Prompt Post - Part Ten
I am REALLY, REALLY SORRY about taking so long, guys, and about not being around much recently. I've been busier than I have in a while, and it just kept slipping my mind between uni applications and volunteering and all sorts- for some reason I thought we were much further off a new post.
If there is anything I haven't responded to, as of now, I'm ( Read more... )
Bwah-hah-ha!
Archibald Jensen Arkham died during the eighth year of construction, when he accidentally-on-purposefully slit his own throat with a pearl-handled straight razor. Both razor and house would change hands within the family many times, and both would finally come to rest in the hands of one Amadeus Arkham.
The original name of Arkham Asylum was Arkham Hospital. The house’s dark history as a mental health facility began in the early 1900s when the last living Arkham's mother, Elizabeth, who had suffered from mental illness for most of her life, committed suicide. It was later discovered that her son, Amadeus Arkham, had a psychotic break and murdered her, then repressed the memory of doing so.
Dr. Amadeus Arkham, the last by-blood still-living Arkham, decided that as the sole heir to the Arkham estate, he would remodel his family home in order to properly treat the mentally ill, so that others might not suffer as his mother had. Prior to the first period of the hospital's many, many remodels, Dr. Arkham had treated patients at the Kansas State Psychiatric Hospital in Metropolis, where he, his wife Constance, and their daughter, Harriet, had been living for quite some time prior to his mother’s death.
When he told his family of his plans, they all moved back to his ancestral family home to oversee the remodeling. While there, Arkham received a call from the police notifying him that serial killer Martin "Mad Dog" Hawkins - referred to Dr. Arkham by Metropolis Penitentiary while at Kansas State Psychiatric Hospital - had escaped from prison, and sought Dr. Arkham’s considered opinion on the murderer's state of mind. Shortly afterward, Arkham returned to his home to find his front door wide open. Inside, he discovered the raped, mutilated, and dead bodies of his daughter and wife in an upstairs room, with Hawkins' nickname carved on Harriet's limp, dirtied body.
The shock of the murders brought back the repressed memory of killing his mother. For many years, Elizabeth had suffered from delusions where she had been tormented by a supernatural creatures, and had called on her son to protect her from them. He was skeptical of the veracity of her visions, but, one day he finally saw what his mother had been seeing - a great swarm of bats, a spectre of death. Taking the pearl-handled straight razor from his pocket, which had proven to be an accursed family heirloom, he cut his mother's throat to end her suffering. He then blocked out the memory, and attributed her death to suicide.
Horribly re-traumatized, Amadeus put on his mother's wedding dress, another accursed family heirloom, and took out the pearl-handled razor he had carried every day since the day he had killed his mother. He knelt in the blood of his family, and he vowed to bind the evil spirit of "The Bats", which he believed inhabited the house, through ritual and sorcery. “Mad Dog” Hawkins was captured, and admitted to Arkham Hospital. Amadeus “treated” Hawkins for months until he finally, fatally, electrocuted him in a shock therapy session. This incident was treated as an accident by the authorities, but soon after this event, Arkham spiraled down into madness.
He continued his mission even after he was incarcerated in the re-named Asylum; he scratched the words of the binding spells and cantrips into the walls and floor of his cell with his fingernails, and painted them on with his blood, until the day he died. With his death, the rituals he had been performing would bind the curse of the Arkham family to the Asylum. This curse would eventually drive all who entered into the asylum, for any reason (please excuse the pun), batshit-insane. Thus creating a third, and final, accursed family heirloom.
In another world, in another time, Jonathan Crane would intern, work, go crazy, and die in Arkham Asylum. Not this world though.
Probably.
This is sooo fuuuuun, you have no idea...
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