Ghosts
There have been many reported ghost sightings at the site, (such as tall men) both while it was still a mental hospital and more recently as the Repton Park development. In Rodinsky's Room, a book by Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein about David Rodinsky, they mark the tower at L. C. C. Claybury Mental Hospital, as the "fixed compass-point from which Rodinsky drew his circuits of London. All his maps were based on that sightline" (Dark Lanthorns 32). As a result of Lichtenstein's research, we learn that this is the hospital where Rodinsky's sister, Bessie, was sectioned, a fate that would befall Rodinsky himself when the authorities forced him out of his home on Princelet Street, setting in motion a series of events that led to his eventual entry into a mental institution in Surrey (Long Grove Hospital), where he later died of heart failure.
Read more about this topic: Claybury Asylum
Famous quotes containing the word ghosts:
“They call them the haunted shores, these stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here, and sea fog, and eerie stories. That’s not because there are more ghosts here than in other places, mind you. It’s just that people who live hereabouts are strangely aware of them.”
—Dodie Smith, and Lewis Allen. Roderick Fitzgerald (Ray Milland)
“Some ghosts are women,
neither abstract nor pale,
their breasts as limp as killed fish.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Why the ghosts of poor old dead Romans should be dragged in every time a man eats an oyster, I don’t see. We’re as fine specimens as they were. I swear I shan’t let any old turned-to-clay Lucullus outlive me, even if I’ve never eaten a lamprey.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)