My Home Away From Home

This is not the right place to spend a laborious amount of time detailing the hours I've spent exploring the hospital (and the now sadly defunct and arguably more interesting Taplow Lodge site). For some time, I've been working on such a piece (ultimately for an intended screenplay to be titled "Some Kind of Dead House") but, for this tale of "The Flincher", a detailed background is not necessary - interesting though I'm sure it might be. Nevertheless, with an assortment of people, and even once (what was I thinking) alone, I've spent a fair amount of time inside the place. You might even say that, aside from any vagrants that have bedded down inside (of which we've seen traces), I know the ruin inside-out as well as, or ever better than anyone else. During the 1½ years I frequented the place (which came to an end solely because I moved overseas), I gathered many mementos and artefacts such as X-rays, creepy doll's heads, and even scripts from a film that was shot there ("The Last Days of Patton" in 1985). We've even made our own films - "The Harrowing" & scenes from the cult classic "Mist Raiders" at the location. The point is - I'm very familiar with the place. It even gave me a strange sense of uneasy comfort (I did say strange) once I was inside - a true home away from home. There are two situations, however, when this is not the case.

One of these is the mysterious feeling you get upon climbing over that glass shard-topped wall - not just the first time, but every time during the day. There's this haze - a kind of aura around the place - and it can send a shiver down your spine. It's like someone or something telling you that you shouldn't be there. And the size of the group you're with doesn't change things: That feeling you're being watched; The eeriness of the lamp-post creaking and swaying on its fittings even though there is no breeze; The strange dripping noises and echoes around the buildings. There is no life within the hospital surrounds. You don't hear birds - anything you can hear is unfamiliar, like being in a different world. And it's a funny feeling. Like I said - almost comforting once you're in (especially if you're a regular visitor) - but for those first few minutes, you're truly on-edge. The hospital offers these warning signs during the daytime perhaps as a way of telling us all to get out of there by twilight. For at night, it becomes nobody's friend.

Until very recently, I lived right next door to a cemetery - tombstones lay not ten metres from my bedroom window. In that house alone at night, it became pretty creepy from time to time. Indeed, there were enough strange things going on for me to question the extent to which we understand the world we inhabit. Living at Dead End? (unfortunately, you can no longer check out our old website -but we may resurrect some of it for posterity in the future) didn't alter my opinion that no place in the world is as downright frightening at night as the hospital.