An asylum who’s who (part 2)

Everbleak had a way of magnifying minor obsessions and quirks into huge, operatic extravaganzas. The asylum provided a stage for them: like a big Broadway show, but with a cast of hundreds all performing to their own scripts and scores; private little librettos of insanity. The cacophony was unbelievable sometimes. We would compress bread dough into makeshift ear plugs when they got really vocal.

Daniel DeWitt – former Everbleak psychologist

Declan ‘Fungal’ O’Connor looking delighted with an impromptu haul of girolle mushrooms, foraged during a pauper’s funeral, c.1971

Lunatics are like a hall of mirrors. They reflect and distort each other, adding to an overall warping of reality. At Everbleak, the hall of mirrors was low-lit and unpredictable: it could reflect laughter as well as monsters. A whole cast of impossible and unlikely characters.

Let’s not beat about the bush: the Frick twins (Hetty and Betty) were evil little pyromaniacs from Los Angeles. Pets, people, post offices and palm trees had all been reduced to charred remains before they were captured and incarcerated (as minors) in Everbleak’s most secure psychiatric wing. They had even managed to set the back seat of their arresting squad car alight, laughing demonically in handcuffs as it burned out of control on Melrose Avenue.

Hetty and Betty’s early life was one of neglect and borderline abuse. Their mother, Jane Frick, was an actress who appeared in b-movie, (extremely) low budget horror films such as ‘Blood Sisters: the Vampire Nuns of Biloxi’, ‘Killer Kangaroo’, and ‘Buried alive with a pervert priest’. Their estranged father was a famous Hollywood director and raconteur that we can’t name for legal reasons, but his ‘thriller’ initials were VP.

The pyromanic Frick Twins, pictured here (in reflection like Medusa) with their mother: the horror b-movie actress Jane Frick.

The girls grew up around various LA movie studio sound stages, back lots, and on-location haunted houses as their mother acted, drank and screwed in roughly equal measures. The chain-smoking crew became their minders, perpetually trying to keep them quiet with candy (and any other available prop or distraction) as they moved from motel to motel, or spent hot nights sleeping top-to-toe and unattended in their mother’s trailer bed.

They saw gallons of fake blood, saw prosthetic throats slashed, and watched a woman (their mother) possessed by a demon so that she turned into hobo-fucking nymphomaniac nun who then ate her victim’s heads (‘Praying Mantis’, Zebratrope Pictures Inc. 1974).

Did all this exposure to horror, violence and the occult turn them into pyromaniac, psychopathic murderers? The psychiatrist at their trial (for burning down Zebratrope Pictures) certainly thought it a factor. But only within an overarching framework of gross neglect and alcoholism.

Unlike their later arsonist escapades that burned on a grand scale with pugilist-posed corpses as a finale, Betty and Hetty’s early pyromania built its momentum slowly, progressing from trash cans to mattresses, then parked cars with combustibles and accelerants under the gas tanks. Five people and an innocent alpaca died in that final Zebratrope studio fire, but the Frick twins refused to show one shred of remorse as the judge sent them down for life imprisonment in a secure mental institution (they were lucky that California saw death sentences as barbaric).

Sent to Everbleak, they immediately became asylum celebrities / royalty. Psychiatrists were fascinated by them, and fellow patients were terrified of them. They filled the walls of their room with crude crayon drawings of zoos and schools ablaze. And even the occasional drunken visit from their mother couldn’t dampen the broadness of their sedated grins.

Louis le Pendu, ruminating on ‘musketeer matters’ despite the attentions of a Siamese twin irritant.

Louis le Pendu believed himself to be a fearless French musketeer, but was actually Charles Lamont: a steel press operator from the Chrysler factory in Detroit, where his fantasist personality disorder and erotomaniac obsessions would end up in tragedy.

Let’s rewind a little. Louis would go to the movies at least five times a week. It started simply as a means of escaping the relentless noise and sparks of the production line, but eventually started to encroach beyond the velvet flea pit of the Regal picture house into a whole inner mind-world of melodramatic, swashbuckling fantasy.

It was always the Three Musketeers that inspired him the most. He admired their brotherhood, their confidence, and their sartorial style. And how perpetually cheerful they were. Even in the middle of a perilous situation, or whilst smashing a small barrel over an enemy’s head, they would laugh loudly and boisterously.

Louis wanted to laugh like that: laugh, sweep women off their feet, and cut somebody’s belt so that their breeches fell down.

It started with the wig: the curled locks of a Musketeer dandy (procured from a theatrical costumiers) that Louis would wear to the supermarket, cinema, and the blues bar on 7th. It immediately caused mockery and fist-fights, but Louis didn’t care. Within a few weeks he was wearing full Musketeer regalia onto the Chrysler factory floor (minus the sword).

His supervisors immediately reprimanded him for the safety implications of his lacy, effeminate sleeves and flowing tabard. He was both a fire hazard and a distraction to the other workers. But rather than going home to change (as requested), he immediately challenged the foreman to a duel. To the death. With the aerial of a 1969 Chrysler Newport.

Louis had been wanting to win the favour of Millie ‘Milady’ Munro from payroll for at least a year, and now he was suddenly battling his way up to her mezzanine office, fencing off security and co-workers alike with his aerial rapier.

He expected her to gasp with heaving bosom at his heroics (she wouldn’t be aware of him sniffing his weekly pay packet for a faint scent of her perfume or toilette), but there was no romantic ending to this story: just a foreman with a skewered eyeball, dead amongst the rivets.

