Unplayable Horrors

I’ve been working on a bit of a secret project for my D&D game. It’s kind of brutal. Let me clarify. The encounters aren’t particularly difficult for the suggested level, no, the material itself requires a bit of a warning. It was inspired by a true story that got my design gears rolling, and that true story deals with some very dark material. The material touches on things that I know are sensitive to some people, but, therein lies the difficulty of many stories.

I stumbled across an article discussing things that aren’t in D&D. I thought it was interesting that they included some things that, in my experience, really aren’t in D&D. Well, I shouldn’t say they aren’t in the game, a better way to say it is, they get glossed over quite a bit. We all know that certain races and monsters keep slaves, even some kingdoms, countries, and organizations within the common races, keep slaves. But, it only comes up when it’s thrust in our face. Drug use, true genocide, and other truly evil aspects of real life are left out. I know why, so do you. It’s a fantasy, and part of that fantasy is we want to check the real evil at the door and enjoy some good old goblin bashin’. Heck, why not?

On the other hand, some of the best stories ever start with these very evils, and some adventures may touch on these horrors, but not very often, in some cases, never. I’ve even seen evil campaigns where it really just turns into an opportunity to play the monsters and you bash on the paladins and elves instead. I have never played a campaign where slaves were more than a group of people saved from a wagon train or drugs were maybe named dropped as a reason to not like an organization. I’ve seen rules for drug use, but have never seen it in game, actually affecting dice rolls. Even drunkenness is treated more as a humorous backdrop for a character than something that affects things.

I’m sure some groups use these things, and I’m about to explore something on par with them. I’m ready, and mature enough, to drop real evil into my game. I’ve actually creeped my players out before (they’re asking me to do so again this October) and seen true revulsion at some encounters I’ve placed before them. But, I’m going a step further, injecting a level of realness that I have never seen. I actually put a warning on the first page to introduce the idea of the adventure and make sure everyone is comfortable with playing in the game.

The idea popped up when I was looking for creepiness around Seattle during my stay there. I stumbled across an interesting story of a place called Starvation Heights. It’s got murder, betrayal, insanity, court battles, evasion, and all hanging around a core of a fad diet that was as bad as bad can get. It’s an awesome little story morsel, and I plucked it up and decided that this was the basis of awesome, it just needed a fantasy twist, like potions that make you think your healthy, but you aren’t, an evil priestess who worships a dark god of pain, and a backdrop of gorgeous evergreen forest haunted by orcs and goblins.

As you can imagine, the diet became the center of the adventure and it branched into an exploration of starvation and why people would want to use such a dangerous diet to become healthy. Then, I laced a mystery into it. The result is that the players have to talk to a lot of people who are willing to destroy themselves and risk death through starvation to be “better.”

One could say, that is a sensitive issue. I myself have people in my life that have struggled with such ideas and that made gave me some insight. It made me realize just how much I agree with the idea that some stories need a level of consent before they are thrust on people. I’ve seen arguing over the idea, that it might detract from the horror by spoiling the story. I say to the contrary, you don’t go to a body horror flick if you don’t know what you’re getting into, otherwise, you might be running on that ticket. I would expect no less at the roleplaying table. How cruel would it be to play a game where drug use is a core concept of the story, but someone at the table is haunted by circumstances surrounding drugs? Similarly, slavery, self-harm, genocide and other such brutal concepts stand to really jar someone who is not prepared.

But, (yeah, I started the paragraph with a but) I also believe that using these stories at the table, really allowing a group of hearty adventurers to explore a scenario where such an issue is at the heart could lead to an amazing and very rewarding tale, for the right group. And so, I begin the path of writing several scenarios for 5e that are driven by Loviatar, and explore everything, the darkest darknesses, that such a being might impart on her followers before stepping away from The Realms.

I think that maybe more tables should explore these horrible things, to make evil more evil, more real. But, I also believe that you should make sure before you go digging in such dark corners of the human mind, you prepare your group.

