The children of Everbleak (part 1)

A visit from the ‘Turtle Man’ to Everbleak orphanage, 1959.

Whilst the nuns of Everbleak were hardly known for their ‘welfare’ or kindness, they did allow Sylvan Kane to open an orphanage in 1913. Although he asked for children to be accompanied by donations, many were allowed to stay on a charitable basis. In the early days, however, they were immediately put to work in the kitchens, gardens and laboratories to ‘earn their keep’. 

Everbleak also had several children’s wards that became especially popular with middle-class families who could combine treatment of their mentally-troubled offspring and ‘little freaks’ with an Atlantic Ocean vacation. They would abandon them in the gloomy entrance hall at the start of the week, then return with tans, straw hats and a relaxed disposition on Sunday afternoon. Kane was quick to market these ‘Cure-cations’ in periodicals and journals, along with other toothsome (largely cocaine-based) children’s tonics and cordials. 

The Guzman twins arrive at Everbleak c.1953. The man carrying them is Arnold Parker, a circus impresario who decided to cut their telepathy act from his roster.

The nuns were terrible at organising games, so the children would invent their own entertainment. Some of it was absurdist, and some of it was downright dangerous or distasteful. ‘Sack Back’ or ‘Pin the dwarf-sack on the alpaca’ was a self-explanatory game for children old enough to be able to contain a struggling dwarf within a hessian laundry bag. ‘Nun and Run’ simply involved knocking or ripping the wimple from a nun and retiring to a safe distance. However, it was usually repaid with solitary confinement or a light beating, so was usually done in a crowd, or from behind, with pre-planned escape routes. ‘Dead Head’ was an outdoors game where a child was forcefully buried up to its neck in the sand dunes for dogs to urinate on. ‘King Dead Head’ was a popular variant where a mackerel or crab ‘crown’ was placed upon the head for ravenous seagulls to feast upon (usually resulting in injury and stitches). 

A publicity shot for Everbleak’s children’s hospital, c.1967. ‘All the dolls and healing you could ever want’. Watching in the background is Lionel ‘the lion’ Peters, the retarded caretaker of the children’s wards.

The children were also allowed to form their own houses / factions, each with its own complicated membership rules and initiation ceremony. Some onlookers would simply describe them as ‘gangs’ though. ‘The Circx’ were a loose alliance of miscellaneous circus children and orphans. ‘The Tiny Terrors’ were a thuggish (and dangerous) troupe of midgets and dwarfs. ‘The Stonewalls’ were Southern confederates, and mostly orphans of fallen soldiers. And ‘The Nations’ were a motley crew of sideshow freaks and various other ‘abominations’ that their name was derived from. Despite all the rivalry and loyalties, they were mostly unified in their hatred of clowns and nuns (apart from The Circx, who had a few child clowns amongst their ranks).

A supervised maternal visit at Everbleak’s maximum security wing. Date unknown.

Education was left in the care of the nuns – or not at all. For those with the mental capacity or desire to learn, lessons focused on basic arithmetic and reading, along with practical skills such as shiv-making (a nun speciality), wilderness survival, and woodcarving.

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.

Everbleak: experimental treatments (part 1)

Horseshoe crab blood being harvested for ‘Doctor Calhoun’s Anti-doldrum Serum’: a milk-based tonic for the insane, that became a specialty of the house. Until 1935 it also incorporated trace opium.

Think of the weirdest, most depraved thought you’ve ever had. Something so fucked up that you’ll carry it to the grave. You know what I’m talking about, you filthy animal. Now multiply that by ten. You’re still not even in the same ballpark as the experiments that were conducted at Everbleak throughout the 20th century.

The veins of Everbleak run dark and sluggish. Black treacle on a summer’s day, with blowflies laying eggs on a dead clown’s corpse. Just as Sylvan Kane intended.

The experimental treatments of Everbleak were a natural continuation of what he had been trying to achieve at Bedlam. On the benign surface, that meant new ways to cure melancholia and madness. But the dark reality of men like Kane – and the misfits who surrounded and followed him – was the desire to go down all kinds of other rabbit holes: alchemy, parapsychology, black magic and reanimation to name but a few. Theirs was a world of science and medicine, but outweighed by the swirling imagination and contagion of insanity – sat like a fat boy at the other end of the seesaw.

Everbleak’s patented ‘sleep inducer’: a contraption that aimed to synchronise a subject’s alpha waves with those of a giant, living bat.

