Glenn Dale Sanitarium

Glenn Dale Sanitarium, abandoned, dark and ominous place of evil and dread that held the criminally insane.  Glenn Dale Sanitarium, five level red brick rectangular structure resting solid like a crypt of iron, Glenn Dale, existing on a tract of land in Prince George's County, Maryland.  Under the slanting gray tile roof and within the shadowed halls and rooms of this hospital, pale ghosts of the sanitarium's dead walk and weep, remembering what it was to be alive.  Other unfortunate souls pound on the doors and walls of the hospital, as if trying to escape.  Some of the Glenn Dale dead scream in voices the living may never hear.  Some of the dead laugh insanely; others whisper and talk amongst themselves, planning and plotting against the living, hoping to harm foolish trespassers.  From behind shattered windows in this asylum these phantoms stare out both night and day at the world of the living.  By night, darkness settles around Glenn Dale Sanitarium like a cold black shroud.  The blackness traps the secrets of the sanitarium, confining the secrets and sealing them in the shadows, crumbling white pasteboard walls, and white concrete floors.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
One of the specters of Glenn Dale Sanitarium is Fran Botkin, beautiful and sinister woman, murderess wearing the images of a thick fabric black dress, black leather boots. Fran Botkin, fair skinned, narrow facial features, long black hair, sharp white teeth that gleam when she smiles.  Fran, slender, stood six-foot, at one hundred forty pounds, with lengthened, partially bare arms and tall strong legs.  Fran Botkin, now deceased, dark-eyed, stares, waiting to clutch the living with thin, taloned fingers.  Fran Botkin, who when alive murdered five people, men and women, by slitting their throats with an eight-inch long, one inch wide, five ounce, sharpened gray-steel straight razor.  The gleaming oblong blade of the razor, a murder weapon, cut deep and without mercy.  Wearing all black, red finger-nailed right hand wielding the razor, Fran stalked each victim, found them alone at night, crept up behind them, lunged at them from behind trees or from shadows.  As they turned, before they had time to cry out, she attacked while she grinned a red lipped smile.  Her victims' facial features broadened into expressions of alarm and terror.  In a mad brutal screaming frenzy she slashed the razor's blade dozens of times through soft skin, severing carotid arteries, jugular veins, staining dark-hued or brightly colored pants, dresses, shirts, and dark shoes with splattered warm crimson blood.  Fran hacked the glistening cool steel of the razor down through skin, veins, arteries, vocal chords, muscle, nerves, down to the bone, to the spinal vertebrae.  She used  the end of the razor to amputate fingers if the target of her fury raised hands up in panic or failed defense.  As she perpetrated the horrific attack, her victims' blood pressure intensified; their breath became rapid and shallow; their eyes widened in fear and horror.  When the object of her violence fell to the ground, Fran pounced, continued the terrifying assault, cutting and chopping at noses and mouths, slitting throats repeatedly until murder was done and every victim lay in a pool of deep red blood.  After each murder, drenched head to foot in her victim's blood, adrenaline pumping, giving her three or four times her normal power, she ran back into the night, into the black nightfall that protected and concealed her.  She took fiendish delight in the pain and terror of her victims.  Enjoyed planning each act of murder with diabolical intelligence.  She learned how to handle the bloody razor, how to hack the blade in an arc back and forth, up, down, or directly ahead, depending on her victim's height.  Until one evening Fran was caught at last and committed to the madhouse at Glenn Dale Sanitarium on May 10 of 1978.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
Within the depths of the sanitarium, debris, clutter, dust and filth exist as proof of decay.  In chill winter the interior of this lunatic asylum is icy cold as a grave.  In summer the heat inside Glenn Dale stifles like an oven.  The air inside smells foul.  Dirt and molecules of disease contaminate everywhere at Glenn Dale, but spirits of the asylum don't care.  Empty white-sheet covered hospital beds are layered with spider webs.  The steel frames of the beds are corroded by age and suffering from neglect.  Floors are littered with medical cotton, bloody white bandages, medical records, plastic bottles with medication, and electrical equipment for the hospital.   Broken glass, a wicked trap left by vandals on part of the floors.  Walls at Glenn Dale have been spray painted with red and black graffiti, obscenities, pentagrams and other occult symbols.  In a locked room at the far right end of the third floor, melted black candle wax on the floor, an inverted black pentagram and an inverted black cross painted on every wall give evidence of a Satan worshipping ritual performed in the past.  