Story by Dana Martin.
Green River, Ohio, wasn’t always haunted. At one time, the small town was framed by thick trees and foliage, which provided a serene backdrop for quaint little houses with white picket fences. It was a storybook town in every way.
Even small towns need medical services, so a hospital for the mentally insane wasn’t unusual. The asylum in Green River 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 decades after the catastrophe, there were 26 patients admitted at the Green River Asylum and a staff of 15. Under normal circumstances, nothing ever went wrong.
But, in the summer of 1942, three tornados of historic proportions flattened the town of Green River, killing everyone and destroying everything: the volunteer fire company, the town sheriff’s office, the markets, the houses, the drive-in cinema… all of it. However, because the asylum was made of massive amounts of thick stone, it did not tumble as easily as the old wooden houses and structures did.
No one realized it then, but the only survivors of the Green River tornados were patients and staff inside the asylum that day, protected by the giant stone walls that behaved as a fortress against the devastating storm.
In the weeks and months following the total destruction of Green River, things began to change inside the asylum. The doctors and nurses—reliably the only sane, functioning citizens left alive in the destroyed town—ignored the patients in their frantic attempt to save themselves.
Owen Bell was one of the higher-functioning patients, who’d been committed to the asylum in 1939 after killing his family with a pitchfork and using their dead bodies for experiments involving electrical cords and blue cheese dressing. When Owen 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, Owen 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, Owen turned the tables on the former nurses and doctors, drugged them, and subjected them to his own twisted and painful experiments.
Without interference, Owen became the uncontested leader of the new Green River Asylum.
Years passed before anyone escaped. Her name was Nurse Betty, and her story was found scribbled in the margins of a book lying beside her skeletal remains. Most of the entries are smeared with blood. One of them reads:
October, 1944. 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 Owen’s nurses, they are brainwashed to enjoy Owen’s dreadful experiments. I’m afraid to guess what he’s doing with the dead bodies this time.
Today, hardly anyone knows the way to the map dot that used to be Green River, and if they do find it, time and overgrowth of brush have made the asylum almost invisible. During the day, the asylum is a vacant, eerie, crumbling stone structure that 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.
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