Although Louis admitted (at the subsequent murder trial) to stealing Milady’s oversized silken bloomers from her apartment washing line to use as his musketeer ‘kerchief’, she did begin a correspondence with him that lasts to this day.

Louis le Pendu now spends his days as a full-time musketeer in the sun-lounge of Everbleak’s secure wing. His thoughts alternate between defeating the evil Cardinal Richelieu and kneeling before Milady’s pubic triangle as its faithful servant.

Edna ‘Chopface’ Reeves, national pork queen in perpetuity, pictured with her diminutive beau Tim O’Shanter.

The Cult of Mickey

I don’t recall how it started, but it got way out of hand. Went from funny to weird in the space of a few months, sometime around the summer of ‘56. Nuns wearing Mickey Mouse wristwatches is one thing, but nuns taking a bus to Raleigh or Winston Salem on the weekend to get a Mickey tattoo on their ass or inner thigh is just plain disturbing.

Archie Briggs, former Everbleak Hospital Porter

Mouseketear Nuns worshipping a home-made Mickey in a private bedroom shrine.

Walt Disney opened Disneyland, in Anaheim California, in the summer of 1955. It was the culmination of almost thirty years of dreaming, planning and superhuman tenacity. Little did he know that a small party of Everbleak nuns would go there on vacation soon after, and take the Disney corporation’s icon (and Walt’s most precious personal creation) to its furthest literal conclusion.

Mickey Mouse is a cultural deity. A 20th century colossus standing astride the American dream, and arguably far more famous and recognisable than Jesus (and The Beatles – sorry John). He is the perfect host, the best merchandise salesman, the best PR agent, the best actor, and the greediest little money-whore on the planet.

The party of Everbleak nuns who were greeted by him on Main Street in the dazzling west coast sunshine, did not see him as an alcoholic hired hand in a sweaty, smelly suit. They saw him as a beatific presence bathed in holy glow. A divine being who had no voice, just outward physical expressions of love. For these addicts and lunatics in dirty habits, it was worship and lust at first sight. By nightfall, three of them had taken Mickey’s sacred communion, from behind, against a magic kingdom dumpster.

The party of nuns took their Mickey worship (and an unplanned pregnancy) back to Everbleak, where they offered prayers and offerings to their mouse god in secret. Crude icons and votives were fashioned for makeshift private shrines, alongside the primitive ‘official’ Disney souvenirs that existed at that time.

The cult of Mickey fermented slowly: underground and gaseous, like an ale of darkness. New members were initiated with a Mickey Mouse button badge pinned through their left nipple and worn for a week; the pain reminding them of the suffering that Mickey endured as the put-upon sorcerer’s apprentice. Rituals and incantations were guarded jealousy, and pilgrimages were made to the Greenville Picture House to see the sacred animated sermons of their lord and master.

Mickey promised them happiness, positivity, a love of animals (Pluto), and eternal life as an animated being beyond the travails of the flesh and earthly dust. They had not abandoned Jesus, just made him move over in their bed a little to accommodate Mickey too.

Cult of Mickey adherents started calling themselves ‘Mouseketears’, after the mascara-streaked holy tears that the divine could reduce them to. Especially after orgasm. And it wasn’t long before the Mouseketear nuns started recruiting other Everbleak inmates and staff into their cult. This is where it started to grow darker, as the old joy and lightness was gradually replaced with fear, draconian rules, and seances trying to summon Mickey into the mortal world. The cult members started decrying any official or commercial representation of Mickey, and started making their own (crude) masks and accessories. Their sinister appearance was perfectly in keeping with the new direction of travel: death-pacts and a desire to commit mass murder at Disneyland against the ‘false and frivolous followers’ besmirching Mickey with photo requests.

Cult members mock a non-Mouseketear nun. Note the crude homemade masks and gloves, introduced as a protest against store-bought ‘commercialisation’ of their icon

By the 70’s, the cult had largely evaporated through boredom and inertia. Nuns were finding new idols to follow: Burt Reynolds being the most prominent. For a short time, they would wear Burt moustaches and worship to ‘East Bound and Down’ from Smoky & the Bandit.

East bound and down, loaded up and truckin’

Everbleak Halloween: something wicked this way comes

LSD-laced apple bobbing for some of the West Wing nurses, 1932. Dressing as witches was later banned as being discriminatory against the ‘real’ Salem witches who were participating in the experimental parapsychology programme

Halloween. Trick or treat. A time of cynical over-commercialisation or the binds that tie us to a dark pagan past that existed long before the self-flagellating death cult of Christianity started marketing its wares?

For most, Halloween is a benign celebration of confectionery and confected frights; a safe, sanitised toe in the water of satanic ritual and spirit-world malevolence. So you can only imagine how Everbleak translated this mildly-spooky occasion into a pitch-black torture cellar of unspeakable horror, actual witchcraft and demonic possession.

