“The ‘brain empty’ cemetery”.
With inspiration from Ailsa’s excellent blog
take a look the challenge here “Where’s my backpack”
my version of the theme “Mystical”
Sometimes, reality is more weird and mystical than the imagination.
There is such a peaceful and quiet atmosphere under the tall beautiful beech trees
at the small forest graveyard down towards the fiord called “Isefjord”
– simple gray tombstone and small bush-like vegetation shows
that here are several hundred people buried
and a small white chapel with a bell tower looks like a mini castle in the countryside.
But the bright fairytale atmosphere covering a story so weird or mystical, like a fairy tale also can be – the chapel and forest cemetery was part of the former state hospital at Nykøbing up northwest Zealand (Sjælland) – when the institution was greatest,
there were up to 1,000 psychiatric patients and residents and 700 employees.
In danish called “Sikringsanstalten” (means ‘secury institutions’)
It was also the country’s largest psychiatric institution with many psychiatric persons sentenced to psychiatric forced stay an unlimited period instead of long prison stay.
When residents died, burial took place in the small chapel,
and was subsequently buried either outside at the graveyard
or in cemeteries at their relatives’ homecities.
But what family and relatives didn’t know was that the brain of the dead one had been removed for research – at the end of the chapel, a room with beautiful burgundy red walls and taupe ceiling, a double door leads into a room that resembles an operating room here, as in all psychiatric hospitals in the country, surgeons removed the deceased’s brain and filled the void out with newspaper before the coffin was carried into the chapel
and the funeral could begin.
Collection of brains of deceased mentally ill with forced hospitalizations
because of very terrible crimes stopped in the mid-1980s.
All the brains were collected at the great psychiatric hospital in Aarhus,
where there are still 10,000 brains left which they don’t know what to do with.
An interesting and good danish link “here“
…..
The tell a letter-story challenge by idea of the good “