From the start, Kane encouraged his staff and patients to think about the nature of physical and mental health in an oblique, unconventional way. It resulted in both brilliant ideas foreshadowing today’s notions of wellbeing, and bleak cul-de-sacs of death and depravity. There was often no middle ground. Try to imagine circus freaks and midget clowns riding alpacas across the North Carolina sand dunes with newts pickled in vinegar placed beneath their tongues like a lozenge, and veins full of amphetamines. Or life-drawing classes where graters were taken to the mummified remains of catholic saints to produce a pungent kind of holy parmesan to be snuffed and snorted as a cure for the nun-blues. These kind of things were regular, everyday events at Everbleak.

Dr Christoph Schfartsinger running clinical trials of his ‘swallowed crow’ treatment for speech disorders – in this instance on a French mannequin-child at precisely 19:59.

Although the natural, entrepreneurial instinct of Kane was to shout his exploits to the crowd in the manner of a coarse carnival barker, many of Everbleak’s more ‘extreme’ experiments remain a secret: not even a footnote in the classified files.

And long after Kane’s death, in the fifties and sixties, both the FBI and CIA’s fledging parapsychology and occult divisions were rumoured to have close links to the Everbleak Institute and some of its practitioners. In time, this currently classified information will become publicly accessible, and should provide some new chapters, insights and gossip in our Everbleak story.

An unknown physical fitness apparatus from around 1907. Everbleak’s proximity to the sea allowed Kane to incorporate all kinds of marine biology into his experiments. The photo is probably an early publicity shot, because the user is Guinevere Botton, the first governess of the children’s wards and Everbleak’s orphanage for the insane. She was later ousted by the nuns and died a broken alcoholic in Dodge City.

Everbleak: a safe space for wayward clowns

Nurses attend to a clown suffering from ‘the sickness’, c.1921

Clowns have been one of the most misunderstood and marginalised segments of society since Joseph Grimaldi first created our modern, coulrophobic image of them in the 19th century. Drawing on inspiration from the (much) older Italian commedia dell’arte, his ‘Auguste’, red clown mutation was the inspiration for everything that followed. And what followed was largely a monstrosity, creating the deep fear and mistrust that has followed their kind ever since. 

Shunned – even by each other – clowns became a feral and lonely sub-species of alcoholic children’s entertainers, third-rate circus performers, midget rodeo sidekicks, psychotic serial killers, and cliched horror memes. 

Clowns hate two things: themselves and children. So it’s no surprise that children hate them too, finding them unfunny, dull, nightmare-inducing or too obvious in their forced slapstick. Throwing a bucket of feathers at the audience isn’t remotely entertaining. Tipping some custard down your own baggy trousers, even less so. But there is nothing more tragic and gut-wrenching than watching a clown too drunk to make a balloon giraffe ‘dying’ in front of a birthday party of bored seven year olds. Yes, he’s been sleeping in the car since the divorce. Yes, he has that restraining order hanging over him. But does he really deserve to be slow-clapped out of the door with his ‘bag of fun’ thrown down the pathway after him? 

A wigless, noseless clown in the grip of a psychotic episode conducts an imaginary orchestra with a stuffed owl baton

Because of the mistrust, hatred and self-loathing, clowns are highly susceptible to addiction and suicide. It’s why they started turning up at Everbleak as soon as it opened its doors in 1906. And word quickly spread on the clown jungle telegraph: here was a place with tinctures, methadone, hot meals, and no laughter. A perfect place for clowns with ‘the sickness’ (as profound clown psychosis and depression eventually became labelled). They were suddenly free from the responsibility of ‘fun’ that so troubled and eluded them, and there were no hostile, provincial crowds to fill them with anxiety. 

Over the years, lengthy studies and clinical trials were conducted by the Everbleak Institute to make sense of the apparent correlation between clown and serial killer personality traits. No definitive conclusion was reached, but the numbers proved a higher likelihood for clowns to become mass murderers – and vice-versa. Subsequently, they were never allowed near knives or other makeshift weaponry – even at the dinner table. Everbleak instead issued them with a ‘spork’, which could only inflict minimal damage to passing nuns, alpacas and visitors. 

Fun and frolics (or extreme subordination?) in the midget clown ward, c.1930. Note the presence of a disco mirror ball, some 45 years before Studio 54. Circus clown Chico Ramires (pictured right) claimed he invented disco balls in 1925 after waking up beneath the dangling testicles of an Alpaca whilst traveling with a circus troupe through Columbia.

