A Ghost in the Asylum (Patreon Exclusive)

Camarillo State Hospital was an insane asylum that was hastily turned into a university and remains haunted to this day. We'll hear from a listener who had a terrifying encounter inside of the building.

If you enjoy this episode, please rate and review, and follow the podcast on Instagram @heartstartspounding. Listen on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding

Sources

https://www.laweekly.com/a-trip-to-purgatory/

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-03-16-me-26647-story.html

https://uh-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/10657/6641/KOVAL-THESIS-2020.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

TRANSCRIPT

It's that feeling when the energy in the room shifts. When the air gets sucked out of a moment and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight when your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing. It's when your heart starts pounding, when heart starts pounding.

Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding Scary Stories told by those who lived them. I'm your host, Kaelyn Moore. Joining me today on our inaugural episode is my oldest friend and coincidentally sibling Leo, welcome, Leo. Hello. Hello. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me. How are you? I am simply existing.

Yeah. I don't wanna be perceived, but I want to exist. Does that make sense? Yeah. To all of our listeners. We're fine. , we're fine. We're chugging along. We are chugging along. Okay. Leo, I wanted you on the podcast today because you have a unique experience with the thing that we're gonna be talking about, and I'm really excited to share with everyone kind of the research I've been doing on, um, This topic and the story that accompanies it.

Uh, but you went to a very haunted university. Yes, I did. Can you tell me a little Oh yeah, baby. Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Um, yeah, so I went to school in southeast Ohio. Um, at the base, it's like kind of outside the base of the Appalachian Mountains, but it's still like Appalachian country.

Um, I went to Ohio University, beautiful campus, beautiful area. Love it. Shout out to every single Bobcat, current, past, present. Um, but yeah, our campus was like notoriously haunted. And like we got on, remember that Linda Blair show like most haunted places on earth or whatever? Yes. Yeah. We had a segment, God, it was like called?

Called the Devil's Campus or something. . Do you wanna go to a school? Absolutely possessed by Satan? Satan was actually the dean of Students right there. Um, but yeah, so there was just like a bunch of reasons why it was haunted. Um, one of the main theories is that like the five major cemeteries in the town, when you connect them, it creates a pentagram.

Okay. Did anyone ever like check that out and see if it was, yeah, so I cannot confirm or deny whether that is super legit because to be honest, don't really remember. But , I think I have looked it up and there are like five main cemeteries and they do line up kinda. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but also we had the ridges, um, Up on a hill right outside of campus that the college owned and they had renovated it into.

Office buildings and a little really nice, uh, art museum. Um, but the Ridges was a mental health facility in the 19 hundreds. Yeah, I think also the 18 hundreds, but yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. So there was like, and there's like a lot of tales from the Ridges while it was opened and while it's been closed that are just.

Really, really creepy and unsettling. And then there's also like a lot of stuff on campus that has happened that's been weird. Hmm. Um, like in, I know specifically in one dorm there was a dorm room that like, I think a student took her own life and afterwards a demonic face kept showing up in the. Oh my God.

And like no matter what they did, so they had to like shut down the room and it convert it into a boiler room because they deemed it inhab, inhabitable, uninhabitable, uninhabitable, . Yeah. Was there anything ever that like you F saw on campus or felt. I mean, walking alone at night on campus is always unsettling.

Yeah. But just, I remember like walking in dirty South and if you're from ou, you know where Dirty South is. Um, and just. Constantly getting the feeling that like there was someone behind me, but there rarely ever was. And I say rarely because I did get followed on campus, but Oh my God. Yeah. . . Geez. But like, uh, also, if you walk by, um, , the main four, the front four.

Um, apparently like it there, there's just like weird energy everywhere. And I did, I have gone to the ridges and I have seen stuff in the windows. Mm-hmm. . Um, but you always kind of just feel like there's another person there with you. Even if you're by yourself, like it's hard to explain. Yeah, yeah. But I have had specific instances of like weird stuff that has happened.

That's so bizarre. No, I remember visiting you in college your junior year. Yeah, senior year. Junior year, junior. And we did go to the ridges and yeah, it's just that overwhelming feeling of. . It just feels like there's people inside, which is a really weird feeling to have, and it's hard to explain exactly what that feeling is.