Would the Real Wolfman Please Stand Up

I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons for a very long time, since some time in 1993 if I’m not mistaken, and it was pretty early that I had what I will call a Tracy Hickman moment. I was used to seeing goblins and kobolds and owlbears. We fought dragons and griffons and chimeras. We even slaughtered zombies, slayed death knights, and conquered a certain famous castle with a certain famous vampire in it. During that time, though, I fought several of these weird creatures called werewolves.

Yes, werewolves. My characters treated the silly little critters with little more than disdain and frustration, or, if the DM was really clever a sudden awe at how he surprised us with who the bad guy really was. Still, my real world self always felt cheated. The werewolf was an easy kill because a rogue had a silver dagger and the always prepared fighter bought some alchemical silver crap. Oh, and wizards don’t care because magic kills anything except for ancient dragons and the tarrasque.

I remember the first time I saw a werewolf. I was spending the night at my grandmother’s house and watching cable, not good cable, but hey, Stephen King movies with a little edited for TV action were nice when I was eight. I stayed up until the wee hours and caught a werewolf flick about a kid in a rocket propelled wheelchair and the only way to kill the creature was silver. It was magnificent, and it stuck. All of the good werewolf movies sold the same crazy idea. The werewolf, or even wolfman, was basically The Incredible Hulk but all bad guy and with one weakness. Bullets didn’t hurt it, crushing it didn’t work, even after being blown to bits by a stick of dynamite, the wolfman healed. Although, I did thing it was hilarious that you could get away by kicking him in the nards.

I read about the Beast of Gevaudan, I watched the original Wolfman, I dug up the story of the wolf that was shot and sent to the Smithsonian and it arrived as a human body. I was invested, and all of that long before I cracked the spine on any role playing game nonsense. I knew, as every kid my age knew, that the only way to put down a werewolf was with a silver bullet, and sometimes, more than one.

And so, I found myself asking, why on earth can any willy-nilly adventurer tackle a werewolf like it’s no big deal. This was a creature that deserved more. The werewolf shouldn’t be a random encounter in the woods. It shouldn’t be relegated to Bitey Bloodthirsties menagerie. A werewolf should be an unstoppable threat that drives an adventure. It should be the BBEG that you have to collect the silver weapons and damage spells can’t touch so you have to plan perfectly to get the best of the creature.

I kept expecting someone to see the problem and correct it. Hell, I was looking so hard that when the Tyranid Deathleaper came along, I realized, it was just a werewolf in a carapace. And so I open the 5E Monster Manual, hoping, praying to the gods of the wild that my desires would be answered, but no. Some people say you need to add levels or just build your own. I say Van Richten would laugh his ass off at your pathetic lycanthropes, Wizards. At any rate, I think I’m going to jump on that and see what I can do, but I still have expectations. If a vampire can get its setting, why can’t we have a good werewolf adventure.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been some good lycanthropy stories, but I don’t remember the wolfman traveling in packs to create fear. And it was just comical when he was playing second fiddle to the pasty bat guy. Here’s to hoping that a real werewolf, a powerhouse of terror is waiting around the corner.

Curse of Strahd: Old Bonegrinder and Encounter Balance

Warning: Spoiler Alert for Curse of Strahd…

 

This is my first blog in quite some time and I know I’m showing up late to the Vampire party, but, here we go. I’ve been prepping to run Curse of Strahd (and by prepping I mean reading I6, reading Domains of Dread, pulling out Fair Barovia, The Bleak House, and other material, printing maps of Barovia and Darkon, figuring out what I want to use from the book and what I want to change).

A great deal of what I want to do with this adventure stems from the fact that I have loved the Ravenloft setting since some time in 1994 that started with a beautiful boxed set. But, the thing that I’ve discovered and bothers me a bit is the talk of encounter difficulty, and especially Old Bonegrinder.

I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that the three hags, night hags in particular, are way out of league with the recommended 4^th level status of the proclaimed 4 to 5 adventurers. Well, let me just say that I have long loved games like Vampire the Masquerade, Cult, Chill, and Cthulhu, and the Ravenloft Masque of the Red Death boxed set is among my favorites. I also love horror movies and write horror novels, so let me just say a couple things that might shed some light on this interesting encounter.