In the asylum, homemade costumes and unmedicated psychoses (the inmates had a ritual of not taking their meds to get in the right ‘mood’ for Halloween night) would compete for attention and status after ‘lights out’ at 10pm. Unlike Valentine’s Day, there was no mingling with the wider hospital: it was too late, too dark, and too demonic to allow masked, murderous psychopaths free access to the sick and innocent. Even the nuns knew to withdraw completely as the buzzing strip lights suddenly gave way to curfew darkness. But the lunatics had their candles ready (even though naked flames were strictly prohibited on account of the pyromaniacs): home-crafted candles made from the fat of amputated limbs, and with a pungent smell to match. Wesley ‘Bobo’ McGraw (a clown janitor) ran a sideline retrieving body parts for the inmates from the hospital incinerator – either for a small fee, or as a trade item within Everbleak’s internal bartering system. Freak contraband.

Asylum inmates in their homemade Halloween costumes, c.1959

Dark deeds, sex, fire and mutilation would ensue. Sometimes the clean-up alone would take two weeks, and it was always several days before the medication kicked back in enough to ‘calm the beast’ and return asylum life to (relative) normality for another year.

I get questioned about our leniency, and the wisdom of letting pyromaniacs have access to matches. Or Spanish clown midgets being allowed to run around unsupervised with poisoned knitting needles. I don’t see it as irresponsible because I believe that everybody has the right to cut loose every now and again. Pent-up demons are entirely noxious to mental wellbeing, so let them have their dark carnivals and depravities. Let them copulate on the stairs and prowl the corridors like slavering wolves. ‘It’s better to express than suppress’. That’s our motto. That’s our ideology.

Sylvan Kane – interview with the international journal of experimental psychology, 1935

A game of ‘bitty swing’: the last person to bite the apple from the string was forced to pay a forfeit, which could range from eating a live raven to reciting William Blake whilst alight with petrol.

There was this crazy asylum game called ‘Red Sauce Sally’. They’d get someone – the ‘Sally’ – to wear these bags full of tomato catsup under their clothes. The aim of the game was to find the ‘Sally’ in near darkness with short-bladed shivs. You had to go around stabbing then tasting the blade until you found the catsup. Not me though – I hate tomato catsup. Especially when it’s made by circus folk treading the tomatoes by foot with their dirty, deformed little toes.

Sal Brewster – Asylum inmate 1961-1989.

Although Halloween in the asylum would invariably lead to bloodshed and pregnancy, the festivities in the main hospital were more lighthearted (apart from the drugs and witch coven orgies), with traditional trick or treating for the orphans, carved pumpkin competitions, and apple bobbing.

Some, though, would say that the spirit and horror of Halloween is all year round at Everbleak.

An asylum who’s who (part 1)

I have seen minds shattered against a wall like porcelain clowns. And I have seen minds for whom the shattered shards of those clowns are crude shivs for exercising the darkest of deeds of human nature. I’ve welcomed and entertained them all – even the ones shattered quite beyond repair, and those poor souls who’ve been hurled so far into the abyss that they’ll never re-emerge from it.

Sylvan Kane – from an interview with the Raleigh Sentinel, September 1922

Veronica Bancroft and her new Pensacola death puppets during her ‘stay’ at Everbleak, c.1962

As part of our sojourns into Everbleak’s photo album and meandering history, we have already been crossing paths with some of the characters who have walked it’s scuffed linoleum: people who may have been prominent or mundane in historical terms, but are now somehow illustrative of a certain time, theme, or point of interest.

All well and good, but there are others who also deserve recognition and celebration, just for being themselves.

Take Veronica Bancroft for example. And when I say ‘take’, I don’t mean it literally. Those who did would almost certainly find themselves gurgling blood through a slit throat, staring up at a crowd of happy-faced puppets as their life ebbed tragically away.

Veronica, on the exterior, was a normal suburban housewife from Pensacola on the Florida panhandle. She would attend church in white gloves and regularly donate to the welfare shelter next to the supermarket. Not exactly a pillar of the community, but at least a supporting strut.

But Veronica was hiding a secret. In her twenties, she had become obsessed with hand puppets. They were her friends and confidants, her masturbatory aids, and constantly spoke their funny little thoughts to her – even when they were sleeping quietly in their special box. There were clowns, bears, a spotty dog, an elephant, and a monkey: Manfred, who was their leader and spokesperson. It was he who would often tell Veronica what to do on behalf of the other, shyer puppets: like a foreman of the jury telling her that her husband was guilty (so guilty!) and that she should start slowly poisoning him with rat control strychnine in his mashed potato – which she immediately did. With fatal consequences.

But Veronica also wanted to share her puppet friends and their happy, smiling faces with the wider world. So she started performing shows with them at Sunday School, old folks homes, and municipal parades. Their act was set in a psychiatric doctor’s waiting room (constructed from a whitewashed cardboard box), where Veronica played the giant receptionist, and the puppets were the ‘patients’. Nobody ever saw the psychiatrist though. He didn’t exist in this contained little world, and was only referred to occasionally as ‘Herr Doktor’. So the action therefore centred around the making of appointments, turning up late, and arguing with the receptionist in strange, squeaky voices. When Veronica was in the midst of a real psychotic episode, however, the dialogue would become slurred and disjointed, or just get reduced to animal grunts and howls.

Sadly, not everyone was enamoured with how this ‘drama’ and it’s unscripted, unconventional dialogue came across, so audience members would sometimes fall asleep, complain and heckle. Silly them: the thin-skinned puppets abhorred even implied criticism, so would exact vicious revenge on the culprits. Mostly with a knife across their windpipe as they slept.