But when you're standing outside of this building, it just, it looks abandoned. It's in shambles. You can still see remnants of if Yeah. Yeah. Like of like the people that were inside. And it ended super tragically too, like you didn't mention how, you know, the fire that happened at this place, like the really traumatic.

Well, like fire, there was a fire and they had to shut down part of the institution, but that sort of, they were able to rebuild mostly from it. Okay. But it was always an over looming um, feeling because the way the ridges were built, um, like the shape of it was basically all of the docile and like, And like not violent offenders, they put in the center of the building where they could easily escape if there was a fire.

But the more violent offenders and the people were there for more serious crimes and actual crimes, cuz they. Throw you in there for any reason. Um, yeah, were put on the outside of the building so that it was tougher for them to escape if there were a fi was a fire. Oh yeah. Like was they were like down the wings, like further away from exits and, and so that was like just from the be like.

that was the vibe of the building. Yeah. So like right off the bat, you're, you're gonna get some negative energy. So today we're gonna talk about kind of a s a very similar situation. It's insane that there's two colleges in this country that have similar backgrounds, but there's a school in California, just a me, 45 minutes away from us, an hour, hour and a half in traffic called Cal State Channel Island.

And this is a nice little coastal college up by the Channel Islands National Park. Beautiful. Go kayaking there if you haven't, but it has a really spooky past because before, this was a university that opened in 2002. Cal State Channel Islands was also a mental health facility, quote, health. It was a, a mental facility called Camarillo State Mental.

And it was open from 1936 to 1997. Leo, do you know much about it? Can I run you through the background of it? Yeah. Could you, could you run through it real quick? Um, yeah, so this was a, I've never heard of this place. This was a mental hospital that was opened from 1936 to 1997, and at the time that it opened, it was the biggest mental facility in the world.

And at its height, it held 7,000 people. That's LA Times massive when it was opened, described it as a warehouse for the mentally ill. So that is kind of the insanity that starts this story. Um, I think it's also important to kind of know at the time in California, the prisons were overrun. And there was a lot of people being put in mental facilities for a bunch of various different reasons.

And so one thing I wanna emphasize as we tell this story is it's not like there were a bunch of violent, quote unquote, crazy people in this building, and that's why it's haunted. I would actually argue that it was a lot of. People facing, um, lower grade mental health issues and that the treatment of these people was so horrible that mm-hmm.

that's what makes it haunted. Yeah. I, I almost feel like with what I know of other haunted mental health facilities, um, You know, you're always gonna have a mix of like the super, like the really like bad people, quote unquote. Yeah. Um, and then the people who are put in there because their family doesn't know absolutely.

How to care of them. Yeah. Um, and it's just like, it's the dread and the sadness that comes from the people that. Shouldn't be in there, that are in there. Absolutely. That ties itself to the building. A hundred percent. And that's I think, exactly what happened with this building, because when it opened, it was actually mostly home to alcoholics, schizophrenics, promiscuous women and people with anxiety and depression.

So it was essentially people who were, at the time, vagrants, like that's what they were calling people at the time, was vagrants. And there was a. Vagrancy law that was passed in the early 19 hundreds in California saying that vagrants had to go to jail. And that's why the jails were overrun. So a lot of these vagrants were actually just alcoholics that maybe were out all night and were as acting like, um, belligerent and were drunk, or women that were promiscuous and their families were worried about them and their 10 promiscuous tendencies, and we're sending them to this.

But think about it. This is a facility where people who drink too much. Have too much sex. People that are anxious and depressed go and it's 45 minutes from Los Angeles in the thirties. So this actually was kind of a retreat for famous people at the time. Like a lot of famous people would go when they were trying to like lay low or they felt like they were having a mental health issue, or they needed to get clean saxophone legend Charlie Parker.

did a stint inside of the Camarillo State Hospital. Steve Mann, who was Frank Zappa's guitarist also stayed there. There's even, um, a rumor that Hotel California is written about the Camarillo State Hospital. I can definitely see that. Um, I, since you bring that up, having it be like a retreat for famous people.

Was there like, you know, like a area that was designated for them, like it was like the Camarillo State Hospital and then if you were famous and you needed some time away, you could come swim in a pool like, you know, I imagine facilities. . I imagine that was true. I couldn't get too much of a background on the exact facilities that were inside.

