Hospitals age awesomely. It’s not for nothing that numerous scary video games have scenes set in hospitals. Terrifying experiments by mad scientists leap instantly to mind. Reanimated corpses shambling along decrepit corridors. Long screams of the mad. There’s lots of atmosphere, lots of chills, and fantastic visuals.
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Small Pox Isolation Ward |
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| Small Pox was once an incurable killer, claiming around 400 million deaths in the first half of the 20th century before its eradication. The people who contracted it were likely to die, and had to be removed from the general population lest they spread the infection to others. The Small Pox Isolation Ward Haikyo set into a then-remote Izu cliff-side was one such place they’d be banished to, to endure the agonies of their disease while lying on a straw mattress in a wooden shack, looking out to the sea and waiting to die. | |
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Toyoshin Convalescent Centre
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Nichitsu 4. Doctor’s Office |
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| The Toyoshin Convalescent Centre is an oddity already sunk from the consciousness of the neighbouring area, something the local kids don’t even notice as they walk past it to and from school. No fences or barricades of any kind guard its door or driveways, but no-one ventures inside because- why would they? The place is a shell neither ominous nor dangerous- something old men potter around inside singing enka songs while searching for scrap firewood, a non-place already fading from existence. | Nichitsu is a tiny little village huddled in a chilly mountain pass, far from the nearest population center. Come an emergency the Doctor’s office would have been the only ER, so its few rooms were crammed full of equipment, now forgotten and lying in shadow: rusted iron operating tables, toppled X-ray machinery, documents sheafed and scattered everywhere, surgical clamps in heaps and organs floating in formaldehyde jars. All of it now sinking, as the floor-boards bow under the weight of 30 years of absence and neglect. |
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Keishin Radiology Hospital |
Waverley Hills Sanatorium |
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| The gutted shell of the abandoned Keishin Hospital stands blank and ghostly on the rural Kanagawa sky-line. It once housed state-of-the-art radiology and cancer departments, now the only pieces of equipment remaining are the chairs bolted to the floor in the dentist’s office. | The Waverley Hills Sanatorium in Jefferson County, Kentucky, opened in 1910 in the thick of a Tuberculosis groundswell, then an incurable disease rife in the swampy backwaters of rural Loisville. The infected went to Waverley to be quarantined, and most likely to die- now the current owners hope to re-furbish and re-open it as a haunted hotel. |
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on Ruin of a Japanese WWII Shipyard on Writing Blog #8 tapestry narratives on Writing Blog #7 the engine of fiction