First, Welcome to Ravenloft, this is a different creature from what you are used to. Period. End of Conversation. Get it through your noggins. Ravenloft is the Wuthering Heights to The Realms’ Middle Earth, okay. You just walked out of a place where you were heroes, soon to be lords, mighty mages, and legendary dungeon delvers through the mists of Ravenloft. Things are a changin’.

Ravenloft by its very nature is supposed to present the usual challenges in different allotments and provide grimmer, darker encounters. Translation, you aren’t killing goblins every five minutes, but you might be searching behind paintings and rifling through desks on a far more frequent basis. But, that’s not the point of this little treatise. No, my point is encounters are not meant to be balanced and Old Bonegrinder is the design team screaming in your face to remind you.

Let’s catch up on the Svalich Road So Far (some of you understand that reference, I’m sure). One, you went through some mists, maybe because a gypsy told you to, a werewolf pack is hiding in it, or just because damn choking mist made us. Okay, no problem. Then, ooh, the creepy woods and headless statues at the creepy self-closing gates (every haunted house in every cheesy kids haunted movie). And welcome to Barovia. It’s doom, it’s gloom, you might have had to kill some semi-comical zombies and a vampire spawn, met the pretty lady, buried an old dude, and met a mad priest, oh, and got overcharged for stuff you should have bought on the other side of that damn, cloying mist. Then there was the creepy, yet completely harmless one-of-us ghosts at the gallows, and Madam Eva. So, a party and a bad psychic hotline.

And then Old Bonegrinder is right past the castle you already know you can’t handle. Hey, it’s just a creepy windmill, right? Right? In normal D&D it probably houses an ogre or a grumpy dwarf complaining about how he should be mining, but no, inside is a big bad night hag and her two daughters. That’s three, yep three CR 5 creatures, and if they get to act as a coven, likely but not guaranteed, three CR 7 creatures. Yes, that is exactly right.

That is some unfair crap right there if I ever saw it. You’re going to drop an encounter that is deadly for 9^th to 10^th level characters in a rundown flour making machine for four 4^th level adventurers? You must be insane, they’re going to die. If this were Forgotten Realms, yes. If it were even Dark Sun, maybe. But this is Ravenloft my friends, and you need to be reminded after all this fluff adventure building, creative storytelling, player hooking. You can die here, and that is how you make players afraid.

That is exactly the intention. That is also why the entry for when you meet Morgantha reads, “She doesn’t mind visitors, as long as they’ve come to do business. She tries to sell her latest batch of dream pastries…” You ARE NOT meant to kill these hags yet. You are meant to walk in, snoop around, run across someone who knows they can kill you, and be offered a damn pastry while as a player, you compute the fact that you just walked in on a monster that Mr. Greenwood wouldn’t make you fight for another two or three levels, even as a BBEG. Again, Welcome to Ravenloft.

See, Ravenloft is based on Gothic Horror novels primarily, and over the years has grown to embrace many facets of horror. For instance, Izek, could easily turn into a slasher like Jason or Michael Myers. The Abbott plays on body horror like “Saw” and “American Mary.” It should feel that way. It shouldn’t just be creepy forests and dark, lonely moors, because no adventurer is going to be impressed with that, or trolls, or even dragons after a while. But, if you have a bunch of greenhorns who think they’re awesome because they killed Uugurk the Ugly Orc and maybe a vampire spawn come across three night hags who would gladly sell you to the locals as donuts, the players might have to say, “Volo, I don’t think we’re in Cormyr anymore.”

Missing Midnight Monster Madness

I am a fan of the classic horror monsters. Yep, I love Dracula, The Wolfman, Frankenstein’s Monster, and even The Creature. Throw in The Phantom, Black Cat, and a good dose of “The Twilight Zone” and you have a huge chunk of my pre-teen and early teen years. The old cable channels at my grandparents’ house kept me up until three or four in the morning, learning all the Hollywood details of the supernatural. I never felt such a connection to slasher films, but the supernatural I was just head over heels for.

