Claybury Asylum - Ghosts

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.

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