Dark Passage: Hospital Hopscotch

The Hospital of Seven Teeth

6. Anatomy Theater

The morgue is housed in a small mansion, the size of a comfortable one-family home. As it is situated on a hill, the main entrance lies upstairs, leading to the pathology lab and a darkroom. Walking down the staircase one encounters the wall of refrigeration trays, which separates an antechamber with a van entrance from the autopsy room. A room that turns out to not only be the morgue, but a theater as well.

I confess to collecting pictures of anatomy theaters. The simultaneously disturbing and stimulating cerebral areas this kind of theater taps into are better addressed elsewhere. But this was the first time I actually stood inside one.

And how grim it was. A small, dark room -- about the size of a bedroom -- contained a few spectator tiers behind the drainage remnants of the missing autopsy table. The walls were dirty and stained, without the standard sanitary tiles. The floors were little better than packed earth.

It was hard not to feel claustrophobic inside that shuttered space. All airs of clinical distance dissipated before visions of people crowded in a shady barn, watching the "doctor" poke at something lifeless beneath them. Inside a hospital known for abusing its patients, this sinister room offered the final indignity. At the same time, seeing the macabre tinged with such absurdity certainly kindled the imagination. The place was rife with many things.

How incredible it was to visit such a place. To be faced with such a turmoil of excitement, dread, sadness, such a dreamlike sense of unreality -- all stirred up by one vast, decaying hospital. It will not be there for long.

The complex is slated to be demolished very shortly. A few of the outlying buildings may be renovated for future use. As for the rest of the facility…

The current plans for this hospital are to turn it into a golf course.

Just watch out for those holes.