I miss the demons, ghosts, and powerhouse singular monstrosities, but I think I miss the atmosphere more. The old black and white and grainy color flicks that relied so much on not knowing where the threat was and how they built carefully culled anticipation were magnificence. Maybe it was oversaturation, but I feel so let down by the modern horror flick and how jump scares are either predictable or just downright weak. I feel like the villains are less villainous simply because there is an expectation to see the bad guy, to connect the visible threat to the psychological when the truth is so much the opposite.

It all boils down to the psychology, methinks. I feel we actually felt more when we didn’t know what to be afraid of. I also feel that the lack of saturation played a big part in building anticipation, oh, and the fact that people actually treated horror as an art form instead of a game to get their name in the bucket. Yes, I feel that is a solid argument.

See, horror is pretty basic, hell, let’s look at the old slasher classic, “Halloween.” The primary prop was-as I hope you all know- a painted Captain Kirk mask with modified eyes and blue-white paint on it. Many of the actors wore their own clothes and rumor has it that Ms. Long Legs herself got her wardrobe from a JC Penney for about a hundred bucks. Yea, that’s right, the lead ACTRESS got her clothes for the equivalent of about three-fifty at a local department store. It doesn’t get much more low-budget than that, ladies and gentlemen. And yet, it was a landmark film that gave birth to the supernatural slasher films that have hit theaters almost every Halloween Season, Friday the 13^th, Summer Blockbuster Season, and no, even for most Holiday Seasons.

We get slammed with the next great unstoppable, or comically unbeatable human, threat so often we just roll our eyes. Why? Well, I think when the formula is literally based on, “Hey, we can film this at the local community college and hire nobodies as long as there’s the super slutty hot chick and the pretty good girl,” it’s just too damn tempting to try to get the ridiculous returns that many of the originals grossed. And with production costs that low, there’s practically no risk. So you see dozens of them a year, or at least it feels that way. (If you’re looking for proof, go look at the Horror selection on Netflix.)

Oh, and the legendary supernatural monsters that I fell in love with are treated even worse. It seems studios have adopted the same low budget but big return perspective for werewolves, vampires, and now zombies. It is a sad day when the groundbreaking Count Dracula has been turned into everything from a marketing scheme to a bunch of spoofs and satires that range from somewhat funny to downright spiteful. Then there are the attempts to do something clever that get the green light just because the title has Dracula in it.

Granted, every once in a while a film comes along and surprises the crap out of me. For instance, “Van Helsing,” that joke of a movie with Wolverine in it, turned out to have some of the best portrayals of the great classic horror films. The vampires were creepy, inhuman, elegant, beautiful, and dangerous. The werewolves were beasts, perfect killers, and yet majestic, just like a wild wolf, but bigger, meaner, and more eerily humanoid. Even Frankenstein’s creature was honest, terrified, emotional and yet capable of great anger and as a result, also terrifying in that capacity. How did that happen in what was little more than corporate sanctioned fan-fic? Probably love.

See, I am a firm believer that there are definitely people that love these characters, ideas, tropes, and settings. You can see it in the good bits of “Hemlock Grove” and “Supernatural” and in movies like “The Others” and the latest “The Wolfman.” You can feel the appreciation for the terror and the attempt to hold on to the feel of the old films and shows. You can get the warm fuzzies from days of yore when people knew how to blend creepy and sexy and make you terrified of both the creature and the thing in the mirror.

Still, there are too many instances that fall well short of the mark. It’s these, where the love doesn’t cut to the final product or the product was never intended as a labor of love, that you find the ultimate weakness. They fall flat, leave you hollow, and die out with a whimper. I find myself noting that a trailer looks good, then quickly glancing back at it sideways, asking myself, “What do they really thing they’re going to do to impress me?”

I’m bored with torture porn, I was right after the first Hostel movie. A slasher has to be damn good to keep my attention. Supernatural horror films are so much more disappointing because I once loved them. I remember being twelve and watching hours and hours of A&E documentaries on Dracula, Dracula’s Castle, Vampirism, and Bram Stoker. Then flipping over to USA to watch the movies that made people watch the silly documentaries. I remember even then I had no stomach for knockoffs and second rate crap. The Carmilla-esque lesbian vampire flicks were complete let downs. I knew what they were really for, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I want my vampires with a whole lot more terrifying than sexy, sorry.

