Dark Passage: Hospital Hopscotch

The Hospital of Seven Teeth

3. Tunnel below Tunnels

The hospital campus is tremendously large and all the buildings are linked by tunnels. During a previous night of exploration we had waded into a flooded passage whose water ended up reaching to our waists. On this particular night we had managed to avoid getting soaked.

But we did get terribly disoriented. Long, long tunnels. Narrow staircases leading into buildings that were impossible to identify until we had climbed to an upper floor and looked out of a window. Tunnels beneath tunnels. Crawlspaces that were dead ends, barred by old brick walls and littered, perhaps, with a solitary shoe. There seemed to always be stairs reaching yet further into the ground.

In some tunnels there was a faint breeze, indicating a nearby exit. Other passages were heavy with foul air. It appeared that no one had traversed these dark caverns in many years. There was no way of telling what we would stumble onto. As excited as we were, we admitted being prepared to make unpleasant discoveries. If this was not death's custom-tailored performance space, I don't know what is.

Some asylums, such as Northampton, have their ghosts -- but this one has the blood and guts. It's ugly, it's filthy, it smells bad. It has a tragic and sordid history. Here people watched other people being taunted, abused, dissected. The tunnels make you think of those things.

The question that keeps recurring: How on earth was it possible for one institutionalized mental patient to dismember and bury another on these grounds?

And where exactly could such a thing have taken place?

I've often noticed that there can be a close link between horror and grief. While I was not exactly mourning Miss Ann Marie Davey, 36, I was trying to resurrect her in my thoughts, questioning and pitying her. The tunnels were grim. They were the tunnels of a place where someone -- not the murderer -- was playing with seven of Ms. Davey's teeth and no one cared.

That night we had our objective. In a place where every corner was a potential crime scene, we looked for the facility where those victims eventually ended up. Most hospitals have a tunnel leading to the morgue. We were looking for the morgue. Several times, medical apparati and jars containing unidentifiable decayed matter led us to believe that we were nearly there. Yet the rooms we encountered would inevitably be remainders of other hospital functions.

But at times, though I was with three men, I felt a physical dread. The tunnels were cold and filled with mist. They were pitch black, years away from contact with daylight. And occasionally there were condensed pockets where the remnants of something horrible pressed against my skin. Those pockets were creepy beyond words. The wet, dank tunnel smell, already heavy and obtrusive, here seemed rich with decay and organic waste, edged with something sweet. In those areas the moments spent away from the others, as I was photographing or lingering over some artifact, invariably ended with a rising fear that made me rush to catch up with the footsteps fading ahead.

It wasn't until later, days after I had left the hospital, that I began to feel somewhat traumatized, realizing that this place had impacted me more than any other ever could, and whenever I subsequently returned, again sleeping on the roof, the buildings had the uncannily familiar outlines of a place one visits often in one's dreams.

Phoenix from the Ashes