Asylum 113

Chapter 1

"I'm not crazy! I'm not crazy!" the tortured soul's screams echoed through the long forgotten building. The walls crumbled and the floors, rotten. The doors, heavy and cold, stood like tall metal soldiers. The windows were barred with rusty black iron and the windows themselves were tightly bolted. The vast building was stripped and barren, not a soul in sight for it had high metal fences decorated with barbed wire that trapped the dark building. Warnings were dotted around each of the fences and the place had long been removed from all maps and road signs. Trees and wildlife stretched around the large building, the green life went on for miles in all different directions, a small grey road curving in from the north. 'The Road to Recovery' they called it. 'They' meaning all the staff that worked in that tormented building. It's always been there, that road, company for the grotesque building. It wasn't always like this... once it was the most famous asylum to be run and not for good reasons, no, this building was famous for the amount of deaths there were. The asylum opened in 1851 and was the 113th asylum in the country to final be shut down in 1921, with a death toll of over 13,980 people. This included patients and staff. In the years that it was open, the asylum housed over 16,000 patients, this included: Homosexuals, people with PTSD, ADHD, Schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, Autism, Bipolar, the list goes on.

The day room was where most patients would find themselves in, various chairs, sofas and tables dotted around the large room. No games or toys in sight, they couldn't be trusted. Only three decks of cards were allowed and they were to be shared between seventy two residents. The walls had various religious icons, the bumpy brickwork was on show for all to see, and the floor was a cold marble, the ceiling was plastered white and cracking. Two double doors stood on either end of the room, light bouncing off their dark wooden frames.