Happy Haunting

A Victorian lunatic asylum begins to reveal its secrets

The “castellated mansion” of Merivale’s nightmarish recollection was Ticehurst House, an 18th-century pile in the depths of the Weald of Sussex, that had by Merivale’s day been in operation for about eighty years as a private madhouse run by a local family of medical practitioners, the Newingtons.
Merivale’s records are among those of some one thousand or so patients, treated at Ticehurst between 1793 and 1925, that have been digitised by the Wellcome Library and are freely available through the Library catalogue.

Ooh. So much better than fiction.