Every window at the sanitarium has been smashed by vandals, some of whom did not make it out of the sanitarium alive, because the spirits did not want them to.  Dark furred rats and mice scurry on the floors looking for food.  Long ago, such fanged dark eyed vermin feasted on the protein flesh and drank the blood of bodies in the hospital morgue.  Abandoned hospital carts reflect sunlight by day.  Wicked four-inch hypodermic needles still remain on the silvery metal carts like poisonous snakes ready to inject deadly venom with steel fangs.  Perhaps psychiatrists and nurses at Glenn Dale injected Fran Botkin with such needles, puncturing her skin, drugging her.  There are stories of Fran Botkin confined in a white heavy fabric straight jacket, and locked in a small padded white room at the sanitarium while she screamed at the walls.  Other accounts claim Fran Botkin, when not confined might attack hospital staff, punching and  kicking them until sanitarium orderlies intervened.  She even cut a doctor on the forehead with a fragment of pointed metal.  One dark night, on October 30, 1980, in frustration and despair, Fran killed herself with an overdose of hundreds of milligrams of stolen antipsychotic medication. She had turned forty years old that very day.  Hospital doctors estimated she died at about 9:00 p.m.  Ironically, this was the very hour and time period Fran had been born forty years prior.  Fran Botkin was found in a supply room on the second level of the hospital, flat on her back on the white concrete floor, staring up at the ceiling, dead of ruptured blood clots on her brain.  At the end, blood flooding her frontal lobes and blotting out her mind.  Now she has taken her place with the other phantoms of Glenn Dale Sanitarium, anguished souls who wander forever, finding no rest. She died just thirty miles from where she'd been born.  But her hometown would not bury Fran Botkin, thinking her a disgrace due to her suicide.  Nor did her husband -- a business man, her three children, or the remainder of her family want to be responsible for her remains.  Instead she lies buried beneath the earth in an unsanctified grave, in an unmarked graveyard, at a hidden location on the property at Glenn Dale Sanitarium.  While her spirit, in vindictive red rage stalks the hospital like a deadly scorpion longing for blood.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
Tormented specters at Glenn Dale Sanitarium.  The ghost of a malevolent, chalky skinned eighty year-old woman, nearly as tall as Fran Botkin, with a weird biting laugh, long white hair and eyes with no pupils.  Wearing a white hospital gown as hazy as smoke, the old woman clutches the faces of intruders, inflicting painful red bloody scratches.  The emaciated-looking old woman endured  frightening abuse at Glenn Dale when she was alive.  She will take her revenge by tormenting the living who tresspass at Glenn Dale.  If you see her at night she will whisper to you and taunt you, try to lure or trick you into a fall down concrete stairs or into a deep elevator shaft -- many died following her.  There is the vengeful transparent ghost of a middle aged, six-foot man in a long black robe.  With a pale thin face, black hair, ragged white teeth, and clawed fingers, the robed man lurks in the shadows of the hospital, searches with dark eyes, ready to gouge the flesh of any living people who may invade his domain.  The bizzare energies of the dead enable them to harm the living in many ways, and to drain vital energy from the living, and we have no power to fight back.  So many cold and malicious phantoms who stalk Glenn Dale after nightfall.  The frigid reality of death holds them in its merciless grip.  Some spirits wail in grief; others shriek in high pitched voices of insanity.  Demons may also wait at this place; they rejoice in the morbid and hellish energy of the sanitarium, energy that pulses and shocks with an almost electrical power.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      
Glenn Dale, abandoned in 1981.  Confinement and madness, insanity and death, shadows and the light of a moon nearly full.  Corridors and rooms, eight foot high by ten feet wide.  Glenn Dale Sanitarium.  Phantom screams of patients tortured.  Tortured by shock treatments as patients lay bound by black leather straps to sliver colored operating tables while hundreds of volts jolted their bodies, damaged their brains, and broke their bones.  Thick white plastic mouth guards had been jammed between their teeth to prevent them biting their tongues in half.  Barbarically sadistic psychiatrists at the sanitarium refused to inject anesthesia into persons given shock treatments.  Instead these doctors watched with great contentment while the mentally ill suffered from electric shocks.  Spectral cries of dead patients tortured by ice water baths, beatings, forced prefrontal lobotomies with sharpened steel scalpels.  