A Glimpse into the Past: The Asylum’s Dark Legacy
It was with this enthusiasm that I tried to research all the history surrounding the place so that when I enter, I’ll be prepared for what lies within. As one would expect, the asylum was designed in the late 1800s as a mental hospital to care for a wide population of patients suffering from mental illnesses. At the peak of its functionality, the asylum accommodated hundreds of individuals. Many were provided treatments widely regarded as inhumane by today’s standards.
The place was notorious for practices in the name of severe treatments, involving electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomies, as well as other forms of protracted isolation. Many of the patients stayed there for years because they had been abandoned by their families and were subjected to whatever the institution deemed necessary. Stories about mistreatment and abuse slowly unfolded in years, which finally built a scandal that ended its existence with the closing of the asylum in the 1970s. Some of the patients who passed through its doors lost their lives there, and it is said that many restless spirits never really left.
The asylum shut its doors for good, and since then, it has simply withered away to nothing. Nature reclaims some parts, vandals others, but the worst part about its legacy was not the physical decay-it was in the stories that come out about what went on after dark. This led the asylum to become one of the most famous haunted places in the entire region-to the degree that phantom apparitions strolled up the corridors, chilling sounds and visions. The more I heard such stories, the more urgent became my eagerness to finally step in that place myself.
