Syndicated Post
What’s with all these clown sightings?
If you saw our coverage of multiple creepy clown sightings in Greenville, South Carolina a couple of weeks ago, you know these incidents have authorities nervous and residents terrified… and not just because leering, stalking clowns tend to appear in more than a few nightmares. While coulrophobia is a real condition, these locals’ concerns aren’t […] Read more
The Ultimate General Mills Monster Cereals Quiz!
Nothing says Halloween quite like General Mills’ Monster Cereals, and with Count Chocula, Boo Berry, and Franken Berry now back on store shelves, it’s safe to say that the best season of the year has officially begun. You love to love them and you damn sure love to eat them, but just how well do […] Read more
A spoiler free review (and explanation) of The Tension Experience
The Tension Experience: Ascension – Spoiler Free Review The Tension Experience: Ascension has arrived! Wonder what that odd crashing sound you heard in the background of your life was this weekend? That was the sound of every theatrical norm in the city of Los Angeles being destroyed. Ascension sets out to break molds and redefine […]
The post The Tension Experience: Ascension – Spoiler Free Review appeared first on My Haunt Life.
Build Your Own Haunted Mansion or Michael Myers House Using Your Home Printer
As the arrival of the Great Pumpkin draws closer and school supplies are replaced with the ghoulish delights of Halloween, thoughts of trick-or-treating, haunted houses, pumpkins and parties creep forth from the cranial cobwebs. The real horror of these macabre delights is the vanishing act they can perform on everyone’s cash flow. Not to fear, […] Read more
Flashback: “Jaws” at Universal Studios Hollywood, through the eyes of a 7 year old
In 1975 Steven Spielberg created the summer blockbuster. Jaws was a global phenomenon that kept people out of the water, terrified of a great white shark attack. For me as a child of 7, I was so freaked out by a movie that I hadn’t even seen, I was afraid…
The post Ken’s Gateway Scares – Jaws on the Universal Studios Tour (1976) appeared first on HorrorBuzz.
Screamfest Horror Film Festival Announces 2016 Slew of Scares
One of our very favorite film festivals in the Los Angeles area is returning for 2016 and, WOW, they aren’t fooling around this year. Screamfest Horror Film Festival recently announced a first wave of films to be admitted to the festival. Among the prestigious list is Fear Inc. staring Abigail Breslin…
The post Screamfest Returns to Los Angeles With a Slew of Scares appeared first on HorrorBuzz.
A Walk Through Norwalk’s Abandoned Sanitarium
I’m becoming pretty predictable.
If there’s a mental hospital I can visit—abandoned, or not—I’m gonna go.
But when I do, I always think maybe they’ll want to keep me there. Maybe they won’t let me go back home.
For my latest jaunt to a psychiatric ward, my friend Joanna (who also introduced me to Rockhaven Sanitarium) turned me on to California’s second state mental hospital, the former Norwalk, now known as Metropolitan State Hospital.
Over a century ago, when choosing a location to follow Patton State Hospital—and to help relieve some of its overcrowding—the state government originally considered Beverly Hills.
But Beverly Hills has always had a way of dodging infrastructure and other facilities—like the freeway or the subway—that might bring property values down.
So a parcel of over 300 acres was chosen in an area then known as “North Walk” for its “country air.”
The hospital started taking in patients 100 years ago, when the Imperial Highway was just a cow path and had to be improved for arrivals by horse and carriage.
At the time, I don’t think many were too concerned with handling departures.
Norwalk might’ve been a “cow town” in the first decades of the 20th century, but there were as many as 1990 oil wells in Santa Fe Springs, the next town over.
At the peak of the oil drilling, the Norwalk hospital was surrounded on three sides by derricks.
By 1923, oil activity had slowed down, and Norwalk continued on as a self-sustaining community…
…whose patients farmed, raised cattle, and performed other (many agricultural) tasks to keep the hospital running.
It wasn’t really “work therapy”—it was just work.
Nothing can provide free labor like a bunch of captive patients who are physically able but mentally unstable.
Even today, although some buildings have been demolished, Metropolitan State Hospital is like its own little town.