I know what the facilities looked like a little bit later in like the sixties and seventies as like the way mental health was being treated changed on like a state level. Yeah. In the thirties and forties. I don't know much about the facilities that they were using. I do know. About the tactics they were using on people, they deemed mentally unwell.

And I do believe that they would've never gotten away with performing these things on a celebrity or a musician. So I imagine there was a very different treatment between people. Yeah, there were. They were also probably, I imagine, kept like physically separate. In the building. Yeah. Yeah. So I would imagine so.

I think probably the darkest piece of history about the Camarillo State Hospital is the fact that they were active practices of sterilization. . And so in April of 1909, there was this thing called the A sexualization act that was passed. It was like 21 to one, and it was approved in the house, like 41 to zero, like it passed with flying colors through our government.

And it established California as the first state to start legalizing sterilization in mental institutions.

Why I have so many questions. Oh my God. I know. Like, don't know where to start. Because first of all, with what I know about American history, I'm not surpri. I'm still disappointed and upset not Oh, totally. Yeah. Not surprised that California was like, yeah, let's legalize this. This is a great idea. Yeah. Um, So they could just sterilize any person who is.

To the facility. Oh yeah. It's what the f And actually it was so wild, widely used in California that we , we were a place that the Nazis looked at as to how to do it in Nazi Germany for, for sterilization and eugenics. So what did eugenics look like in California at the time? It kind of was a free for all.

It was like the wild. Most of the people that were sterilized were, I don't wanna say most, a lot of the people that were sterilized were promiscuous women, quote unquote promiscuous, quote unquote promis because you could literally like kiss a boy down the street and be labeled promiscuous too much shoulder and be a harlet at the time, which is wild.

And there's all these stories of women. Not knowing what they're going to the doctor for and then finding out after the fact that they've been sterilized for what have you, like whatever promiscuity looked like. At the time, there were people who were alcoholics who also found out that they were sterilized, schizophrenic people, even just.

Depressed people were finding out after the fact that they were being sterilized, that their families had asked for them to be sterilized. And this is a insanely dark time in our country's history, in our state's history for sure. And I absolutely believe that something like this leaves an impression on a place.

There's no way that this, that type of energy doesn't just live there forever, especially. Being, first of all, being sent to a facility. Most of the time they, I don't wanna say most, there's probably a decent number of cases where they did not know that they were being dropped off. They did not know, like they were probably brought, told they were going on a drive, they were pulled up to the front door and they were like, all right, see you when I see you.

Yeah. And so, That en energy entering, and then on top of that being forcibly sterilized without your consent. Yeah. That Oh my God, that that'll break a person. Absolutely. Like. Sterilization also wasn't the only thing that was being used there. Shock therapy was incredibly popular at the time as well. And you know, shock therapy is something that's still used to this day.

The rules about it have completely changed, but that was another one where back in the day it was kind of a free for all you could. Shock someone so bad with the intention of completely removing their personality in order to put a different personality in the person. That is a lot of shocks and it was just allowed.

That's ugh, that's heartbreaking. We'll be back after this break.

There's one story that I have about, um, this woman who grew up in Oregon and was sent to Camarillo by her parents, and she believes that she was forgotten about. Her parents never wrote to her. Her parents never came and got her. And one day her aunt, who was her conservator at the time, signed her up for shock therapy, and this is her quote on what she experienced at Camarillo.

Quote, they strap those electrodes to your head and tie you down and then zap, you lose control and go into total body convulsions when you know they're gonna do that to you. You get all tents and scared that they'd put a codex in your mouth and make you bite down on it so it wouldn't crush your teeth, which is just Terri terrifying.

And they, they could do this as much as they want to. A person and your family members could sign you up for. And what was her, what was she in there for? Did you, did you say that? Um, she actually, so this woman was a paranoid schizophrenic and that's why she was sent there. Oh my God. Which paranoid schizophrenia requires such a, Delicate cocktail of medicine, such oversight by trained professionals.

You cannot zap that out of a person. Yeah. Also, just like verbal therapy also helps. Yeah. You can't like, You can't microwave someone's brain and expect them to just be fine afterwards. Like, exactly. Oh my God. Oh my God. Exactly. So this goes on through the decades when finally California decides that Camarillo isn't making enough money and they closed the facility in 1997.

