Coffee Break

The Halloween Files: As Quiet As a Cricket

Do you ever hear of those articles in the past telling the public lies about how they found an old body somewhere but then it comes out a few days later that it was fabricated and staged because they wanted more popularity? Well, here in the small city of Salt pine, The Crimson Star has a competitor, that being said however, The True Bayou newspaper did something just like this only a few months ago, staging the deaths to become one of the best newspaper reporters in the country; but it did not go as planned for this news crew, as The Crimson Star caught them in the act, and managed to tie them up completely. 

That being said, we have more to disclose. A call came through this morning, around seven AM, and as some of us work early hours, like myself and some of my TCS team, we managed to catch the call just in time, and well let me tell you, it leads us down one heck of a ride. The anonymous caller who only identified themselves by the name of, ‘M’ said to us that they knew about a murder that happened so long ago that we weren’t even born, and that my friend, is partially true, after all, how old do you think I am? 

We arrived at the scene where ‘M’ said the murder would be, and truth be told I was expecting an animal, we get a lot of cold callers telling us that we need to make a case on a murder that they had just discovered and then when we get to the scene, we find its only a dead cat that was ran over by a car; yes its horrible and mean, but it doesn’t make it an illegal crime that needs to be investigated. 

However, what we found wasn’t an animal, but in fact a fragile skeleton of pure bone and decay, rotting and decomposing in one of the old hospital beds, like it was placed there by someone a long time ago or has been lying there in wait for somebody to find them and help them. First things first, we brought in one of our other teams; an Archaeologist and a coroner, both to help us out with the new case at hand. This was (thankfully) a rare case for us and Salt Pine, but nevertheless was very shocking and startling for all of us, by now the skeleton would have been discovered if it had been laying there for all those years that it had been decaying alone in an isolated room, so that’s what we started with, it was obviously moved and thus, maybe understanding why could lead us to many new leads. 

As the coroner said the skeleton has been dead for only 20 ish years, we investigated this first and realised the hospital we found them in was around between 1860 and 1930, and the skeleton must have been killed in the late 1990s, when the hospital had just been stopped from performing horrible acts of torture and pain on the mentally ill patients who couldn’t speak up for themselves and were so overly medicated that they didn’t know what was happening, and even if they did, there was nobody to believe them. But now, we can. 

We started looking through the old files of the hospital and went back decades of unsolved deaths that were just put down as ‘unmarked’ or ‘unknown causes’ which infuriated us as an investigative service, we know that these people who have died from the abuse they most likely suffered in this mental hospital.  We will definitely be coming back to this place, after all there are countless deaths that happened here that need to be understood and solved, properly. 

The hospital itself was extremely silent and you could quite possibly hear a pin drop, but in this quiet peculiar city, there is nothing ever quiet for long, and quiet doesn’t come without consequences here. The skeleton at the old Willow Hospital for the Mentally ill opened up so many new doors for the Crimson Star newspaper, and as much as we hate to say it, this case is proving extremely difficult; in one case we have an anonymous caller who only wanted to be identified to us as a stupid letter and how they found the skeleton after ‘exploring an abandoned hospital’ that has been derelict for a very long amount of years and on the other we have the nurses and doctors who were meant to care for these mentally ill people and yet we know didn’t and actually neglected them in their ‘top tier’ care, even if we found what happened to this skeleton, we barely have any proof yet and might not even have a perpetrator who is alive, so this might be one of our cases that you finally get to see us make a case unfortunately, go cold.