Many of the structures are from the early 20th century, as well as from the 1920s Southern California building boom…
…and the 1947 Post-War building program, which gave rise to a new 504-bed Receiving & Treatment Center in 1954.
Overcrowding was relieved tremendously in the 1950s with the development of psychotropic drugs (like Thorazine and lithium), which meant people with even severe mental problems could actually get better—and hospitalization didn’t have to be a life sentence.
Now, there are lots of campus buildings standing in disuse, their windows boarded up.
No longer do patients have to sleep in beds that have been “stacked,” surrounded on every side by other beds. And they don’t have to sleep on the floor anymore, either.
And now that they’re all adults—the children’s ward having closed a few years ago—most of them can move about freely within the fenced-in campus perimeter, with restrictions.
After all, nowadays those who are admitted to “Metro” aren’t just mental “defectives,” as they were once called. Many of them have some criminal record. Almost half of them are incompetent to stand trial. Almost as many are considered a danger to themselves or to others—without having already committed a crime.
Given its 100 years of history, Metropolitan State Hospital (like Patton) took on the task of creating an on-site museum to tell stories and display some of the artifacts that have been collected over the years.
The museum is located in a 1920s-era residence, probably used by a doctor and his family.
So far, most of its visitors have been from the community or from other hospital facilities. One can assume that anyone who works at Metropolitan probably just wants to go home after their shift is over.
Some of the archives include an admissions system used to create nameplates…
…and putting names of those committed into the registry.
There are vintage academic texts, other scientific and educational support materials, and equipment…
…like an antique cork press (for corking pharmaceutical bottles)…
…a welder…
…and, of course, an electroshock therapy machine.
Because a greater percentage of Metropolitan’s population is now of a forensic nature—and the hospital doesn’t even accept people who are voluntarily admitted—security is of paramount importance.
Long gone are the days of the “camisole restraint,” involuntary sterilization…
…and the freezing cold or boiling hot hydrotherapy confinement techniques.
The facility is considered low security (compared to the prison-like operations at Patton), and it doesn’t accept patients who’ve been convicted of violent crimes like murder or sex offenses or who have a history of setting fires or escaping. But it still must provide protection for its staffers, who’ve been frequently subjected to violent patient outbursts and attacks.
While patients may pose a threat to the staff (even if they weren’t violent before they were committed), they themselves aren’t entirely safe while they’re “institutionalized”—not from each other, and not from their caregivers.
Poor use of restraints, mis-prescribed medications, and negligence have all led to patient deaths that would’ve otherwise been preventable. One female psychiatric patient died in 2009 after her neck was somehow mysteriously broken, while a nurse keeping watch nearby slept through the whole thing.
Some manage to make their escape—at least, to the morgue—by committing suicide. But even if someone were to walk off the grounds of Metro and go AWOL (which some do), they may never escape the thing that sent them there in the first place.
Then again, at least they would escape the treatments, which are sometimes worse than the disease.
For a peek inside Norwalk Hospital in the 1970s, there was a black-and-white documentary film that was shot there called Hurry Tomorrow, directed by Richard Cohen and Kevin Rafferty.
Here’s a clip:
Related Posts:
Photo Essay: Patton State Forensic Mental Hospital for the Criminally Insane
Photo Essay: The Scary Dairy
Photo Essay: Lanterman Developmental Center, Pomona, Haunted & Closing
Photo Essay: Rancho Los Amigos, Abandoned County Poor Farm, Downey (Exterior)
Photo Essay: Retreat to Rockhaven Sanitarium Read more
A Misty Eyed Review of 2015’s “Ward 13 Haunt”
South Pasadena, CA
For this #FlashbackFrightday, we start dipping into new territory–great haunts from 2015 that are, unfortunately, not returning for 2016. There are many reasons why this may happen. Sometimes, it’s a matter of funds and financial success. Other times, the owners literally move away (case in point: The Empty Grave this year). Still other times, there are personal matters affecting the designers or producers that preclude a return.