Then there's a five, about five year period in between the mental hospital closing and the university opening, and so I sent you photos of both. Can you look at those photos? Yeah. You said there's a five year difference? Yeah. What do you notice about, there's not a five year difference in those photos, but what do you notice about the hospital and the university?

They're the exact same building. They're the exact same building. They changed absolutely nothing. They did not change anything. Oh my God. Those kids are still going to school in the same facility. How I'd, I'm curious about the inside, cuz like me too, I'm seeing like the outside, the facade is completely the same.

Absolutely. I'm curious about like, Could. Oh my God. Oh my God, my God. Basics of like hauntings and bad energy. You have to just tear the place down. You have to burn a place down, tear it down, demolish it. Like, you know, you can't just use the same structure and then be confused as to why bad things are still happening.

Yeah. So I do have some insight on the inside of. This building, and I'm going to play you an interview I had with a man named James who has been inside the building. He was inside of Camarillo in like the late nineties, early two thousands, so it was in this in between period. Between it closing as a mental facility and opening as a university.

So it was right after this place closed and he came face-to-face with something absolutely terrifying inside.

About 20 years ago, um, before, uh, Joseph and I started Night Walker and, and started making horror movies, um, I was a musician, uh, based out of Ventura ca. And when I moved there, um, my guitar player had talked about the Camarillo State Hospital, and there was always rumors and stories about it, about being haunted.

And, you know, uh, after it was no longer, uh, a state mental hospital, uh, it was abandoned for a long time. People would sneak in and have experiences and whatever. It's always been room. So we go there one day because we lost our, uh, our practice space and we were looking for a. And our guitar player who had gotten a job at the college that they were renovating, um, said, Hey, there's empty, empty places all over here.

Maybe we could finagle a deal to my practice. So, so myself, uh, him and our bass player went out there, um, and our bass player was a huge skeptic. Didn't believe in it. Kind of was like making fun of making fun of us a little bit for kind of believing in it. Um, we'd get out there. There's only one other. In the whole area and it was a maintenance worker working on something.

They dunno what it's, um, and the first room we entered was the courtroom. Now I don't know why there was a courtroom in the middle hospital. I'm, I'm assuming, you know, there was for releases, et cetera or whatever. Um, but it was creepy and eerie all in itself. You know, very classic, like old horror movie.

And then the first thing we saw when we walked in was in dust written. We're still here. We chuckle. We're like, okay, obviously this isn't a ghost, but then you're like, well, well maybe. So one reason that they're actually. Was a court in Camarillo was in 1969. There was a law that passed a state law that passed saying that they had to have twice weekly court sessions so that patients would have an almost unlimited right to put their case before the court for appeals, um, to, so that they could leave.

So it's actually a good thing that there was a. I guess like of the whole hospital, this was probably like a better part of Camarillo. Um, that being said, like talking to him about the court, he said that it was like someone just closed the door one day and no one went in for years. Like it was just covered in dust and cobwebs, pe like all the stuff was still there.

It wasn't like people had cleaned up and they had, you know, were getting ready to demolish this before they turned it into the university. It was just one day they were told that they had to leave and they just closed the door. Like, uh, like someone had just taken a snapshot of it. Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. And then in the dust, yeah, there was written, we're still here, which is, we're still here. Terrifying. I was gonna say it is, it's nice that they had a court for like people to argue these things. Um, argue their sentencing. But I have to imagine that it still probably didn't work out too well for a lot of people.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. . Yeah. . As we as we know. Just cuz there is a court doesn't mean there is a fairness. Fairness trial . Yeah. Yeah. And they're like, mm, you have to represent yourself and you have 20 minutes to prepare . Yeah. Go have fun. Go have fun. Uh, yeah. But we have a court, like I could see that being on the pamphlet course there.

We have a court option times a week. You can . We meet three times a week and it's always on the judge's lunch break or whatever that you have to Yeah. Oh my God. 10 minutes to appeal your case before they stick you back in chalk therapy. Um, okay. I'm gonna play you a little bit more. Okay. So, yeah, so then we're walking through and uh, we're like, well, maybe this will be a cool practice space.

And we're kind of like joking a lot. And then we, we get to this corridor and you could. The, like an outside garden area, um, in between this hallway and our bass player, uh, kind of turns and he stops and he, he made some comment, which I can't remember. And then we're like, Hey, man. Like, all right, listen, we know you don't believe in this stuff.