Chico Ramires provided a clown’s-eye view of Everbleak through his journals and creative writings. He was the archetypal ‘wayward clown midget’, with multiple personality disorders and a magpie’s obsession for shiny things. He was a stealer – and a biter, but had a particular way with words, often writing poetry to reflect his mood or state of mind:

Song of Winter

This is the love that dare not speak
These are the clouds o'er Everbleak
These are the rivulets of blood - so red
This is the wound at the back of your head
This is the colour of your Winterness:
So white
So cold
So lost
So dead

Despite their natural inter-species antipathy, Everbleak clowns prefer to reside in clown-only wards and dorms. Some even stay on to become clown therapists and doctors – or just to annoy the nuns. Which suggests that Everbleak, despite its flaws, is viewed as a haven and safe harbour amongst the clown community.

The Costalini Twins pestering one of Everbleak’s dinner ladies for late-night toast, c.1942. Their request was probably entertained, because although they were diminutive in size, it was always advised not to cross them in any way.

The Nuns of Everbleak (part 1)

Sister Magdalena on her afternoon tea rounds with ‘Arthur’ before becoming Everbleak’s first Mother Fucking Superior.

Nuns have been part of the fabric and sinew of Everbleak since the beginning, and the Everbleak nuns have always come in a variety of shapes, sizes and sadistic neuroses: a pick-and-mix of psychotic nuns, if you will.

But this is where history becomes controversial. Many say that the nuns of Everbleak aren’t actually nuns at all: just opportunist sadists who hide their cruelty behind false wimples and religion.

Either way, Sylvan Kane started inviting local nuns through his salt-rusted hospital doors as early as 1911. Following a fire at the dark convent on Manteo Sound, it’s believed that he offered them new lodgings in return for cheap labour and security enforcement at Everbleak – which they duly overran like a monochrome rodent infestation.

For a long time there was no formal structure to the nun’s abhorrent cruelty; they just arrived in dribs and drabs of diocesan disgrace and murderous intent, smoking, drinking, and fighting amongst themselves to establish a natural pecking order. But things were to become more organised when Sister Magdalena seized the mantle of Mother Fucking Superior, some time around 1929, and kneaded them (with no small degree of force) into some kind of shape.

Even after her promotion, she continued to take afternoon tea to the patients with ‘Arthur’, her simian confidante, rapping ungrateful people across the knuckles or nose with a wooden spoon, and giving them nightmares with her notoriously disturbing ‘smile’.

The nuns have always ruled the discipline of patients and staff alike with an iron fist: a cruel combination of bitter austerity in goodwill, and angry sexual frustration. Beatings, punishment and black mass sacrifices were all par for the course. Many of the most unspeakable, depraved incidents in Everbleak’s history are nun-related.

Sister Fiona: pictured in the bear crèche in 1950. The ‘bear’ in this instance is another nun wearing a costume to scare the child (shitless) out of its apparent learning difficulties.

In 1957, pitched battles occurred between the nuns and the midgets over a seating-height dispute in the East Wing canteen. The echoes of vicious recriminations still occur to this day, and there is a mutual hatred between the two factions. Even the introduction of some midget nuns from Bulgaria failed to build bridges.

Something wicked this way comes: Sister Hannah makes notes concerning the interaction of arachnid and dummy. Nuns were often involved, through choice, in the most disturbing and horrific experiments (Everbleak classified files).

Editorial note: we have looked for stories and anecdotes showing a softer, caring side to the nuns, but there aren’t any.

Nurses perform a bandaging demonstration for the nuns of Everbleak, c.1949.

Everbleak: the grounds (part 1)

Supervised target practice with the Bernaud twins, 1955. Later banned for a William Burroughs style ‘accident’, it was popular pastime for those permitted near a live firearm.

Everbleak hospital and it’s outbuildings stand within sprawling grounds that cover the full encyclopaedia of Outer Banks flora: from windswept ocean grass to Japanese Honeysuckle; from Russian Olive to Sawtooth Oak.

The grounds have been an important and integral feature of the day-to-day culture and life of the hospital since founding father Sylvan Kane first mooted the idea of a therapeutic and telekinetic golf course during a bout of whisky fever in 1910. Although no golf course was ever realised, since then, much work has been done by patients and staff alike to landscape and cultivate their surroundings.

Not all parts of the grounds are accessible. Areas for the graveyard, witches coven and nudist colony for the insane have been designated as ‘private’. It is here that inmates with the required passes can undertake supervised debauchery and perversions not permitted within the confines of the hospital (usually for safety and modesty reasons).

In certain circumstances, inmates are allowed to picnic in the gardens and grounds, or take part in a game of scotch egg boules (using a boiled quails egg as a jack). Nobody knows exactly when this tradition started, but it remains a popular Everbleak pastime.