In the case of Evil Twin Studios, highly acclaimed producers of the Theater of Terror, Raymond Hill Mortuary, and last year’s Ward 13 attractions, the problem was securing a location for the haunt. Haunted houses don’t just spring up out of nowhere. There is far-ahead planning that must occur to negotiate the rental and use of a commercial space, factoring in build time, production, and deconstruction, and for haunts that do not have permanent locations, this can derail a season if not adequately addressed in advanced enough time.
So it was with ETS, who hope to come back in 2017 with an even scarier production. But for now, we look back at their offering last year–an exploration of an old asylum where cruel and unspeakable experiments were performed on already deranged and lunatic beings. But among those at the Raymond Hill Sanitarium, even the most hardened feared Ward 13, the laboratory housing the most secret and vile of horrors. Lets take a look!
Welcome to the Raymond Hill Sanitarium.
Presented by Evil Twin Studios, complete with photo op!
The ticket booth is to the left. Entry is straight in.
But first, some precautionary warnings and safety spiel from the security guard.
Lets venture in…
In the lobby of the Raymond Hill Sanitarium, the receptionist is… disinterested.
Meanwhile, a patient to the side sits playing chess. With herself.
“Who are you here to see again?” *eye roll*
Sign in over here.
OH NOES DROP PORTRAIT SCARE!!
Well, she thought it was funny.
Not that 30 seconds of continuous laughter is unnerving or anything.
The furnishings in this asylum are quite… unwelcoming.
OK, that’s enough from you.
The receptionist was so good at making us believe she hated us.
I guess we’re being allowed in for our visit.
The openings were not always typical doors. Stepping over and under things was not atypical.
This room looks infested.
This patient was constantly feeling itchy.
In the next room, it’s time to take our drugs!
This patient liked the drugs.
We’re not patients? Too bad. Lets take them anyway.
Oh boy, time to go on a psychedelic trip.
This is strange.
That’s definitely not a gorilla lurching toward you. Nope. That would be mad!
Into the children’s ward.
Who likes creepy kids?
Here’s a creepy kid. Creepy kid was creepy.
After crawling through a tunnel, we came into a morgue littered with wheelchairs.
This was the infamous wheelchair scene, where guests were instructed to sit in a wheelchair and was pushed around through the yard full of crazy inmates by staff or other inmates.
It was wacky and amusingly fun, but then it was time to get dark and finally enter the dreaded Ward 13 of the sanitarium.
The looniest of the loony stored here.
We were led into a padded room, with only a woman in a straitjacket to accompany us.
And then, she snapped.
Onto the next room, which featured my favorite thing in the whole maze: Tub Boy!! He was cold. So cold…
Onto the medical area, where the horrible experiments were being conducted.
That’s not suffering…
…it’s science!
The room was littered with evidence of other atrocious studies.
This patient was receiving electroshock therapy.
It looked quite painful.
Or perhaps it was electric sleep aid. Permanent sleep aid?
Those instruments certainly didn’t look inviting.
The doctor then turned his attention toward us.
We shuffled into the next space, only to be greeted by a horrid possessed creature.
If that didn’t chase us out, a demented ward member carrying a taser certainly did.
I suppose this would be the appropriate time to end. She didn’t take too kindly to our presence.
Ward 13 provided a haunt that was fun, thrilling, unpredictable, and immersive. The volunteer talent excelled in their roles and really owned their characters, while the theming and props were impressive, gory, and charming (in a horrifying way). Clearly, the folks at Evil Twin Studios love what they do, and that is reflected in their haunt. Plus, some of the innovative or uncommon elements of the maze, such as the fun psycho wheelchair ride, the dark shock walls, and the non-eye-level scares and crawl-throughs amped up the excitement, entertainment, and apprehension factor. The intimacy of Ward 13 really set it apart from many professional haunts, and even later on in the Halloween season, this attraction repeatedly came up in discussions with my fellow haunt enthusiast friends as an example of a breakout hit haunted house for October.
Proceeds from Ward 13 also benefited the South Pasadena Education Foundation, a private fundraising organization that supports educational programs and after school development to assist at need children and anyone looking to further their academic progress. It’s another example of scaring for a good cause, and Ward 13 certainly did a lot of that!
