Today’s Dreaded Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In the early 20th century, some swore, peering through the black railings to the stone buildings with their arched windows and Corinthian columns, that the entire Bellevue Hospital complex in New York City was haunted. Stories were told of the “Bellevue Black Bottle” of the late 19th century, containing a mysterious potion supposedly used to winnow out the poorest patients. And of the morgue there where, after a disaster, the bodies literally overflowed. In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building on Washington Square had burned; more than one hundred young seamstresses had died; their blackened bodies had been stacked like cordwood on the piers behind the hospital. Mothers from the Gas House district, the gritty, crime-ridden neighborhood just south of the hospital, used its name to threaten troublesome children; “I’ll send ye to Bellevue” was almost as dreaded a warning as “I’ll tell the Gerry Society on ye,” the nickname of the city’s Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, hated for its relentless policing tactics.
The hospital’s famed psychopathic ward, home to the lunatics, the crazies, the suicidal, and the homicidal, only added to the rumors. Its windows were barred; ivy climbed the stone walls – in the winter, their creepers tangled like old bones. Passersby swore, swore that at night they could hear screams through the glass, see shadows stalking past the windows like unchained beasts.
Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook
This reminds me of a saying my mother had when my siblings were children in Duluth, Minnesota: “You kids are gonna send me to Moose Lake!” (Moose Lake being the local asylum, of course.)
Ahhh, Bellevue. I have fond memories of that morgue – I did my practical embalming classes there in 2003 and 2004. As my teacher always said ‘Its a place where the roaches are the size of rats, and the rats are like small dogs’. (He also advised us to not date or loan money to the morgue workers. I feel like there was a story there we never got to hear)
I would like to hear that story.
When I grew up in Simi Valley, CA a neighboring community of Camarillo was famous for having a state run mental institution. Occaisionally I would read in the local newspaper of how somebody from the hospital was in trouble for something insidious that “allegedly” occured there…the more things change, the more they stay the same.
My shrink interned at Bellevue and she calls me “unique”
At the turn of the century, some people in New Orleans were scared to go to Charity Hospital because of the black liquid they had to swallow upon admission. I think the black stuff was castor oil or somethink similar. I’ll have to find the story again in the book “Gumbo Ya-Ya”
I found a free download of the book! http://www.archive.org/details/gumboyaya00louirich
The black stuff was cascara. The Black Bottle Men are mentioned on page 76 in the chapter of the Axman’s Jazz.