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
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 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.
everbleak 