I’m still looking for a good werewolf story that isn’t “The Wolfman” re-edited. I really want to see a landmark, blockbuster werewolf flick. Please, someone out there get on that, I promise it could be amazing. Hell, any monster or slasher flick could be, just show us the love.

Why “Ghostbusters” Was a One Shot Deal

As you may have heard, there are plans to release a new Ghostbusters movie. It hurts, it really hurts. Ok, maybe it won’t be horrible but there are at least a few reasons that the franchise will never pull the audience it did the first time around.

First of all, there’s the obvious. Three comedic geniuses at the top of their game and the apex of their notoriety worked together to write the first film. The result: Absolutely amazing! The witty banter, the solid but natural jokes, and the hilarious visual comedy were astounding. But there was more to it than that. These three had been working together and around each other for years, honing their comedy to fit each other. They were destined to do something huge.

Of course, the main writer, Mr. Harold Ramis, didn’t just show up to write a comedy. Maybe he did at first, but when the gears got turning, we ended up with several of the most noted plot lines ever derived combined. Now, stick with me here. The first and most obvious is the hero journey. There is an obvious trend from mundane to fantastic, taking steps to reject the journey, then embracing the quest, then discovering the tools and how to use them, culminating in a crazy, multidimensional showdown. Pretty standard fantasy/sci-fi hero journey material.

But did anyone notice the coming of age tale? Yeah, it’s not horribly obvious because these three schmucks are what, friggin’ 40? But, that’s just it, they are schmucks. The incredible Mr. Murray portrays Dr. Peter Venkman who is truly a big high-schooler. Think about it, when we meet him he’s using his government sanctioned research money to get phone numbers. He makes a reference to being in the private sector like it’s a living hell and then in the same breath discusses taking wing to reach their potential. These guys are frat boys who never really left the house, like some kind of perpetual Van Wilders with research grants.

Yet another typical mainline plot is the meaning of life theory. It’s the movie where Jim has been doing one thing all his life and things finally get bad enough to break out and do your own thing. This is where Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz really is a crucial device. Stantz thinks the guys are doing the right thing and then wham, bam, the world goes topsy turvy and there’s Venkman with his crazy, childlike wonderlust saying just jump and find out who we are. Stantz fights it at first, but like every other movie average-joe turned Amazo, he falls in love with the potential he has for his newfound life.

These three plots form the basis for the witty back and forth, and just so we could see it a little bit better, they introduce Zeddmore so we have an ordinary guy off the street to see how these three loopy, zany nuts really are. It’s a perfect reference point and gives most people a down to earth perspective to relate to.

These alone give it the right fuel to connect to a wide audience but what pushed it over the top? Why can’t you top this film? Well, it has to do with how it was written. The powerhouse minds behind it wrote it as a one shot and really only wanted to do it once.

Yes, I say that with confidence and I’ll even explain why.

In the midst of making every ghost a one-liner from the fat slob to the asshole cabbie, they threw everything at the table. They pulled the right cameos and pegged the right venues. They connected across the spectrum of comedy, film, and music. When a movie gets Casey Cassum to do a piece you know it’s gonna be big. The marketing was massive. Yep, let’s face it, when the commercial for the movie was also in the movie you know it’s going to be everywhere.

And then there’s the ending. After all the joke-ghosts the world is about to be destroyed by the cutest, silliest kaiju ever. That’s right, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was a joke on Japanese monster movies, it had to be. Try to picture the most harmless thing ever destroying one of the world’s largest cities and you end up with sugar puff Godzilla. Then you lose both the main love interest and the corny side kick which is a plot double whammy against the heroes of any story. And the finale actually has the protagonists risk the existence of two realities to save the day. Let me say that again, the flippin’ good guys decide that instead of just letting bubbly, lightning tossing chick rule the world they will chance blowing her reality and ours to absolute nothing.

