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Even small towns need medical services, so a hospital for the mentally insane wasn’t unusual. The asylum in Needles was typical—nurses administered medicine and restrained patients if they became agitated or dangerous. A doctor was in charge of treating patients and determining when—or if—they could ever return to society.
According to a registration log that was uncovered years after the catastrophe, there were 22 patients admitted at Desoto Asylum and a staff of 10. Under normal circumstances, nothing ever went wrong.
But, in the summer of 1966 residents of Needles began to go missing. Their mangled bodies were found by authorities inside Desoto Asylum. Unable to figure out how the patients of Desoto Asylum were escaping the residence panicked and boarded up Desoto Asylum with all the patients and staff still inside, the strong brick structure acting as a prison.
In the weeks and months that followed, things began to change inside the Desoto Asylum. The doctors and nurses ignored the patients in their frantic attempt to save themselves.
Toby was one of the higher-functioning patients, who’d been committed to Desoto Asylum in 1966 after killing his family with a pitchfork and using their dead bodies for experiments involving electrical cords and blue cheese dressing. When Toby was no longer subdued by debilitating amounts of brain-numbing sedatives, he overheard the staff planning to escape and leave the patients to die.
Unrestricted by the bounds of human decency, Toby unleashed years of pent-up rage against the frightened staff and began committing revolting horrors on their live bodies. With the help of other patients, Toby turned the tables on the former nurses and doctors, drugged them, and subjected them to his own twisted and painful experiments.
Years passed before anyone escaped. Her name was Nurse Betty, and her story was found scribbled in the margins of a book. Most of the entries are smeared with blood. One of them reads:
October, 1968. He is coming for us one by one, and I can hear them screaming from the padded cells, can smell the burning flesh each time the lights flicker. I know it is the electric chair. He calls it “shock therapy” but he and the girls are punishing us. I beg Alice and Paulette to remember how well I treated them as patients, but now as Toby’s nurses, they are brainwashed to enjoy Toby’s dreadful experiments. I’m afraid to guess what he’s doing with the dead bodies this time.
Today, hardly anyone remembers the horrors of Desoto Asylum. During the day, its vacant, eerie, crumbling brick structure hardly seems worthy of notoriety. But at night, when the smell of burning flesh permeates the air in a putrid dark cloud, thrill-seekers looking for innocent fun are in for the shock of a lifetime.
GALLERY
For your viewing displeasure…
