From the inhumane abuse of Pennhurst Asylum, to the animalistic cruelties of the Royal Bethlehem Hospital, for years writers have used the mental asylum in order to flirt with the fragile boundary between reality and insanity. Books like Madness so Discrete by Mindy McGinnis have even speculated on what defines sanity. They’ve dealt with difficult ideas of how to live in a society where you’re unable to see the cracked facades of friends and family. In modern times, the interpretations of Alice in Wonderland have taken a very dark turn, to the point where even Alice herself doesn’t know if she’s crazy or not. 

But what makes the asylum a truly unnatural place to write about is the fact that those age-old barbarities still linger on, whether it be from memories, or from ghostly moans. For writers, these untold mysteries have captivated their minds, more so because these are places we’d rather not talk about. Unless we’re talking about a haunting or looking up human rights' violations, there is no way to talk about these subjects. Still, this is the horror genre. And we are known for our abnormalities. 

The condemnation of the living 

The living have long since graced asylums with their presence. For the living, screams of agony resound through the corridors, never once giving other residents peace of mind. Straight jackets, chains, lobotomies;  it’s as if every medieval torture strategy decided to just show up in some random person’s room and go nuts, pun intended. The warders aren’t at all helpful; some are just downright monstrous, others just unwitting bystanders looking to pass the time. The physicians aren’t that useful either; perhaps the only merciful thing they may be willing to do is give you enough medication to leave you a vegetable, blissfully unaware of the horrors happening around you. 

The damnation of the dead

But the dead also tell tales. The abuse the patients have suffered through can lead to violent hauntings, some longing for the warmth of life, others for revenge against their abusers. The Pennhurst Asylum, as mentioned before, is already inspiration enough for twisted horror novels. What’s more, these ghosts can tell you what exactly was happening to them the day their loved ones left them to the asylum, what it was like dealing with a hell on earth. Questions race through all our minds. What became of those innocent children, the ones their parents neither cared for nor wanted? What about the woman who kept screaming “Bloody murder” at the end of the hallway? Or the drunk who wanted to give his dead wife a beer or two? The criminally insane? The souls who are lurking in the dark, just waiting for their chance to kill? Who knows what became of them. 

It’s subject matters like these where we, as novelists, tend to look at the asylum as a source of inspiration. Writers are storytellers, and the asylum hosts an abundance of untold desires that no one else got to understand. The patients and their doctors, the warders and their charges; in these asylums, such relationships lead nowhere. Even in the afterlife, there is no room for them.