MERCH!

Monday, July 4, 2016

Whispering Hills Sanitarium

Dr. Ephraim Waverly was inspired. He’d been to Battle Creek, Michigan, Had met with Dr. Kellogg, and had come away from that meeting with the idea that a sanitarium of his own was a worthy goal and a worthy vision. He’d taken his inheritance and had bought a patch of land in a remote, but beautiful, spot out away from town. He hired a brilliant architect and set to work making a peaceful and restful resort/medical facility.
   And frankly, The rich folk were very interested in taking the rest cures, in the new fads in dietetics, and the new types of exercises and therapies. Dr. Waverly began to make money hand over fist.  Most of which he plowed right back into the San, and occasionally helped to hire new doctors and therapists.
   And it was, without a doubt, an idyllic spot. A lovely view looking out over the bowl of Crater Woods.

Oh sure. No business is without its problems. There were occasional stories of the staff seeing ghosts or other hallucinatory phantasmagoria. Even Dr. Waverly noticed that occasionally there was a bit of a pall that seemed to hang over the place. When Dr. Frehley hanged himself, it was shocking of course, but even his family had mentioned that he’d always had a melancholic disposition all of his life. There wasn’t even a whisper of anything more..untoward.

Occasionally, patients would come to the San, looking for a restful getaway, only to have a hysterical breakdown of some sort. Some recovered. Some did not.   Then, one of the groundskeepers went missing. They never even found a body.   People in town, especially the sort that didn’t care for the rich tourists, began to revive the old stories about how Crater Woods was haunted and that the spirit of the Wendigo stalked its woods in the winter. Hunters and fishermen went missing out there every once in a while.

But Dr. Waverly pooh-poohed such superstitious notions. He worked tirelessly to make the San into a beautiful and healthful spot.  It had, after all, become his home. He lived in a peaceful little cabin not too far away and devoted most of his waking hours to helping people. Sure, there was the occasional disappearance or odd burst of unusual tension from customers or staff. But it being so far from town proper, not much made the papers.

Until, one of the children of a very rich couple went missing. Police were summoned, and eventually a detective set about trying to locate the young girl. The detective was able to round up a few hunting dogs and with one of the young ladies bonnets, they went in search of her.

The scent led right to Dr. Waverly’s door. and then, right into the cellar of the cabin...Which is where the scent stopped.  It’s said, that the sights the detective saw there, in that cellar, unseated his reason. He certainly took to drink thereafter. but when he arose from the cellar. He stalked back to the sanitarium, located the Doctor, and emptied his service revolver into the man, then reloaded and calmly did it all over again. Taking unusual care not to kill him too quickly. 

It was all over the papers. The bones of at least 16 separate people were found in that cellar and some may never be identified. The Doctor’s journals were gone over with a fine-tooth comb, but there was never any conclusive sign that Dr. Waverly was even consciously aware of his whole “Other Life”  His journals were quotidian, Dull even. and no sign of another journal was ever found, although there ARE stories of one. Always “friend of a friend saw it once” sort of stories.

This, along the with the stock market crash, two years later put the place out of business for good. and that’s the way it stayed for a while.

But you know how it is. Some damn people can’t leave well enough alone.
A developer for a health consortium found the place and thought it was peaceful. And with just the right sort of security could make for a nice, remote mental institution.  A sanitarium in the modern sense of the word. Naturally, being a group of out-of-towners, none of them had ever heard the wild stories and by the time they had, well...That was fifty YEARS ago for crying out loud! Besides, they’d already bought the land and had sunk money into building new structures and renovating the old ones. These were men of business and science. They weren’t going to be scared off by ghost stories from around the campfire.

The new structure was a squat 4 story edifice that hunkered in the middle of the formerly expansive greensward of the old San and was made of large slabs of poured concrete. Dubbed, “The Grey Lady” it was the actual facility for the housing of the mentally ill.  The older buildings were retrofitted into offices and dormitories for the staff. A high concrete wall was erected around the perimeter and an underground system using one of the tributaries of the Wicomicomico River for both power and clean water was built.

And you know, for a bit there, it seemed as if the ghosts of old had indeed been chased off.  It never seemed like any of the patients really ever got better there, but that was never expected. Psychology was still in the business of warehousing people who couldn’t function in normal society. At least, in the late 60’s it was.

Oh sure, once the ghost stories got around, it seemed like everyone on the staff had to see one. One poor nurse literally had an anxiety attack from seeing...SOMETHING, she knew not what.  And of course, there was always the story about Wayne Mason.

Wayne had had a psychotic break and had gone on a 4 state killing spree. When the cops finally managed to stop his motor home, he offered them the drivers license of the man whose face he’d stapled to his own.  The cops were not particularly fooled as you can well imagine. After a whirlwind trial, whose coverage was only truncated by the Charles Manson trial, Wayne was dumped at Whispering Hills, hopefully, to rot for the rest of his damned existence.

