Have you ever been inside an asylum? I lived in one for a very long time. For most of my life. And I never left.
I was admitted when I was ten, of all ages, by my family because they thought I was mental. If only they had known. But anyways, for five years I lived here, if you can call it living, and went the entire time without hearing anything from my previous friends and family. It was like I had dropped off the face of the earth; like no one remembered me. Everyone just seemed to have forgotten I was here or that I even existed at all.
But I was surprisingly alright with that. I didn't seem to care. After being admitted I started dreaming; of strange proceedures that were more horrible and terrifying than you can imagine. The dreams confused me. I had never seen or heard about any of these things. But the scariest part was always the end of the dreams. The person that the proceedure was being performed on would turn their head and look straight at me, and it always was me. What I never understood was why it scared me so much; it wasn't even that bad. Then again, when you're forgotten by everyone you know and love, and live in a mental hospital, even the slightest things can freak you out.
The girl who was kept in the bed next to me was named Jessica. Out of the five years I spent sleeping in the same room as her, the worst part was the full moons. Every night there was a full moon, the entire institution was filled with the screams of the seemingly truly insane. Jessica would lean over me as I lay down in bed and begin screaming, trying, and succeeding, in scaring me.
Five years is a long time. You have no idea. Time seems to drag by immensly slow when you have nothing to do but sit stuck inside a mental hospital, so five years seemed longer to me than it would to you. They never let you out of your rooms unless it was to eat or use the restroom. And sometimes not even that. They also had this place called The Room. From what I had heard from some of the other patients there that were sane enough to gossip, The Room was not somewhere you wanted to be put. It had no windows, no lighting. They stripped you of all your clothes and shoved you in there, locking you in for excruciatingly long periods of time. Luckily, I stayed out.
I kept a journal during my stay. At least, I did as long as I could. But you run out of room eventually. Or ink. I slipped it inside a loose seam in the mattress I slept on, hoping someone would eventually find it and read through the torments of this place. And there were plenty of those. Such as the time that Jessica went so completely mental that they had to strap her down to her bed. They didn't even remover her from the room. She sat strapped there, thrashing, for what seemed like hours. I lost track after the clock stopped moving. I wondered how long the clock had been there, how many people had slept in my bed before me, if anyone had left messages or notes for the patient after them. I wondered how many had gotten so fed up with life here, they began searching the place for a way out; and when finding none, resorted to eating their mattress.
But I really hoped that, if nothing else, someone would find and read my journal, and shut this place down. No one deserves to be locked away and forgotten in a place like this.
This hospital was built in 1878, and was then closed down in 1992. The lobotomy was both invented and perfected here. As I eventually found out, my dreams from the beginning of my institutionalization were prophetic. I know because I saw them happen years later. I was never released from this living nightmare, though I was here for only five years.
My name is Christine Belle. I was born on September 30, 1875, and was admitted to DSH on December 2, 1885. I died on December 12, 1890, and I continue to haunt the halls of Danvers State Hospital.