota Technical Center signed an agreement to buy about 690 acres of the land. After a legal fight, the sale was completed in 2006 for $11 million. The state’s incentive package was valued at more than $38. 9 million.
Toyota said it invested $187 million by the time the complex opened in October 2008, with expansions adding hundreds of millions more. Developers who had bid higher for the land sued the state, but the sale stood. The demolished hospital’s history has been documented in archives, including state records covering 1930 to 1969. Patient files within those records remain sealed, including those of the three men who believed they were Christ.
A 2011 study and repeated retellings kept the story alive. The Three Christs of Ypsilanti was adapted into a film released in 2020 starring Richard Gere, Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins, and Bradley Whitford. Reviews described the plot as three men placed in one room to battle over identity, but the true story was two years of daily confrontations and forged letters orchestrated by a man who later admitted he had played God. The hospital was built to treat people but ended up confining them, built next to a great university that studied them, built to be economical at the cost of their identities, and built for humanity in a place where many were never visited.
The benches and dayrooms told the true story for decades. The state finally recorded it in 1969: the buildings had never been suitable for treatment at all.