Wayne, for a violent psychopath, was still a chatty fellow. So it was a bit interesting in his therapy sessions when talked about making a new friend...Dr. Waverly.  Dr. Waverly told him that things run in cycles...That the tension builds up and then...well.  The cycle to come was going to be the biggest yet.  The doctor had told him. Yes. He had FORESEEN IT.

This went on for about 4 months. Mason would wax messianic about the coming cycle without exactly saying what the hell he was talking about.  It was a new and interesting wrinkle to his pathology, but after 4 months of it, nobody paid it as much mind as they should’ve.

6 days before the Christmas holiday, the violent wing had a completely inexplicable but utter failure of its internal security. 3 nurses and an orderly were the only ones who managed to escape. Everyone else was butchered mercilessly, then the inmates turned on one another. Mason’s body was never found.

Now, the place is deserted and people who still remember, including members of the city council, won’t allow that area to be re-developed. No one even wants to go up there to bulldoze the place. People who fancy themselves ghost hunters go up there.  Some see nothing. Others see too much.

What’s really going on:
Here’s the deal. The Ghosts are actually incidental. It’s not exactly a magnet for ghost activity like Brockton Hall is on the campus in town.  The ghosts have accumulated over the course of time because of the horrible events that have taken place here and around Crater Woods.  But they aren’t the work of some Major Demon, or horrible dark magic, or anything like that.
The fact is, Crater Woods is unusually but naturally acoustically “warm”, like the best sort of concert halls are designed to be. The Wicomicomico River and Crater Falls, generate an infrasonic standing wave. Temperature, humidity and soil plasticity cause this infrasonic frequency to fluctuate. But given the right conditions, over the course of time, it literally could drive any person mad.  The whole place, under the right conditions, can create an enormous caldera of crazy.  And sometimes, it absolutely does.
   Now the fact there ARE ghosts sort of muddies the water in terms of seeing the actual cause, especially since you can’t actually hear it with your normal hearing. But that being said, the ghosts are scary, but with a few exceptions, harmless.

The Layout:
Unlike some descriptions of places that I’ve done before, I’m not doing this one like a turn-by-turn map. The place is very large and has many different locales contained within it. As a result. I’m only going to hit the highlights.   

Dr.Waverly’s Old Cabin: Was bulldozed many years ago. there is still a particular spiritual “Stain” on the area and it may be the nesting place of some nasty (non-ghost) spirit as a result.  Dr. Waverly can occasionally be seen sitting on a stump, looking off into the distance and writing in his journal. It’s not good to attract his attention.

The Gatehouse: The primary security location for the facility. Since there’s no power up here none of the monitors or P.A, system work at all. The gun racks have been picked clean long ago.  Shades of slain guards may keep watch on similarly dead televisions. With the right kind of eyes, one can see guards tooling around on the parapet of the wall.

The Main Building: Lies to the left of the “Grey Lady”. Few of the windows are intact. The main building is a bit of a manse. Its main hall is easily a hundred feet wide and the main admitting station takes up a minuscule amount of that space. The dining halls and kitchen still bear signs of the massacre that took place here. The east wing of the building is given over to doctor’s offices, medical storage, and a retrofitted operating theater. (Using the original Operating theater that the San once used) Part of that area had been given over to the ECT suite, and there may be bad echoes of spirits still reliving the horrors of electro-convulsive therapy.

The “Dormitory”: Originally used to house rich patients, the original floor plan made each of the dorm rooms quite large. Staff lived on the premises for the most part, although there were a few who would drive in from the city if they already owned homes, or had families. Horrifying murders still play over and over here, but few of the shades here have any motive force.  The spirit of Head Nurse Collins roams these halls though and her approach is usually heralded by a drop in temperature. She’ll assume anyone not in hospital garb is a patient and will likely attempt to see them back to their cell in the Grey Lady.  Any attempt to prevent that will draw an unpleasant response. Please note that I have just made an understatement of some depth.

“The Grey Lady”: Housing for the inmates of the asylum. Magnetic locks on the doors, they just failed one night.  No one seems to know how or why. The whole place still smells faintly of concrete, bleach, alkali sweat, and old death.  Bats have taken roost in the upper floors where some of the windows have been broken out.  The bottom levels of the building house the power and water station for the complex. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. It’s just been off for ages.  There is also an enormous septic tank that is separated from the water/power station by a concrete slab wall. The tank was so large because it needed to be able to not be serviced for at least two months at a time.  There are still times up here when the roads get impassible in the winter.  
Inmate ghosts can be a mixed bag of interesting conversationalists, violent psychotics, and as per usual, the combo platter.  Wayne Mason considers this his little kingdom and takes a paternalistic interest in anyone messing with his children.
It should be noted that symptoms of graphomania manifested in a statistically significant number of the inmates and most of the walls in the place are covered with script in ink and various bodily fluids.  Do an Image search on Google for graphomania and you won’t lack for visual cues for your players.


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