In her police interviews, Veronica Bancroft admitted to being present at all 14 murders, but was adamant that it was Manfred and the other puppets who had physically made the blows and incisions to the victims. She believed them to be possessed by satanic forces, and revealed that they had encouraged her to worship Lucifer too with their ‘cute little faces and funny ways’.

Bancroft resided in Everbleak Asylum’s maximum security wing until her death in 1997. During her incarceration, she was allowed to make new hand puppets in her weekly arts & crafts sessions and often put on shows for the other patients. She also wrote a recipe book for children’s parties, showing a flair for the imaginative use of frankfurters and spam. It was never published.

Gustav Rheinhold levitates a visiting psychoanalyst, c.1969

Gustav Rheinhold was a strange, quiet little boy from Munich. He had a penchant for dressing like a little Bavarian shit and causing chaos through the telekinetic power of his mind.

It began in the streets of his home town, where young Gustav would strut around in lederhosen, telekinetically making the dresses of women at bus stops blow up. However, he soon progressed to making dogs levitate as their owners walked them in the park, and making policemen turn mid-air cartwheels as they directed traffic at Gärtnerplatz.

To avoid Gustav being kidnapped (a very real possibility at the time) by GDR Stasi agents, his parents bought him to the USA under sponsorship from the newly formed paranormal division of the FBI (Black Rook). It was they who brought him to Everbleak in the late 60’s for testing and observation of his extraordinary abilities.

Gustav Rheinhold would later go on to head up Black Rook (1989-1996) and was responsible in the early 70’s (whilst still a child) for acts of psychological and telekinetic warfare in Vietnam.

Dr Ahmed Famoos, more commonly known as ‘Doc Tiny’, pointing his replica pistol at a nurse during daily role play. He was freed from a travelling freakshow in Iran by a passing Swedish deodorant manufacturer.

We will visit more interesting characters and their stories in future blogs.

Pulp

The nuns formed a circle around me – candlelit, and apart from their wimples, completely naked. Still drowsy from the knockout drug that the Mother Superior had slipped me after evening prayers, I suddenly realised that my own habit had been removed too. Was this really part of the initiation or just their own sordid pleasures running rampant?

Carlotta Burns – ‘Confessions of a Novice Nun’, Ravenclaw Press, 1941

A typically lurid Ravenclaw Press paperback cover (this one sold under the imprint Vinco)

It will come as little surprise that the permissive sexual culture of Everbleak turned it into a hotbed (no pun intended) of strange erotic proclivities and deviance. Staff and patients alike were free to indulge dark animal urges that would have made the Marquis de Sade blush like a coquettish amateur. 

Warped by a mixture of drugs, repression and their daily observance of the sexual depravity of others, the nuns of Everbleak in particular became brazen in their appetites and desires. They transgressed every taboo of their profession with a mirthless but breathless intensity. Dirty habits and dirty minds. 

It naturally followed that their erotic tales would leak out of Everbleak to find a wider audience: pulp fiction paperback readers eager for the lurid titilation of murderous revenge, scandalous vamps, and lesbian orgies.

The first memoir by Everbleak staff nurse Amy Fuchs. Later turned into a (much sanitised) film adaption starring Hedy Lamarr

The transformation to printed word was largely thanks to one man: Albrecht Finlay, a small-time newspaper proprietor from Butte in Montana. He had been publishing a daily mining newspaper there, but got run out of town for stealing the miner’s wives underwear off their washing lines. After drifting around for a while, he finally got himself arrested in Baltimore, having progressed to stealing dirty underwear from laundromats and Chinese laundries. 

They put him into Everbleak for observation and psychiatric treatment, some time around 1938. It was here that he met Carlotta Burns, an attractive novice nun from Poughkeepsie. Finlay immediately fell in love with her, but was unable to have that love requited as Burns was already involved in a love triangle with a circus strong man and a clown doctor (doctor of clowns, not a clown himself). But she was happy to relate both her own sordid sexual tales to him, and those of the other novices. Finlay saw the commercial publishing opportunities in these stories, and promised to make her a famous writer (within the pulp genre at least). A year later, he was allowed to leave Everbleak and founded Ravenclaw Press – a business he ran from an apartment above a coin-operated laundromat in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Soon after, Carlotta Burns quit Everbleak (and the church), and wrote the first memoir in the ‘Sister Sinister’ series. Lurid and provocative, it immediately became a book-stand and railway station bestseller. 

With the success of the Sister Sinister series under his belt, Finlay felt emboldened to raid Everbleak for other stories and would-be pulp paperback writers. His Ravenclaw Press spin-offs included confessional memoirs from a nymphomaniac nurse (Amy Fuchs), noir fiction about a midget-clown private eye, and various other tales of deviance and addiction.

Whilst both Burns and Fuchs would go on to write low-budget movie screenplays of their books in Hollywood, Albrecht Finlay died suddenly of a heart attack –  surrounded by dirty female underwear in one of the three laundromats he’d bought. He was 57 years old.

As well as the Ravenclaw Press writers, Everbleak gave birth to other memoirs and fictionalised accounts from its patients and staff. This is a rare first edition cover of ‘Me & Her’, which went on to win the Guggenheim prize for literature in 1953.

Everbleak: Rituals & Entertainments (part 1)

My favourite event of the entertainments calendar was the annual 4 Sisters nun race. All four wings of Everbleak had their ‘champion’, and they would be in training all year. It was just one circuit of the hospital, but it always got bloody. Blunt weapons only.

