St. Bernadette’s , est. 1842 in rural Batteridge, was once a place for the authorities to throw the non-white, the homosexual and the deformed - anyone that they (the close-minded people) wanted to keep out of the general community. It took several years before the building was converted into more than a simple storage house for the unwanted - and it became an institution - a fortress to hold the dangerous, unstable criminals and patients inside it.
Converted into a medical hospital in 1888, St. Bernadette’s Asylum finally rose to prominence when a young doctor by the name of Anders Hippolyta implemented his new, untested methods on the dangerous, deranged patients in his care during the turn of the century. No one really cared to know what he was doing, because the results were clear - the most violent of offenders became docile after he treated them and no one cared enough to ask how. They were only mental patients after all.
Dr. Hippolyta, in the twenty-odd years he’d worked at St. Bernadette’s, had developed a dark fascination with experimenting on the patients that had been sent to or committed under him, and his access to them only extended when, in 1920, he took full control of the institution as the Head of Medicine. The next two years that would follow saw St. Bernadette’s become a breeding ground of experiments, mutilation, torture, rape and a hotbed of neglect and pain. Patients who had been sent there for minor reasons were soon tortured beyond the brink of insanity and were never allowed to leave.
In those last two years, hundreds of patients died at the hands of Hippolyta and his underlings, and worse still was when Hippolyta saw fit to dabble in the occult sciences, trying to harvest his patients souls, resurrect the dead and each time he failed, he became more ensnared in his anger and frustration. Believing that All Hallows Eve, the 31st of October, would yield more results, Hippolyta tried and ultimately failed to bring a patients soul from the abyss - and what resulted was chaos.
No one can really say for sure what happened, because a week later when St. Bernadette’s was cleared out and boarded up, the only people that were found were few remaining staff members who seemed lost and dazed. There were bodies of trampled doctors and guards, few patients who had committed suicide when things started to get out of control and the body of Dr. Hippolyta - strung up with a belt around his neck. The cells and halls were empty of the patients and the mystery was never solved.
Pushed from the minds of those who lived in town bordering the institution, it was the talk of high school students and children - not unlike the boogey man, Dr. Hippolyta became an urban legend, as did the story of the patients that had disappeared still haunting the halls and wanting revenge.
The Hippolyta family still lives on in Batteridge, it was a large family after all, although they are still seen as evil and although perhaps not shunned by the community, but the community are very wary of them, even though some only have the slightest connection to Anders.
Dr. Anders Hippolyta never knew, but his lapse in judgement and also in his sanity in his last years as the Head of St. Bernadette’s during 1920-1922 went beyond the norm. His dabbling into the occult sciences and attempts to alter the nature of life and death caused irreparable damage to not only the physical bodies of his patients - or ‘test subjects’ as he called them, but to their souls. A combination of improper burial, no last rites over the dying patients, their ultimate demise at the hands of a madman and horrific deaths left the undead unable to cross over into the afterlife - they remained in limbo.
And they remained angry.
As they were never able to move on to the afterlife after their deaths, they returned to the world of the living to take revenge and tear down the doctors who had mistreated them so.
It was at their hands in 1922, on All Hallow’s Eve when the lines between the living world and the dead were blurred, that they took their revenge on Dr. Hippolyta, and all of the staff that had tortured patients at his command. It was the undead spirits of the slighted patients that overwhelmed the institution, and it was those spirits that stole away all of the living patients, dragged them into the space between life and death to attempt to save them from the doctors who wanted to harm them.
Once the institution was shut down, a mere few days after this mystifying event, the spirits of the patients, guards and doctors that had died lingered on - tied to the building and unable to move on..
