A Haunted Asylum
A true ghost story
Way back in the early eighties, when I was a mere whippersnapper, I worked and trained at the UK’s maximum secure psychiatric hospital. Or ‘Special Hospital’ as they were then called. A payphone directly opposite the Victorian main gate still displayed its old name… ‘Criminal Mental Institution.’ The name may have changed, but its function had not.
I was doing a period of night duty at the time of the reported incident. During the ten hour shift the patients were locked up in their individual rooms, or dormitories, where they remained until the day staff came on duty at 7 am. The role of night staff was essentially security. This included hourly checks to ensure no one had escaped (any incident of such always made national news and the sound-alarm of the escape siren was the most ‘haunting’ of my early adult life) and occasional checks of the exterior building. Most of the buildings, built sometime in the 1860s, were three storeys. Each floor represented one ward. Because of the singular security role — as all the patients remained locked up, there was no physical contact, no therapeutic input — only one member of staff was required per ward. Apart from the odd tea break when you met up on the ground floor with your two colleagues, you were alone on your ward for the duration of the night.