Dr Ralph Blowe

The annual 4 sisters nun-race, 1962. Sister Maria of South Wing takes the lead.

It would be wrong to just portray Everbleak as a place of dark melancholy, howling and mental aberration. It was (and is) all of those things of course, but it also possessed a strong sense of community and (despite the milk-souring faces of the nuns) all kinds of warped fun and entertainment.

Apart from the annual carnival (covered in a previous blog), there were a host of other events and revels to look forward to throughout the year, and staff and inmates all participated. Only the nuns were stand-offish when it came ‘fun’, but even they had their annual 4 sisters race, widdershins around the hospital perimeter. It was like the Palio medieval horse race in Siena, Italy. But with nuns. Each wing would be represented by a single, chosen nun wearing a wimple in the ‘colours’ of their crew. It was a short but brutal race, invariably ending in hospitalisations (conveniently nearby), or occasionally, death. After one such fatality (Sister Moran of the North Wing by decapitation), 1938 saw a ‘blunt weapons only’ rule applied to the race. The week of the race aroused such a febrile, factionalised atmosphere, that fights often broke out amongst the supporters of the competing crews.

Doctor Di Popolo performs the ‘Carving of the Saint’ ceremony in the Everbleak staff quarters, watched by an over-excited ward sister,

The nuns were also connected to another annual event: July’s ‘carving of the saint’ ceremony. It was they who had ‘acquired’ the mummified remains of St Anthony somewhere in the Middle East, and had bought him to the crypt of their makeshift chapel at Everbleak. Debate still rages about who possesses the actual St Anthony, because there are (currently) 7 bodies, 5 heads, 29 hands, and 233 fingers or toes in circulation throughout the Catholic Church.

The ceremony involved removing a small slice (known as a ‘skin relic’) from the mummified remains with a special holy carving knife and serving fork. The skin relic was then grated onto the faithful’s pasta in the manner of a pungent black truffle (to which it shares a similar taste and odour, apparently). The ceremony can hardly be described as ‘fun’, but it certainly entertained the pious. The subsequent and predictable breakouts of diarrhoea were far less entertaining though.

One of Everbleak’s favourite games was called ‘Blagger’ (or ‘Shove Johnny Shove’), which could last anywhere between a few seconds or several years. The aim of the game was to pretend, convincingly, to be somebody else – e.g. patient becomes doctor, nurse becomes patient, and clown becomes nun. Within the confines of an asylum though, Blagger takes on a whole range of added dimensions and dynamics. There were already people playing Blagger without even knowing it (through insanity and schizophrenia), and some deliberately using it for deception (e.g. patients trying to get access to the nun’s secret cake locker in the East Wing). Others merely took on personas and dressed-up for their own infantile or demented amusement. The longest game of ‘Blagger’ on record lasted for 7 years and 3 months, when Audrey Timmermans – a newly arrived inmate with acute pyschosis – managed to pass herself off as a laboratory assistant in the Everbleak Institute. She was only discovered after hacking an orderly to pieces for looking at her ‘like a sarcastic catfish’.

Regular boardgames like Monopoly and Scrabble were mostly banned: either because the inmates of Everbleak would lose / eat the pieces, or because they’d invariably end up with someone being shanked or assaulted.

We look at some other popular games and rituals in future blogs.

A game of Blagger (Shove Johnny Shove). Rufus tries to pass himself off as a nun.

Some children in the 70’s and 80’s would look forward to visits from the Balloon Lady (Esther McDoone), but most were utterly terrified by her demon-possessed clown act.

The Metamorphosis of Sylvan Kane

September and October of 1929 took Wall Street by the ankles and shook it upside down until everything had fallen out of its pockets. The Crash was a disaster for almost everyone: fortunes and livelihoods wiped out in the blink of an eye: high diving bankers embraced by the sidewalks of New York City, and the start of the Great Depression. But for Everbleak, it bought an influx. A new wave of people broken by uncontrollable events and the cruelty of a god like Mamon.

Extra patients meant extra revenue from Government, but Sylvan Kane had gradually been losing interest in commercial matters since leaving Bedlam at the start of the century. He had founded Everbleak specifically to delve deeper into the hinterlands of alternative treatments, parapsychology and mysticism. So by the late 20’s, run-of-the-mill mental illness no longer held any allure for him. It was the freaks, the outcasts, the sideshow anomalies that he wanted to beckon him in through the tent flap. 

He had already started spending a lot of time alone in Everbleak’s greenhouses, where he enjoyed (accompanied by Prokofiev 78’s and laudanum) pottering around with the psychotropic and flesh-eating plants, looking for interesting new strains and mutations. So the sudden arrival of suicidal businessmen and investors looking for neural realignment was the very last thing he wanted. His diary from this time acts as a window into his state of mind..

I tire of convention. I tire of the convention of ‘hospital’ and the all inherent convention and weight contained within that bloody word. It’s designation as a place of cures and wellness bores me senseless. Or maybe convention has tired of me and my aged restlessness. I oscillate between the desire for unbridled adventure, and the desire for uncomplicated peace. I am a coin, spinning between the head and the tail. Chance will no doubt decide which way I fall, but in the meantime, I crave whisky on ice, and nun on fire.