Like, whatever. Like, let's just get through it. And he goes, no. He's like, I'm, I'm not, like, I'm actually not kidding. Like, I saw somebody walk by outside and we're like, well, there's a, there's a worker here, he's on, no, it was a woman. And we're like, oh, . Okay. , let's keep going. But you know, still thinking he's kind of messing with us cause we don't know.

And then we get down a hallway and you could feel on the other side of that hallway that in the dark something was wa like watching us. That utter feeling of like, okay, well I don't know what's beyond there. I'm six two and can handle myself quite well. I'm not walking down that hallway. I don't. What it is.

And you know, we're dar at each other to do it. And we're like, no, no, you do it, man. No, you do it. None of us would. And then in the, in the, in the midst of all that, all of a sudden we hear tooting, tooting. And there was an old piano, of course cliche sitting in the corner and our guitar players playing that.

And I was like, man, I was like, all right. Like, no more. But it was because he did that, that I looked into one of the rooms and you could see, um, like a rocking. In there, a lot of these rooms were still decorated with like, if there was patients still there, um, just like the bed frames were barren and, and that stuff, but e everything was pretty much the way that it, that it would've been if they would've had some TLC to it, which made it even creepier.

Um, so the vibe is up and we're all kind of on on edge a little bit. And then we're kind of walking around and we get into this big ballroom area, which they probably, where they held, um, like dinners and luncheons and things like that. Um, and I would tell Joseph about it later cause I'm like, man, that would've been the perfect place to film something really cool in and I, and pre iPhone days.

So there's no pictures of it. Um, but as beautiful as it was, if you ever read the backstory about the hospital, um, some real horrors like happened. And it was almost like you could kind of feel that, uh, sense of dread, um, wrapped up in a pretty package of the beauty of the, of the architecture of the room.

But something was always hidden behind those walls. Like that was the feeling. So I wanna talk about the horrors that he alluded to in that. Yeah. Little segment, um, cuz I looked it up as to what did go on in the lunch hall. And so apparently, as is probably classic with a lot of, uh, facilities in the thirties and forties, the hospital was like spending way too much money on staff, on the facilities, on, I mean, shock treatment can't be cheap.

How'd they get all that electricity to that building in the, yeah, that bill in the valley, that . Listen, I L A d, WP must have had a field day, so they were running out of food as a facility. They had at one point you could only eat twice a day and most of the food was expired. , which is twice a day. Okay?

You're not gonna die per se, but you have to remember that this is a bare minimum. This is a mental facility and people are taking meds. So people were getting sick. People like, you know, your meds start acting strain or like just you're behaving. They're not doing what they need to do. Yes, your meds are not doing what they need to do.

People were like constantly nauseous cuz they were taking meds. Empty stomachs. People were having epileptic episodes and outbursts. Um, because just like taking their, they, you know, they weren't taking their medicine properly. Patients were like dropping a ton of weight too. Like their families would come visit them and they would look skeletal.

Yeah. Oh my god. And, and they were malnutrition, like malnourished. And so there's actually one patient, this guy Steven Miller, he was 33 years old and he died in his hospital. From starvation here, I'm gonna play you the rest of James' story. Yeah. Um, so we start walking around and our guitar player goes, Hey, let's go down to where the morgue area is.

And I was like, that is the dumbest thing you've ever said to meet ever in your life. Um, but we're here. Might as well go. Um, so there's two ways to get down there, a spiral stair. Which I vetoed right away, not gonna happen. And then a way that you can go through the backside where there's a door. Now keep in mind, there's nobody over there.

Um, we started hearing behind the door what sounded like, um, like, like almost like a slow, like metal table. Being screeched across the floor and we're, we're kind of looking at each other, all three of us. And like when you start getting those nervous, there's the nervous laughs a little bit. Like, are you hearing this?

Like, am I crazy? And uh, and it kept happening more. And then it would stop and then all of a sudden, right, almost like it was right in front of our faces, behind the door was, bam. Someone punched the door, slammed their hand on the. and I could have won multiple gold medals at any Olympic games about how fast I ran.

