Eager Playmates

January 18, 1964

    I should have stopped it way back then. I should have blown the whistle, but I let them suffer. Those memories are my punishment, my curse. Their bodies die, but their spirits remain and they will never let me forget that I let them suffer.

    "Old Warden Frances" had her ways, and damned be the soul that suggested otherwise. No, she didn't heal the mentally ill. She created them. I witnessed them convulse with every jolt of shock therapy. I saw their shaking bodies immersed in ice. I saw mindless zombies strolling the halls, numb beyond awareness with Frances' "medicine". Even worse were the fates of those who had in beauty what they lacked in mind.

    I remember Bitty, Beatrice to strangers. She was a slight girl with blonde hair. Bitty had a fondness for razor blades and razor blades had a fondness for her wrists. They say she suffered from "severe melancholy".  I say she was just trying to escape her daddy putting it to her every night. It's funny what you learn when you actually listen.

    One afternoon a less than reputable nurse decided it was time for a "one-on-one therapy session" with Bitty. He pulled her into a utility closet, shoved her to the ground, and promptly did his business. He didn't even look at her face until afterwards, and then it was too late. Bitty lay there, eyes staring off to some distant place, with a smiling face and a slit throat.

    See, while he was grunting and pumping away, Bitty found the escape she had previously sought in the form of a box-cutter. Everyone thought she had been making progress. My guess is that Bitty just couldn't take being used like that anymore. It was documented as a suicide, nothing more.  Back then the world wasn't interested in finding justice for people like Bitty; but sometimes the dead seek justice for themselves.

    It wasn't five years later, that very nurse made the transition from caregiver to patient. They said he started hearing voices. I had a feeling it was one voice in particular and I knew the owner. I'd seen and heard her myself; smiled at her familiar, yet out of place face in the halls and fought back the sickly humorous urge to ask her, "What are you doing out of your grave?"

    I didn't know that I wasn't the only person Bitty was "visiting" until he came to us. Rumor was some concerned neighbors called the police when they heard screaming, thinking there may have been an intruder. The cops brought him to the asylum. They found him locked inside his bedroom closet, clawing at the door and screaming for them to, "get her away from me!"

    He told them a vivid tale about some young girl and how her ghost was haunting him, first in dreams and then while awake.  He claimed that he'd woken that night to find the girl standing over his bed, hovering over him with a knife...or over his jewels rather. He claimed she'd just barely missed him when she lunged in for the kill.

    Sure enough, there were holes clean through the blanket and sheets. "Poor loon," the cops told me, "He probably did it himself during some crazy hallucination." They didn't believe it. Nor did they believe when he finished the story by telling them how she'd locked them both in that closet and taunted him with the knife until the police had opened the door. Afterall, there was no such thing as ghosts and there was no one else in that closet.

Strangely, he didn't last long with us. The paperwork says he committed suicide.  The truth is we found him hanging, with his eyes bulging and his dismembered penis at his feet, in the same closet he had raped Bitty in five years before. It could have been a coincidence, but it wasn't. I've seen too much to deny their existence. I worked at that asylum for years...and ghosts are eager playmates.