Manish Ram the Nepalese monkey Shaman with his trusty steed ‘Scout’

For Kane, the Great Depression had arrived early. He was becoming as everbleak as the title he’d chosen for his hospital-asylum. So he decided to take drastic action. Out of nowhere, he dramatically announced a trip to the village of Machhapuchre in Nepal (of all the random places in the world), thanks to a telepathic conversation with a wizened little shaman monkey who rode around on a greyhound that had been saddled like a horse.

Manish Ram, my shaman guide, told me telepathically about a rare Nepalese flower – unseen for decades – that has potent psychotropic properties. It only grows in one village – right at the top of the world, amongst the clouds… amongst the picked-clean bones of the Sherpa dead. Does it exist? Probably not. But I want to find it: to go on one last big adventure.

Sylvan Kane

That’s how Kane himself put it, but those around him said that laudanum and insanity had taken such a toll on him by this point, that he actually believed he could commune with animals telepathically. We have to consider, however, that elevating Manish Ram to ‘untouchable’ shaman status had caused a lot of jealousy amongst Everbleak’s doctors and nuns.

Financial Crash mental trauma inmates being ‘selected’. This was a controversial process by which drugged Mexican dwarves would choose a random patient each day to ‘spin the wheel of treatments’. Patients were asked to ‘guide’ the whitewash brush with telepathy, giving them the illusion of power over their own recovery.

There was great fanfare as the staff and inmates of Everbleak bid bon voyage to their founding father one misty November morning. He was travelling alone, and lightly. His backpack contained a compass, a maritime sextant, notebooks and specimen jars. Plus enough laudanum to incapacitate a shire horse.

He french-kissed the nuns, patted the midgets on the head, and was gone. 

After being swallowed by Outer Banks mist, Sylvan Kane wasn’t seen or heard from again for two years. Not even a letter or telegram. Some presumed him dead from opium in the back streets of Peking. Some predicted syphilitic madness and suicide. Some imagined him plummeting into a Himalayan ravine or being eaten by wolves. 

But the truth, as is often the case, can be stranger than fiction.

Sylvan Kane hadn’t actually gone anywhere. He had walked a mere 800 yards to the old Manteo Sound lighthouse. And that’s where he had meditated, read and hallucinated for 24 long months.

He had secretly pre-stocked the disused lighthouse with books, dry goods and canned food, so had everything he needed to survive: through all the wars, winters and psychotic episodes that his outer and inner worlds could assail him with. He had even constructed a way to collect and store rain water.

Kane left whatever was troubling him at the foot of the winding stair, and climbed to the room beneath a revolving sun that had lain dusty and extinct since the Civil War. His demons had come with him to this circular womb, curling up with him for warmth as the nights grew dark and windy. Sometimes he wrestled with them: especially the libido and laudanum ones, but eventually they left him alone in quiet contemplation. 

By the time that twenty four months of raging heat and frosted panes had passed, the metamorphosis was complete. The former Morgan Gresham had entered the lighthouse as Sylvan Kane, but left as Nimrod Ballentine: clean-shaven, serene and studious. As he walked back nonchalantly through the hospital’s crumbling portico, the nuns barely recognised him.

A different chapter and era of Everbleak had begun.

Everbleak: full article from Pussy Revolver magazine, 1971

I’d been sent here, by my erstwhile editor, to answer a question: Is Everbleak the weirdest place in America? To do that, you first have to define ‘weird’. Then throw that definition out the nearest window. Weird? You have no goddamn idea…

Benji Redwood

In 1971, a journalist from the counterculture magazine Pussy Revolver visited Everbleak on a writing assignment

By normal road trip standards, this was an easy drive up the east coast, hugging the Atlantic shore through Georgia and South Carolina. Always on the quiet roads, with the Mom ‘n Pop shops and the old timers filling your gas for you. I had a motel booked and waiting for me, but you never knew if it would still be standing after the latest hurricane had passed by. The weatherman on KWTQ said it wouldn’t hit land this time, but the sky was grey, ominous… everbleak.

The storm passed overnight, so I arrived at Everbleak on a bright morning after a dismal sleep in a dismal motel I won’t embarrass the owner by mentioning. The outer banks of North Carolina are weird enough anyway: remote, flat, and with an air of impermanence. The houses stand on spindly legs waiting to be washed away, and the trees are bent double amongst the platinum blonde grass and reeds.

But Everbleak is way weirder than that, hombre. It squats, dark and brooding like a monster about to pounce. And all around it are it’s dark little monster children waiting to be fed. Was I going to be a regurgitated titbit for their hungry mouths?

But then I get met at the door by Jenny Occam, general manager, and she’s all smiles and ocean breeze like I’ve just arrived at a hotel on Miami Beach. She’s going to show me around. ‘Good trip?’ she asks; ‘Can I offer you a lemonade? The clowns hand-pressed it, but the nuns keep them clean mostly’. And just like that, I’m intrigued at what lies beyond her smile and the crumbling portico of the grand entrance hall.

Benji ‘Red’ Redwood, writer and dolphin rights activist. He was eventually fired from Pussy Revolver after a five day bender at the Kentucky Derby with Hunter S Thompson.

I’d been sent here, by my erstwhile editor, to answer a question: Is Everbleak the weirdest place in America? To do that, you first have to define ‘weird’. Then throw that definition out the nearest window. Weird? You have no goddamn idea! My on-off drinking buddy Hunter S Thompson once said ‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro’. I was about test exactly how ‘pro’ at this writing / journalism gig I was.

But first, let me explain what Everbleak is, because it seems to be as schizophrenic as some of its inmates.