Family picnic in the Winter Garden. Early 70’s? The picture shows Betty McShane and her ‘ventrilokids’ with one of Everbleak’s numerous large-scale anatomical sculpture commissions. Betty was originally imprisoned for murdering her husband, but always maintained that the throat-slitting incident had been carried out by one of his dummies as he slept in their holiday caravan.

Occasionally, Everbleak is visited by travelling circuses and carnivals. Whilst popular with patients and their guests, it can be hard for staff to tell the visiting and the resident circus freaks and clowns apart. This has led to numerous ‘escapes’ over the years, and it is especially hard to catch midgets once they are loose in the surrounding countryside. This led to the carnivals and fairs being run by Everbleak’s resident nun community (we will have a separate blog on them later), but this policy was reversed due to complaints that nuns just ‘aren’t that much fun’ when it comes to rides and sideshows.

Sister Morgana invites you to ride the carousel during 1965’s Everbleak revels.

One ‘outside’ incident in Everbleak lore that still endures today was when the LeStrange sisters and their brother Jacques found the mutilated body of a wolf not far from the latrine huts. The wolf, having swallowed something whole, subsequently found the ‘something’ in question gnawing out through its stomach and torso to freedom.

Closer inspection revealed that a glitter bow-tie had been left behind in the savaged flesh: the instantly recognisable property of Lord Snaffles, a ventriloquist’s dummy and (notoriously perverted) inmate. So although the identity of the victim-turned-killer wasn’t a mystery, his whereabouts remained so.

Nobody saw Lord Snaffles or heard the pitter-patter of his diminutive dress shoes at Everbleak ever again. Which was a relief to the women who wanted to use the latrines without their toilette being spied upon by a perverted ventriloquist’s dummy.

Jacques and the LeStrange sisters make a gruesome discovery in the woods near the latrines

Everbleak: the early years

Orderlies wheel a sick girl (name unknown) to theatre – c.1907

From the start, Everbleak was a place of mystery and experiment. It attracted physical and intellectual monstrosities so dark and extreme that it often became impossible to tell the patients from the staff: the treaters and the treated, cohabitating in a cauldron of insanity that swirled amongst the dune grass and bleak clouds of North Carolina’s Atlantic coast.

Sylvan Kane, our erstwhile reinvented founder, actively encouraged this fluidity of perception and role, reasoning that only the most insane and dark-minded can identify and treat the bleakest outer reaches of insanity, addiction and horror.

But this reasoning may also have been a product of Kane’s own descent into opium addiction through laudanum, and his subsequent obsession with paranormal experiments, telekinesis and witchcraft, the research of which saw him open the Everbleak Institute in 1909. It was mostly housed below-ground in the cellars of the hospital, where hidden doors and corridors allowed the psychic freaks and aberrations to conduct their shady ‘business of the alternative mind’ (as Kane came to call Everbleak’s supernatural excursions) in almost complete secrecy. In fact, even now, classified archives are only just starting to reveal the full extent of the strange happenings and horrors that went on there.

Very early autoscopy / astral projection experiment at the Everbleak Institute for Paranormal Studies. 1910?

In 1911, Kane started parapsychology tests using human and animal mediums. The aim was to guess which of the simple card symbols would be laid next. Kane believed that animals and subnormal human intellects would have an advantage: i.e. a pure, uncluttered mind that was able to tune into psychic frequencies and auras. Tests veered between inconclusive and downright fraudulent, but he was convinced that certain individuals and beings – especially South American alpacas – possessed extra sensory abilities.

Maude Moreno, an albino clairvoyant goes walking with her son Ike, c.1912. Kane built a series of boardwalks in the grounds of Everbleak for the wellbeing of the patients and staff. As well as numerous drowning incidents, they were later destroyed by a hurricane.

Everbleak is located in Dare County, just a mile or so from Kitty Hawk, where the Wright Brothers had completed their first powered flight in 1903. Although it slightly predates the founding of Everbleak in 1906, it appears that Kane was hugely impressed by both the feat itself and the fact that he had washed up so close to its seismic epicentre. There are numerous Wright Brother references in his personal correspondence and diaries between 1906-1915, and Kane would have certainly drawn inspiration from an ‘anything’s possible’ event like that.

‘Anything’s possible’ could easily have been Kane’s personal motto, such was his optimism, tenacity and insanity. Whether it was grafting the head of a clown onto a bulldog, or inviting Frida Khalo to tea, nothing was beyond imagination – or aspiration.

Madame X was a psychic at Everbleak for almost thirty years. During this time, she performed numerous parapsychology demonstrations and cold readings for both the FBI and CIA. She later swapped Everbleak for The Everglades to rear alligators.

