Warning! This was handed to me by my brother who I guess now was a former patient at a psychiatric hospital. I won’t be naming it for the anonymity of my brother. These are his exact words he wrote to me before his untimely death from a surgical complication. RIP little brother.
There was a time when I was perfectly sane. I was top of my class in college, had an internship at one of the best hospitals in my city, and even ran a weekly urban exploring group with a few friends. The latter is where everything went wrong, scarring me so deep that mentally I would never recover.
It all started one night, when three of my friends (Sasha, Larry, and Corey), and I decided to explore the infamous Summerhaven Mental Asylum. Summerhaven had closed in 1874 due to a fire that ravaged the inside of the building. It is said that this is the most haunted and demented building in my whole country due to the experimental “treatments” performed on the patients.
We headed to the Iron gates, looming before us to see if they were open. The letters Smev t Ay were all that had withstood over a century since the closure. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a thick padlock wrapped around stopping anyone from trespassing in the decrepit building. We should have taken that as a sign but we were dumb kids then and athletic enough to just climb over it.
We walked up to the front door hoping it would be unlocked. Sasha who was the most daring of us began trying to push it open with no luck, it was locked. A little frustrating but this happens so we did a walk around the whole building looking at the best points of entry. Since there were no windows save for a few leading to the basement we walked to the front to discuss a course of action. We wouldn’t normally break a window but we really wanted to see inside. That’s when we noticed the door was open. We chalked it up to Sasha working it enough that the wind blew it all the way open when we walked away. What naive minds we had.
The oil void hinges creaked as the door opened. Stale burnt air emanated out of the entryway making our eyes and nose burn slightly. The entrance had a small room to the left surrounded by broken glass, which seemed to be a guard station or maybe even a reception area and a set of 2 wooden doors. When I peered inside the station there wasn’t much except a few papers and pencils scattered about, but as I lifted my hand resting it on the wall to look in further it landed on a set of keys on a key ring. What a lucky find.
I grabbed the set of keys pocketing them and grabbed out my flashlight. I looked to the other three, confirming they had what they needed for the night ahead of us. Corey and Larry pulled out their flashlights, and Sasha her state-of-the-art camera. We walked through the set of double doors which led into a grand room, tables and chairs scattered throughout, some sets perfectly, some knocked over, even some broken to little bits. Dust and cobwebs littered this common room but we all noticed that the building was void of any charring from a fire. I shone my flashlight looking for a way to either get to the second floor or the basement. In the back corner, there was a winding metal staircase leading up and as I walked over to it I noticed there were stairs leading down as well. We made a group decision to go upstairs first and to leave the spooky basement for last.
We ascended the rickety staircase reaching the top without it coming down around us, which is a stroke of luck in a rundown place like this. We entered a long narrow hallway, it was pitch black with the only light coming from our flashlights. We walked down until we reached the only door at the end.
The door opened with a creak leading into what I could only describe as a prison pod. Two tiers of barred cells lined the giant room. When we started walking, shining our flashlights into the cells, we saw that there were 8 beds in each cell. They were so close together they were practically touching. How could they have kept people like this, it was so cruel.
We spread out checking the cells to see if anything cool was inside, while Sasha took pictures. Most of the cells looked mostly the same, bare with 8 beds crammed inside. A couple of them were lined with graffiti with beer bottles and cigarette butts littering the ground, teens must have had some balls to party in a place like this.