Love amongst the lunatics

An afternoon asylum tryst in the Everbleak playhouse theatre. No mutated love or freak romance was prohibited amongst the inmates and staff.

Romantic liaisons. Erotic trysts. Midget orgies. Everbleak has seen them all. Love, like nature, can flower and bloom in the most unusual and inhospitable of places.

Love between psychopaths or the clinically depressed is a recognition and acceptance of the other’s demons: a meeting of wayward minds, usually in a frenzy of sexual perversion, though sometimes in the form of epic poems, or mutilated body-parts given as love tokens.

A doctor is prepared for an early sexual contact experiment. It was originally believed that any kind of love or romantic ectoplasm was highly infectious.

Unlike the repression and bromide sexual suppression of other mental facilities, Sylvan Kane was keen for Everbleak to be open and permissive when it came to affairs of the heart: whether that was romance (or lust) between patients, staff, nuns, or midget clowns wearing a tutu, he wanted to observe how mental aberration affected the accepted ‘rules’ and physiology of human courtship. He also believed that love of the most intense, murderous kind must possess some kind of visible aura. He helped pioneer spectroscopy cameras and techniques to capture this ‘love aura’, but it remained elusive: much like romance in his own life.

An early spectroscopic experiment to capture the ‘love aura’. The camera operator pictured (Dick Ramsbottom) is attempting to add additional sexual provocation via his prehensile, octopus-like penis.

The downside of a laissez faire attitude to romance is a festering undercurrent of jealousy and it’s accompanying green-eyed monster. It resulted in fights, feuds, and murderous revenge: hardly surprising in a facility full of thin-skinned psychopaths and serial killers. Mostly it was all kept in check by the nuns, unless they were the ones (frequently) at the root of it.

Valentine’s Day became an important day at Everbleak. It was one of only two days (Christmas day being the other) that the secure wards and wings were permitted to mingle freely with each other, and the staff and patients of the wider hospital. They were allowed to dress in homemade costumes that ranged from garish to gruesome, and deliver valentines cards and gifts to the object of their (mostly insane) affections. In some cases, this could be monkeys, birds, alpacas or circus freaks.

Everbleak was, and has remained, a place where love flourishes, however dark and inappropriate that love might be.

An unknown inmate brings a stolen statue of a saint to their ‘Valentine’: a masked pagan monkey-god by the name of Vanas.