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.