And I mean, we, I mean we bolted and then on our way out still no cars saw nothing drove back home that night. Um, one of the scariest nights of my life afterwards, especially because, you know, nothing's there, you know, no one's there. And our bass player skeptic, um, to this day still believes in ghosts.

So according to James, when I asked about the layout of the building, he said that there was absolutely no way for a person to get inside the morgue. It was completely sealed off. , was it like underground? Yeah, it was not like underground, but it was downstairs. Okay. Kind of in the middle of the building.

Yeah. So you'd have to actually like enter the building itself? Yeah. To get there. You couldn't just like happen upon it. No, no. You had to kind of know where you were going. And this is just from looking into it, I think a place that a lot of students have speculated is still on campus. Um, that the morgue might have been turned into something that's now being used by students.

I don't believe that it was demolished at all. Yeah. Especially if it's like downstairs. Not necessarily, but like a lower level of a building that's like the foundation. They're not gonna, that's gonna be more difficult to get rid of than say. A top room. Yeah, I imagine. I think so. Also, can you imagine being the freshman that get put, gets put in like the morgue room?

Oh my pa. I. Pants peed . Consider my pants peed. Peed . Immediately. Immediately. This is a fine classroom. Oh, it used to be a morgue. Mm, I just pissed myself. Okay. Yeah, so I've like looked into it as to like what other students have experienced on campus and there's a lot of varying responses. There's kids that, you know, there's parts of the school that actually.

from Camarillo haven't been converted into parts of the university. So there's this place on campus called the Scary Dairy, and this was a dairy farm that they would have the patients work on. What Dairy farm. Yeah. That have, that was the ridges. The ridges was like a, a fully functioning like agricultural and dairy farm that the, they used to use it as like a form of mental health rehabilitation.

Oh my God. That, that's so crazy. Yeah. It must have been just popular at the time. They were like, oh, you know what's gonna make, probably people feel less depress. Well, just like it was a way milking a cow, it was a way f they thought it was a way f to for them to like integrate back into society. Like, oh, you're getting your mental health treatment, but also like we're teaching you how to function in a capitalist society so that you can live on your own.

It honestly sounds like an unpaid internship. Oh, it definitely, it was, it was worse than an unpaid internship. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Where it's like, okay, like this is, this is for you. Yeah. But. You know, you eat what you sow. Is that you eat what you milk? . You drink what? The milk.

Oh God. But yeah, no. Wow. That's wild that it, it happened at more than one place. Yeah. You know, I, I imagine it was. Semi common to have forced labor from the pa, the inmates, you know, it was the thirties and forties and fifties. There truly were no laws as to what you could do to someone you deemed less fortunate than you

Listen, no laws when you drink in claws. Am I right? No. No laws when you're drinking milk. . The dairy industry is a lawless place, but there's, yeah, there's like a few things coming in from the students of. people will go visit the scary dairy as they come to call it, and it, you know, it's still abandoned and super spooky.

People have mentioned hearing sounds. There's a lot of sounds that come from closed doors, similar to James' story of like scratching and yelling. Um, there's rocking chairs that rock and ki like doors that open and windows that slam, and then someone actually. Mentioned that people refer and joke about this thing called getting lost in Bell Tower.

And so Bell Tower was one of the original buildings and it was designed like a maze in order to keep inmates from escaping. So new students tend to get lost in this building a lot because of its maize like layout. It's a building. It's not like, cuz when you say bell Tower, I imagine like, it's like one.

Thing just really tall. It's like a building. It's like a, it's a building. Oh my God. Built like a maze. That's so, that's so terrifying. The fact that like architecture is used as a way. to like weaponized architecture. Weaponized architecture. I weaponized. Architecture is everywhere. It's like the reason that they put little dividers on public benches so that homeless people can't sleep there.

Yeah, it's like web. Yeah. It's the reason in Vegas, why they make all the windows look so much bigger than they actually are is because if you a, if you made the buildings in Vegas have windows for every room, they'd look like prisons and they'd look really big and scary. , but they make all the windows like for four rooms, so the buildings look smaller and closer because they want people to like walk down the whole strip to go to the Mirage and gamble there.

Weaponized architecture, arch architecture. Yeah. Like I mentioned earlier about the way the ridges is built, I also wanna add, I. Don't remember where I heard that. So that could also be a lie. But it's still weaponized architecture where like you're using the ways of the building to just divide and confine people.