Everbleak is essentially three demons possessing a single, dark host: a mental hospital (or ‘Asylum’ in old parlance), a regular medical hospital, and an Institute for medical and parapsychological research. They inhabit a sprawl of buildings, clustered round a main hospital, in grounds that almost reach clear to the beach. It was founded at the start of the century, but most of the buildings were already forty years old by that point, and crumbling in the sea air. Every painted surface here is peeling. Bad skin, bad juju. The sense of foreboding it gives from the outside is palpable.

‘What’s with all the nuns?’ I ask my guide as she waltzes me through wards and corridors. ‘The Sisters of Everbleak’ she tells me, ‘they oversee discipline, security and admin. This place couldn’t function without them’.

They look at me as I pass. But it’s not a look of welcome or curiosity: it’s outright murderous intent. At first I wonder if it’s the beard and cowboy boots, but then one of them stares at my camera and says: ‘No photos. Respect the privacy of the inmates my child, or we’ll feed your nethers to the alligators’. She says it with a smile, so I don’t know whether it’s a joke. I look at Jenny but she just gives this little ‘psychos will be psychos’ kind of resigned shrug. And on we go, deeper into the heart of darkness (if I may steal that imagery from Mr Conrad).

Apart from the psycho nuns, it gets weird real quick. There’s a lot of clowns here: midget ones on hobby horses, alpacas being ridden by (living) ventriloquist’s dummies, and trapeze artistes with streaked mascara. There’s a lot of noise too: part jungle hubbub, part funeral (lots of wailing). It’s like Ken Kesey dropped some LSD in my coffee at the motel: a triple dose. And then the fear comes on. This place is swallowing me; the corridors are digesting me all the way to this thing’s dark stomach.

‘Would you like a cookie?’ asks Jenny as we pass the nurse’s break room. They’re pink wafers, and I’m struck by the colour of them against the peeling green wall. A man in a trilby walks by carrying a live lobster. He’s arguing about something with a chimpanzee dressed as a sailor: an old-fashioned jack tar one. It doesn’t seem to matter to people in Everbleak that animals can’t talk. And now the nuns are looking at my yellow reporter’s notepad with glowering eyes beneath their wimples. ‘Why am I even allowed inside?’ I ask myself as we arrive at Jenny’s office. She looks embarrassed, and then the smell hits me. Before I can ask what it is, she goes behind her desk and grabs a midget nun and a ventriloquist’s dummy (in a state of mid-coital undress) by their collars. Then she virtually throws them into the corridor. You can hear the clack of the wooden dummy hitting the old linoleum, then the sound of the interrupted lovers scampering away. She ushers me to sit, and a clown in a white doctor’s coat asks if we want tea. Jenny declines, but pops a couple of pills. They’re pink and green like the wafer/wall combo, and I wonder whether any of this is really happening. Maybe I’m drugged in the trunk of a car somewhere. Or in a hearse driven by clown undertakers.

For the next hour, I’m regaled with stories… assaulted with anecdotes. Jenny is a good storyteller, and the drugs have opened her skylight up. The sun beams in, beatific and groovy. She tells me a bit about the alchemy and parapsychology going on in the basement labyrinths of the institute: the astral projection and the telekinesis; the ESP and the black magic. ‘Can I see it?’ I ask gingerly. No. Firmly no. But I can have my fortune read if I like. They have a Sherpa from Nepal with a clairvoyant crow, apparently. I politely decline.

Later, we eat lunch in the West Wing staff canteen. It’s pretty clear they’re mostly stoned, and a lot of the nurses and orderlies are wearing masks or circus greasepaint. There’s a dark edge to most of them: a weird kind of menace as they sip their instant coffee and read the daily funnies in the Manteo Bugle. Jenny asks if I want to see the garden, and I leap at the chance for some fresh air. Everbleak smells of musk and decay covered up by cheap perfume, and I still have the sex-stench of her office as a bad memory to exorcise.

The grounds seem bleak on a day like this. This big clouds were back, rolling black and ominous as the wind is punches seven bells out of the weather vane on Everbleak’s gothic roof-steeple. But it’s spacious out there, and they have all kinds of circus folk and people with visible mental illnesses digging, planting and growing things under the watchful eyes of the nuns and nurses. It feels more like a commune than a hospital – or a medieval village, where witches are revered rather than burned.

I suddenly realise that I’ve only just scratched the surface of Everbleak, and that I have absolutely no pictorial evidence of the surreal things I’ve seen. Eventually they let me take one picture of the staff before I go: Doctor Mabuse and Claudia – a nurse in one of the psychiatric wards. They are unwilling (or not allowed) to explain the significance of the blindfold or sea urchin though.

Dr Mabuse and Claudia

I drive back to the motel in need of a drink. Everbleak presents infinitely more questions than answers, and apart from the things you do see, you’re left wondering about what you didn’t: the closed doors, the locked rooms, the smoke from the outbuildings. What are they hiding? Would I even want to know?

Everbleak rocks: madness and musicality

Music ‘ain’t therapy, mother fucker. Music is God, the Devil, and everything in between.

Little Lenny ‘the hex’ Lennon

The Gimps: a secure wing beat combo, pictured here in a publicity shot from 1970. Formed by Little Lenny ‘the hex’ Lennon (pictured here on snare drum), they played one show in the Everbleak playhouse theatre before disbanding due to ‘musical differences’.