Glenn Dale Sanitarium where patients were force fed spoiled, decayed, meats, fruits and vegetables, force fed until patients became ill and vomited.  White clad phantoms of sadistic doctors, nurses, and orderlies.  All of whom, when alive, enjoyed the suffering of patients at Glenn Dale.  The sanitarium morgue in the basement, the morgue where flesh, bone, blood, internal organs, every bodily cell decomposed or rotted.  Each patient withered to a calcified skeleton whose skull grinned the wicked smile of death.  Many patients not ending up in the morgue were burned alive in a crematorium behind the asylum.  Locked in an iron metal chamber, engulfed in bright yellow and orange flame, they screeched in desperate futility and agony until they died. Thick black smoke rose from the red brick smokestack of the crematorium during cremation.  Intruders on the sanitarium grounds after nightfall now report hearing ghostly sobs coming from the abandoned crematorium, and the lingering, sickening-sweet aroma of burned bodies.                                                                                                                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                                           
Those who seek the paranormal at Glenn Dale, misguided people who intrude on the sanitarium in moonlight, using flashlights to peer into darkness of the hospital. Carrying their electromagnetic voice phenomena meters and their digital cameras, and infrared sensors.  In the belief that spirits can drain heat energy from a given area, paranormal investigators often carry a thermal heat temperature gauge.  An isolated area of freezing temperature is thought to indicate a ghost.  Seeking to measure, record and quantify the energy of the dead.  Those who seek the dead claim ghosts exist at a vibration frequency of 350 million; ghosts speak at a sound vibration of 18 Hertz; ghost spirit bodies weigh 21 grams.  Paranormal investigators believe that spirits feed on and absorb negatively charged electrical energy, and that ghosts project a magnetic field which can be detected with the proper device.  The dead care not about such things.  The dead laugh at the living.  The dead at Glenn Dale understand that they exist; the living exist, that hell and confinement are real, that cold hopelessness for them is never ending.  These are the things that matter to the doomed souls of this sanitarium.  For these souls, prayer, God,  salvation, have faded into distant memory.  A demonic energy crosses them, binds them to the murky corridors of this madhouse through which they walk or run as they reach for paint-flaking white walls, doors, or white concrete stairs.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
Fran Botkin again.  Walking softly through the midnight halls of Glenn Dale Sanitarium, she laughs to herself by moonlight, voice hollow, smiling a white-faced wicked grin.  She imagines the youthful, frightened faces of those she murdered, their pale sharply defined features by evening light, their dark hair, glistening eyes and screaming mouths.  She remembers slashing through their thick clothing of different shades, remembers slitting their throats.  Fran imagines the hot pain caused by the razor and the heavy pressure of the blade against her victims' skin.  She recalls being stained by their warm red blood when she severed arteries with a steel razor.  Envisions her victims, male and female, large and small, collapsing to the ground while they gagged, went into shock, clutched at their throats, terrified, their hearts pumping out blood.  She thinks about the bitter copper taste of her victims' spurting blood as Fran slashed and hacked the sharpened razor through flesh and veins.  Above all, Fran Botkin grins at the horror and at the rotten stench of death when her victims become corpses.  Fran's spirit wearing black, black as a widow's veil, black as a raven's wing, darker than the pit of hell and the realm of the Devil.  Fran Botkin, a six-foot shadowy phantom standing like a tall poison orchid of beauty and death.  She smiles with white fangs.  Her red fingernails are claws in search of a victim.  Her red lips and deep black eyes seem to beckon the unwary.  Go not to her if you enter into the terrible domain of Glenn Dale Sanitarium.  If you feel Fran's smooth icy touch, flee.  Run from this asylum where even breath, air and oxygen appear thin and stagnant and where the bright light of salvation never intrudes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
Glenn Dale Sanitarium, a final eternal moment of damnation.  A last plea for release from the sanitarium dead.  A call for long-deferred justice for the Glenn Dale dead.  Night and gloom settle around Glenn Dale.  The sanitarium grounds are like a grave that holds the bleakness of death, the stagnant air of decay.  Within these walls Fran Botkin and the other souls await the living, await trespassers.  Perhaps they await you.