Welcome to Everbleak

The history of Everbleak is a long and complicated one. It has evolved across eras and cultural sensitivities, sometimes in the shadows of secrecy and shame, and sometimes with the pageantry and fanfare of a travelling circus.

It was founded, in the Spring of 1906, by Dr Morgan Gresham, an English doctor who had formerly plied his trade and theorems at London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital for the insane – more commonly known as ‘Bedlam’.

Gresham had earned a reputation (some would say notoriety) for both his controversial treatment ideas, and his panache for entrepreneurial showmanship. It was he that turned Bedlam into a leisure destination for Victorian families to ‘enjoy’ the howls and gurning of mental patients on weekend afternoons. For a small fee, of course.

They would come in their droves: children in sailor suits, and stern men with moustaches, pointing at the psychological aberrations as nurses tried frantically to stop the patients in Bedlam’s fetid human zoo masturbating or throwing their faeces.

Visitors particularly liked those poor, demented souls who had taken on a character, believing – in their insanity – that they were the person in question. Although he had died almost half a century previously, Isambard Kingdom Brunel was still a hugely popular celebrity (largely amongst servants and imbeciles), and Bedlam contained three full-time ‘Brunels’ who would strut around in stovepipe hats and hirsute sideboards, railing at imaginary viaducts and gangs of navvies. They had to be kept in separate wings in order not to murder each other as ‘imposters’, and were not allowed to wear the heavy watch-chain favoured by Brunel in case it became a knuckleduster or strangulation device.

We digress, but all of these darkly humorous, surreal entertainment opportunities – and the appalling taste of the public who demanded them – were duly noted by the keen-eyed Gresham. It became a template for what was to come at Everbleak, though by that time, Gresham was arguably becoming as mad as his patients.

Doctor Morgan Gresham. Date unknown.

Strangely, Gresham’s family history was woven very much into the fabric and history of Bedlam. In 1546, his 9th Great Grandfather and Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Gresham, petitioned Henry VIII to grant responsibility for Bethlem hospital (as it was then known) to the city. Morgan Gresham was very much aware and proud of this legacy, so it seems strange that he abruptly disappeared overnight in 1903 from his lodgings in Lambeth, only to resurface almost three years later – on a different continent, and under a different name.

Nobody knows what medical scandal or scandalous affair had forced Gresham to flee Bedlam and London, but he ended up at North Carolina’s windswept Outer Banks, where he managed to secure the lease on a large (but dilapidated) former recuperation hospital for the Civil War wounded. The finances surrounding this property arrangement remain a mystery, but his name had been changed to Sylvan Kane, and he embarked, with his usual manic fervour, upon a mission of personal redemption and reinvention within its crumbling halls, corridors and dorms.

The original architects of the Barrington hospital facility had reasoned that the salty sea air of the Atlantic would invigorate war-damaged lungs and minds, but in actuality, it just created damp peeling walls and copious amounts of rust. And it wasn’t just the fabric of the building that descended into ruin: all the patients and staff had been turned into gaunt ghosts by opiates. A whole institution of drooling addicts and suicidal excess.

By the time Gresham (now Kane) acquired the Barrington facility, it was a hulking mess of abandoned wards and bleak outbuildings huddled around the main hospital like a murder of crows.

Dorothea Linley – the famous Egg Lady of Everbleak – on her delivery rounds, c.1959. Linley was in fact a mental patient who was allowed to tend to the hens as part of her therapy. She is pictured here with Stefano Bismarck: an unhinged, opiate-addicted magician who managed to saw through multiple assistants in the drug-crazed belief that his omnipotence could later resurrect them.

Where does the name Everbleak come from? There is little written or oral evidence to clarify this, but it’s believed that it derives from Gresham’s description of profoundly melancholic (i.e. clinically depressed) patients having a permanent kind of bleakness: everbleak.

This blog aims to act as an archive of the characters, methods, incidents and lore associated with Everbleak from its inception in 1906, through to its heyday in the forties and fifties, and beyond.

We have meticulously collected photos, legends and oral histories from staff and inmates alike. We will tell the stories of Everbleak through them. They are, by turns, sad, strange, funny and disturbing.

Welcome to Everbleak.

A doctor on his rounds in the Everbleak maximum security wing – c.1932. In the foreground is Pepe Fontaine aka ‘The Midget Clown Killer of Biloxi’. Fontaine’s killing spree took in seven states before he was finally cornered and captured in a large net. All of his victims were shoe store clerks who had been unable to satisfy his desired (specialist) footwear needs. Fontaine was never released, and died at Everbleak in 1949, choking to death on a peach cobbler.

Rehabilitation session for Lola McBride, the bird-headed girl of Spokane.