Insanity unlocks all kinds of creativity. It makes fragile minds teeter on the edge and stare into the abyss. That’s where the most powerful and darkest stuff is: at the bottom of the abyss.

And so it was with Everbleak, bubbling away like a cauldron of raw insanity and emotion. Sometimes it threw out the profile of a serial killer, and sometimes it threw out a killer riff.

The music of Everbleak is as original, off-kilter and eclectic as you would expect for something emanating from a hothouse of hormonal lunacy. It only pays passing deference to fashions and trends, because it’s protagonists were either isolated (quite literally in the secure wing) from external cultural influence, or had no interest in the mundanity of the outside world.

Go-go dancing in the nurse’s staff room, 1965. On the piano is Daphne ‘Whisky’ Grayson who later quit nursing to join Waylon Jennings’ touring band.

Bands formed organically with no desire to follow ‘normal’ conventions about line-up or style. They could just as easily team up a Gregorian plain-chant vocalist with a Stylophone player, as they could assemble a regular ‘combo’ of drum, bass and guitar. So, in true Everbleak style, whatever weirdness you can imagine will always be trumped by the surreal reality.

We were going for a New Orleans soul sound, but not one like you’d hear down on Bourbon. We wanted the sound of a soul singer who’d been cursed by voodoo, eaten by a one-eyed alligator, and was having to plead his way out of hell. Ya’know… the sound of him begging and pleading with Lucifer himself. But instead of his voice it was the sitar doing all the pleading, and all the time, the devil would be going ‘no, no, no’ on the bass guitar…

Willie Shaw – founder of the Spunkjet Five

Scarecrows ballroom dancing in the South wing of Everbleak. Every empty hall, corridor and room was a potential stage.

We’ll leave you, once again, in the capable hands of Little Lenny ‘the hex’ Lennon. This quote is taken from a copy of The Everbleak Bugle – a newsletter created and circulated by the inmates (sporadically) over three decades (60’s – 80’s).

We’re lucky. We have all the musical talent under the sun in this place. And what’s under the moon too. Light and dark, y’know? And we have time and space to swing it, man. I mean really swing it’s dick off. Sure, I could use a little whisky from time to time, but at least I got my music. At least I got that.

Unusual afflictions (part 1)

Oddities come to Everbleak as a last resort, but discover that it’s a resort for oddities

Student nurses (c.1960) study a patient with severe Tudor syndrome: ‘What if the Spanish Armada sinks all the potatoes?’.

The doctors and nurses at Everbleak have seen and dealt with all manner of bizarre illnesses, diseases and syndromes over the years. Some have been of their own making: unforeseen side-effects of unconventional treatments and experiments. Others were brought to their door by chance: the afflictions of travelling carnivals and twilight towns of creeping, inbred darkness.

Dr Randall Poole, head of Freak studies at the Everbleak institute once said: “Oddities come to Everbleak as a last resort, but discover that it’s a resort for oddities, so they end up staying”. And it was true. The circus freaks were always treated with great sensitivity. Even the nuns would lighten their brutality (a little…), for the most physically and mentally deformed. Sylvan Kane had also mellowed somewhat over the years, gradually phasing out his Bedlam impresario act of showing freaks to the public. He started showing uncharacteristic tenderness to his charges some time in the late 1920’s. Rumour had it that following a fleeting romance with a dwarf trapeze artiste, Kane himself had become father to a child with ‘terrible afflictions’ – but this, along with the identity of the child in question, was never confirmed.

On the way to surgery, c.1969. An uncommon case of Bulbitus, also known as ‘bud head’.

In the 70’s, interviews were conducted with some of Everbleak’s nurses by ‘Pussy Revolver’ – a counterculture magazine run out of a laundromat basement in Savannah. They contained some interesting historical insight into the strange afflictions that had passed through Everbleak’s wards, laboratories and corridors.

I saw some stuff, sure. All kindsa filth and freakery. But we always felt sorry for them, ya know? There was this whole group of sightless albinos that got bussed in. Seven of them. They’d been working underground at some secret government facility and had started turning into blind moles with all the colour drained out. Ultraviolet, vitamin D, and amphetamines – that’s what we gave them. And they’d get taken outside in this blacked-out sedan chair thing, where they could get fresh air without getting fried up.

Staff Nurse Judy Thornball

The age of social media has ushered a plethora of new afflictions and conditions into Everbleak . In the ‘Idiot Ward’, the inmates can spend up to half the day taking selfies – on phones that have no battery or signal. They call themselves ‘influencers’.

There was this strange syndrome – Lacrimosa Separation Syndrome… LSS. It affected Ventriloquists who couldn’t bear to be parted from their dummies. This is the dumb, wooden dummies we’re talking about: not the sinister ones who run around with sharp blades causing mayhem. LSS manifested itself in this strange, irrational anxiety about death: would their dummy be cremated or buried with them? Who would care for their dummy after they’d gone if the dummy didn’t go with them? We had this fake crematorium chapel built, so the ventriloquists could lie in a coffin with their dummy and experience how it would be; that they’d be reduced to ash together. It seemed to help.

Dr Frank Coomber, Psychologist

Balloon-head deflation needs to occur as slowly and as naturally as possible in order to avoid potentially lethal side effects

Everbleak is a place of light and dark, of fluctuation and ambiguity. They didn’t always get it right – medically or morally, but they tried. And that has to count for something, right?