That ending says it all, no, I mean it, it says this is the absolute end. You can’t go anywhere after throwing all that in. You cannot top it. Ok, maybe you could but it would require a group of iconic geniuses, a studio that really trusts them all, a killer storyline that hits on a bevy of different chords, a venue that crosses the old triple-threat entertainer threshold, and a plot with a climax so high it makes Voldemort seem like a whimper in the dark.

So, I leave you with the reason we will never have the Ghostbusters sequel we all want. And to the guys who pulled off damn near perfect the first time around I can only say, “Nice shootin’ Tex!”

The Monster in Our Backyard

I grew up with a monster in my backyard.

Not a murderer or a stalker, a real monster, it even had wings and glowing eyes and stood seven feet tall. See, there are a few of us in the world that know what it’s like to live with a near mythic beast that lives just down the road.

You see, I grew up in a little town in West Virginia. It’s a small town nestled on a pleasant overlook between two large, wild rivers. It was and is a dying town, slowly bleeding population to the lure of places like Lexington, Kentucky or Columbus, Ohio that have wealth, jobs, and entertainment. As the hopeful leave the town continues to fade, rot out of existence. It’s a sad state of affairs. But one thing in that town survives, a haunting legend.

You’ve probably heard of it, I mean it’s even got a movie, a horrible, sloppily done movie with a couple big names tied to it but a movie nonetheless. It is the Mothman. That’s right, I was neighbors with the Mothman. For most of us it was a joke-possibility/possibility-joke. That may seem strange, but let me explain.

Where many a small town has a rundown 2^nd Empire Victorian that is the abode of a ghost where no one can spend the night or perhaps a creepy old crazy woman called a witch who needs her yard tended, some towns have something a bit different. Point is one of those few and we had a story of immense proportions. It is a combination of World War intrigue, extradimensional beasts, extraterrestrial visitations, and an old Indian curse. Talk about your Stephen King fodder.

The story was already aged when I heard it, I guess I was the second or third generation. But even though everything we know about the world screams that the story is absolute bobbycock, so many older people not only knew the story, but spoke of it with that genuine “what if” attitude. Even my mother and uncles spoke about the creature like it was some preposterous aberration that for some reason might just exist on the other side of a foggy hill. It was like living in a town that only H.P. Lovecraft could have imagined but about five pages before the story actually begins.

And I’m not alone. All one has to do is turn on the schlock History Channel shows to see how many of these stories are out there. There’s the Beast of Bray Road and the Lizard Man of Lee County. For every completely sarcastic television show on such a creature is a small community that is caught in the midst of a Weird Fiction tale and lives on the edge of preponderance.

Every person in a town like that sits on a spectrum that for the most part is a very narrow sliver on either side of the skeptic/believer line. And I can tell you, even the hardcore skeptics in a town like mine look out at a chilly, mist-shrouded eve with no moon and wonder to themselves just what might be out there.

So, yes, I grew up with a monster in my backyard. A monster that was real enough that even the most sensible of friends and family would stop for a moment and think, “What if monsters are real?”

The Asylums: American Gothic Incarnate

The last few weeks I have become a bit obsessed. Yes, it’s true, something managed to occupy nearly 100% of the time for a nerd. Yes, I’m a nerd-you should have noticed by now. Anyway, where to start, ah, insane asylums. They occupy a special place for most horror aficionados. Lately, I’ve been exploring why.

I guess if anything comes to mind when someone thinks of the haunted asylum or hospital, the first thing is really the edifice itself. In fact, I find it difficult to not imagine the building first and foremost. The mere idea of a huge structure, often with a footprint that dwarfs most people’s concept of a manmade thing, with hundreds of windows, a multitude of strange angles that look like some remnant from an age of monster filled labyrinths, and an imposing presence often set in the midst of near idyllic country pleasantry is enough to make the typical person take pause. Never mind that most of these buildings are actually close-nit consolidated building colonies surrounding a huge central structure, often a small town unto themselves with housing for nurses, doctors, orderlies and a bevy of support buildings because the hospital itself needed carpenters, machinists, plumbers, and for a long time its own set of fields for farming. Add to that the fact that many of these buildings that have survived to modern times come from the wonderful Victorian Age and it becomes quite evident, with sweeping wings crested by weather vanes, looming spires, grinding, watching clock towers, gargoyles to frighten off the evil spirits and frighten the living into sanity, and elegant gabled roofs, that these buildings are a conglomeration of mystic, nostalgic, and beautiful. The beginnings of the perfect gothic horror novel.

