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.
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
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.
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