If Stone Could Speak

author's note

I grew up in a city, much like the fictionalized one contained in these pages to come, with an old asylum that stood on a hill by the water. It was, growing up, a source of intrigue and of fear, and the subject of many of our childhood ghost stories. We spoke of bloodied crosses and phantom faces appearing in windows, and we dared each other to step closer and closer to the asylum gates.

Its old inhabitants were nothing more, to me, than sensationalized, haunting characters. They were flattened and forgotten, known only be the title "Insane" or, worse, "Lunatic". Despite living only minutes from the asylum walls that so many people had lived out their long and dreadful lives within, I had never thought to learn their stories. I never thought to unflatten them from their labels.

They were real people - people who had dreamed, and hoped, and loved; they were people who had yearned, just as I did, for a different life - a life they lived through their days in anticipation for. They lived with a false hope stretched out on their horizon for a life they would never obtain - for very, very rare was the inhabitant who could leave the asylum's walls once they had been committed to them.

Nellie Bly, a journalist who famously had herself committed to New York's Blackwell Asylum in the 1800s in order to do undercover work, found that the women she encountered within its walls were no less sane than herself. The asylum, she famously wrote, is a "human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out."

All this to say: I finally began to read the real stories and journals of those committed to this asylum, thus rendering them living, breathing people instead of the hollow ghosts of my childhood.  I read not only the accounts of this asylum, but of so many others. I wanted to uncover the stories trapped under the dusts of time. What unfolded, through my research, was a history of the mental health care system, as told through the changes in the lives of those living within it. For this reason, my story spans across time. We will see the different eras of the asylum: the era in which asylums were meant to house criminals; the era in which the asylum was a convenient drop-off point for anyone the city wanted to keep separate from its society; the era in which mental illness was seen as a permanent, unchangeable mark against someone, and so physicians only sought to sedate - not heal - them; and, of course, the era of the infamous experiments in mental health healing that still chill us to the bone today.

It is a story of societally-sanctioned abuse. It is a story of lives lost within stone walls. It is a story of the continual cover-up of these voices.

I write this as an apology.

I have lived my life on the cobblestones of an old city that became what it is today on the backs of those imprisoned. I have lived my life benefiting from the fruits of the labors of those who did not have a choice. And I have lived my life with asylum set like an intriguing, exciting word on my lips. It was the stuff of horror movies: and in rendering it a two-dimensional, touristic space, branded as "creepy", its true horrors were all the more easily concealed. For, as we know, sometimes the worst truths are hidden in plain sight.

They are there, screaming for us to listen, if only we choose to look.

And this is my commitment to look. And to sustain my gaze, no matter how tempting it becomes to avert and flatten it.

The people in this fictional story are inspired by the archives of many asylums. No one character is entirely 'true', although many are an amalgamation of lives that were true. Likewise, the asylum is an amalgamation of the archival data of many asylums.

Still, I hope the spirit of their stories is retained here. I hope, somehow, through the spaces in these words, their pain will not be forgotten.