Ghosts of Rosewood Asylum by Stephen Prosapio

Murder,
She Wrote ?”
    “Better.”
    “Oh these games, Zachary. Tell me.”
    “How would you like to join Rebecca, myself
and some more of our friends for a psychic walkthrough of Rosewood Asylum?”
    “Riiiiiiight. I’m hanging up now.”
    “I’m dead serious, Hunter.”
    Silence.
    “Cat got yer tongue?” Zach asked.
    “Wow. Gee, thanks for the advanced notice.
One of the most haunted places in America and you want me there in twenty
minutes? Whoever will I get on such short notice to style my hair?”
    Hunter was nearly bald.
    “I don’t need you in twenty minutes. Can you
be here around midnight?”
    “You’re there...you’re there now? What’s it
like?”
    Zach looked around at the tents on the lawn
and the equipment vans parked in the driveway. The sky was blue; the weather
was warm. Robins intermingled with sparrows in the treetops, while cardinals
whistled their signature song back and forth. Even in the heat of the Indian
summer day, the scent of autumn clung to the occasional breeze.
    But something was just not right.
    “Get here before midnight,” Zach said into
the phone. “I’ll let you see for yourself.”
     
     
    Patrizia’s flashlight beam bobbed and weaved
ahead of them in the darkness as they descended into the basement. Already ten
or fifteen degrees cooler than the lobby, the underground level smelled of
humid earth and sewage. Of course that’s while Zach wasn’t bombarded by Bryce’s
beer-stenched breath. Apparently, his co-host and Pierre had consumed quite the
liquid lunch.
    “This basement was mostly used for
storage—cleaning supplies and canned foods,” Patrizia said. She waved her
flashlight toward a doorway ahead of them.
    Zach wondered if the underground corridor
had looked any different one hundred years ago. Exposed ducts ran along the
length of the ceiling which was only about seven feet high. Bryce seemed uncomfortable
with the rusty pipes so close to his head. He crouched as they made their way
down the tunnel-like hall. The barren concrete walls may have once bore paint,
but Zach doubted the place had ever exuded an atmosphere other than brooding.
Unlike the upper stories which had experienced obvious renovations, the
basement had never been upgraded.
    “One day in 1898,” Patrizia continued, “an
orderly who was substituting for a missing coworker, discovered a woman living
in one of the storage rooms. She claimed that she wasn’t insane and had been
living there in hiding from her jealous husband.”
    “Was she a patient?” Zach asked.
    “That’s where the story gets even more
interesting. No one recalled having ever seen her. There were no records of her
admittance. She insisted that her ‘friend,’ an orderly had snuck her in and had
taken care of her while she was there.”
    “Hiding from her husband?” Rebecca asked.
    “Yes. But that’s not the end of the story.
The day that they found her, they also discovered the corpse of Thomas Carter, the
orderly , in the stables. He’d been stabbed dozens of times.”
    “She did it?” Bryce asked.
    “They assumed that she did. They found
bloody clothes down here. The police wanted to take her into custody, but the
hospital administrator fought it since she was already committed to the
institution. He withheld her identity from the official records.”
    “Dr. Johansson?” Zach asked. “The one Wendy
said died right before the hospital closed?”
    “Yes.”
    “What eventually happened to this woman?”
    “Apparently, she stayed at Rosewood and was
transferred to the female quarters.”
    “Did she die in the fire?”
    Patrizia shrugged. “This morning, Wendy
stated the death toll of the fire was ‘more than a dozen.’ My research found
that it was quite a bit more than a dozen. The actual number was nineteen.
Nineteen women burned to death.”
     
     
    The lobby was deserted when Zach and Rebecca
arrived. He grabbed a bottle of water from their supplies in the lobby and
handed it to her. She