Yeah. You're putting the. Lower class on the bottom of the Titanic weaponized Architecture, architecture, architecture. Oh my God, I not building the dividers up to the walls of the Titanic Weaponized architecture. Absolutely. Building things in a way where if things were to go wrong, the people you deem least important die first.

Yeah. There you don't, you don't have to worry about the people that you've put the bad stamp on. Yes. Yeah. And the people with the highest chance of survival are the people that you think are, are like normal, quote unquote, like, yeah, not as bad. Yeah. Yeah. The people you deem good, so like, is it. , is it like just the walls make it feel maze?

Like what makes it feel maze like, do you know? Um, I, I honestly don't know. I, I mean, I imagine designing it like a maze just means there's probably corridors that don't go anywhere or don't have exits. Mm-hmm. and like lots of dead ends and stuff, or staircases that like don't really lead to where you're supposed to be going.

Like the Winchester Mystery. . Exactly, exactly. That was weaponized architecture against ghosts. You know what, I respect that. Yeah. Shout. I will say to Sarah Winchester, shout out to Sarah Winchester. I think places that use that type of architecture deserve to be haunted. You're not gonna avoid it being haun.

Right. Like there's no way around it. Well, you think about like feng shui in buildings, like you want to orient rooms around windows and around doors and like the use of mirrors, you know, you're, you're. Specifically putting a room together for good vibes. You can put a room together for bad vibes and invite bad energy into a space by designing it.

Oh yeah, chaotically. That's kind of how I feel like my apartment is designed. I was gonna say , you're the vibes in your apartment are absolutely. Awful. I don't know why I keep coming here. There's so bad. I've tried to decorate as well as I could it, but I, I don't think I can save it. Like for, let me paint the picture for everyone.

You have a concrete coffee table right off the bat. Vibes rancid. That was Matt's choice. I agree. Those, the vibes are rancid. It looks like anvil that you would drop out of a window onto a cartoon character to squash that way. Wiley Coyote is terrified. Wiley Coyote is shaking. Knowing I have this coffee table , but like in my guest bedroom, all of the doors just, there's like seven doors for different things and they all open into each other.

So the wall space is so small, you can't like hang a TV or a painting or anything. And there's no room for a dresser because any. The door just opens into it. Yeah. Oh, let's take a break.

What did you think of the story? It's, it's definitely creepy. It's definitely unsettling, especially, um, he was, he, he mentioned just. Like the beauty of the building and then you learn the history. Yeah. And like that I think is like a huge part of stuff like this because it's like you walk up to it and you're looking at it and you're like, wow, this architecture is beautiful.

Like whoever built this, put in so much time and effort. And then you learn about all the horrors and sadness that went in on inside the walls, and you're just like, people walked up to this building. Not realizing that they were gonna be here for a very long time. Yeah. And that's heartbreaking and like, and not really fully grasping what was going to take place inside.

Yeah. And that they could leave their bodily autonomy in the building and have to walk out without it. You never, like, you put so much trust into your family and into your relationships, and you. , you never think or never want people to put you away forever. And then they do. And like that's, that's, that's just so, it's so sad.

It's so sad. And to have your bottle, like your bodily autonomy taken from you by people that you don't know or have it signed away by someone who you like know and trust is so, it's disgusting. It's so upsetting. Like, I'm trying to find words to describe. Yeah. It, and I like there words can't describe how messed up it is.

Absolutely. And the fact that it's a part like you don't learn ab like in order to learn about this stuff, you have to do your own research. You have to like mm-hmm. look into the strange and unusual, you're not taught this in school. You're not taught about the fact that, you know, lobotomies were legal in the United States.

Yeah. Like you have to find. That information out on your own, and so it kind of feels like these. The histories and the troops of these people are being buried unfairly. Absolutely. Well, thank you Leo, for being on the podcast today. I always love your input and you'll be on many more. Thanks for having me.

I love to ramble. I know you do. That's our entire relationship. Um, all right, thank you and we'll see you later. Bye. Thank you to Leo for coming on today and helping me out. And special thanks to James for coming on and sharing his story. James is an independent filmmaker based in Los Angeles, and you can find him on all social media at Night Walker Cinema

Heart Starts pounding as written and produced by Kaelyn Moore. Music by Art List credit's voiced by Cherie Moore. .