These gorgeous buildings saw massive investments as architects and doctors came together in attempts to improve conditions. One such doctor actually lent their name to many of the most peculiar madhouses. His name was Doctor Thoman Story Kirkbride and it was he that gave us places such as Danvers State Hospital, Greystone Park, and my own local inspiration, The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. These huge constructs are among the most infamous of these grandiose buildings. With their bat-like wings composed of offset wards sprawling over hundreds of feet in length, opulent interior designs, and imposing exteriors, they became the inspiration for many a writer including H.P. Lovecraft himself.

As time passed, the buildings all cycled through a similar progression. At first the buildings would live up to their intended purpose, even if that purpose was more wishful thinking than sound science. But over time, more and more people were left-or in many cases completely abandoned-in these massive hospitals. Families would admit nearly anyone from the mildly learning impaired to the criminally insane and then conveniently forget about them. Couple this horrible family treatment with the fact that many of the patients did not have the means to self-support, or even recover for that matter, and eventually the places became crowded to the point of absolute ridiculousness. A quick survey of the history of nearly any asylum produces staggering differentials in expected capacity to actual residency, often in the neighborhood of a factor of ten. That means for every one patient expected to be housed a treated there were in fact closer to ten. Ten people occupying the space, services, and food of ten. This led to staff becoming hopeless and disenfranchised with the care, and despite the awe inspiring beauty and soul pleasing serenity on the outside, all too often it was absolute bedlam on the inside.

The next contributing factor is the very treatment of those within. From the first attempts to house the insane apart from the regular populace overcrowding became an issue, over and over again, as if some grand system had dictated that no matter the number of houses for the wretches of society, there could never be enough space. As families dumped the unwanted and burdensome and the staff grew tired of dealing with patients they were in no way equipped to handle, the doctors themselves had their own difficulties. For one, they had no idea how to treat the behaviors for which people were committed.

This is where it gets juicy. Doctors were convinced that punishment would condition many of the patients. Punishment administered on a regular basis for an uncontrollable behavior is torture. To this day many of the so called treatments administered in these institutions have shown no usefulness whatsoever in treating anything, and many it seems would have actually exacerbated many of the symptoms of the many faces of madness. These are all the horrible cures that we have heard of but force to the back of our mind. It is still very difficult to believe that someone genuinely thought that waterboarding, water shock, electrical shocks, lobotomies, and drug cocktails including massive doses of insulin were cures for anything. But many doctors believed that the calm that followed was an indication of success as opposed to mental and physical exhaustion coupled with a sense of utter defeat.

The third ingredient is the fact that many of these magnificent places still linger at the fringes of towns and cities throughout Europe and North America. The old buildings may have collapsed roofs, molding plaster, and creaking floors yet there is a shred of their glory that lends them, like the traditional Victorian Home, a sense of imposing splendor, lingering authority, and a ghastly antiquity. Coupled with the sweet smell of rot, the mystery of horrid conditions and frightening trials hinted at by the presence of old files, rotting wheelchairs, and rusted surgical equipment, and the crumbling shells of greatness this creates a near mythical realm not all too far removed from our present or our own homes that is ripe and ready for the troubled souls of thousands to wander not-so-forgotten halls, calling out to us in the dark of the night.

These are the reasons that the asylum occupies such a large part of American and English folklore, with a particular thick vein in New England. My own travels have landed me in the shadow of Danvers, Greystone Park, Weston State, and a few other near legendary monoliths and inspired a good bit of my idea of gothic horror. They have given us Arkham Asylum in the world of DC Comics, populated dozens of movies, and been the setting of countless urban legends. So, yes, I have had an obsession of late, but it is merely the culmination of a life lived in the shadows of horror.