It Was More Fun in Hell

You have recently bought the new GoPro Hero 5.0 and a one-way plane ticket to Buskerud, Norway to take a business-related tour of the Lier Psychiatric Hospital by yourself.

You have packed three suitcases, two of which are tech equipment for your multiple cameras you plan to set up around the interior of the hospital; your third suitcase carries your clothes and personal belongings. You then pack a backpack of a few snacks, battery packs, your phone, keys, GoPro, and your wallet. Then, you head out of your house and to the airport where you will experience your last few breaths of pure sanity.

You breathe in the scenery of the Norwegian airport filled with people running in opposite directions, some losing belongings on their way to catch their planes. Then you see little kids running to keep up with their parents who seem to have not planned timing right. But, then, there is you, you’re calm and completely excited for your first vacation out of the United States. You walk up to a big window and look outside, you see jets taking off and landing, you see the clouds moving quickly across the sky and the sun just barely peeking out of the thin, white clouds. You stop your eyes from viewing anymore of the new scenery and walk towards the exit gate of the airport, out, into the clean, clear air of Oslo, Norway.

You hail down a cab and climb in, you ask the driver to take you to the Comfort Hotel Union Brygge in Lier, Norway. While he begins to drive, you quickly take out your GoPro and begin to film the beginning to your horror excursion.

"Here we are in Oslo, Norway, just leaving the airport and taking flight to Lier, Norway to my hotel. I cannot believe how fantastic the view was from the plane, it was almost too extraordinary. We flew through endless amounts of clouds and over oceans and rivers. All the cars and trucks and people just seemed like ants from the height of the plane. It was just fantastic, I will remember that plane ride for the rest of my life."

As you pull into the hotel, you spot a bright, neon green front desk with old record players stuck to the glass of the desk. Above the desk is a quote from the owner, "There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold and she’s buying the stairway to heaven," (actual quote from hotel in Norway). On the wall to your right side is a black electric guitar hanging in a frame, broken in half. You ask the kind lady for your room key and directions to your room and then head off to your room.

You walk into your gray glistening room with more quirky quotes stuck to the walls. One quote stands out to you and it says, "Into the light of the dark black night" (actual quote from hotel in Norway). You don’t know what it means but you just find it interesting and wishing all the hotels back in the USA could have such quirky details like this. You plop yourself down on the comfy, white hotel beds that always seem to be made from heaven because once you sit down, you never seem to want to get back up. But, you sit down anyway and order room service as your dinner, then you pull out your new MacBook air and log into your email to find several new emails from your boss, he writes, "Dear (your name), I hope you found your way to Lier, Norway and are liking your room situations. I have some new news I would share with you about your excursion tomorrow at the Lier Psychiatric Hospital.

First and foremost, be careful about setting up your equipment, townspeople have said once you set something up it always seems to fall over after you walk away. Townspeople have recorded videotapes of setting up cameras in the surgical room and coming back to, the camera gone; most times it had been flung out the window and shattered on the ground outside. So, be careful. Second, I assume you already know that I want these tapes sent to me the following night at 8 pm sharp or else you will certainly lose your job. Lastly, I want your typed up report about the security measures of the hospital from the outside standpoint, this should be written in descriptive detail with nothing left out. i.e; barbed wire? locks? opened/closed doors? Shattered windows? Graffiti? With that out of the way, good luck and I hope you come back the same person you were before entering the haunted Lier Psychiatric Hospital. Sincerely, McAdams."

You shut your computer off and slide it back into your backpack whilst finishing your traditional Norwegian dish. It consisted of rakfisk (fermented fish), gammelost (sour milk cheese), pinnekjott (salty lamb ribs), potatoes, and a few vegetables. Then you fall into a deep sleep.

You wake up to the sun shining in your face and quickly get out of bed, shower, change, brush your teeth, brush your hair, put on deodorant, grab your backpack and suitcases of cords and wires; you walk out of the hotel and hail a cab to take you to your final destination: Lier Psychiatric Hospital.

Lier Mental Hospital was built in 1926 with a long history of providing electroshock treatment to their patients. It’s known that between 1945 and 1974 experiments with LSD (synthetic crystalline compound), testing of new drugs, and research with radioactive isotopes was done here to the patients. Lier was one of the most active hospitals in Norway when it came to the new testing of drugs on patients that not even industries had tried. The electroshock was used on patients to help them and for patients who were misbehaving. Anyone who dares to step into Lier, at first glance, will begin to encounter several hauntings and partial reminiscent stories of previous patients. The first captured attack of a spirit and a tourist was in 2001. A man by the name of Gerald McTorren had come to Norway to visit his recently deceased family members. He happened to stop by the Lier Mental Hospital to videotape, the actual footage of what it was like to be sent to a hospital. He goes at night. It’s pitch black outside and as he was walking up to the side entrance of the hospital, a white flash passed by one of the second story windows. He stopped and glanced up to see a white face staring back at him; he looked away and looked back but the spirit was gone.. He found it interesting and kept walking. He opened the rickety door to the hospital and a giant rush of wind pushed him backward. He brushed himself off and kept walking. He entered the foyer at foot of the first floor stairs and saw the same white flash run across the hallway, giggling. He quickly bolted up the stairs and came face to face with a white spirit in front of him. The spirit then disappeared, the stairs began to shake; Gerald fell from the stairs and hit his head on the wooden floor below; his head was bleeding infusily. He tried to get up and walk out but he blacked out and awakens to nurses with masks on tying him down to a table. He tried to get away but his death got to him first.

Gerald was the only man to have died in the Lier Mental Hospital after falling from the second story staircase and smashing his head on the railing. Authorities tell people that the camera footage would prove, his death was a mere accident, but for people like me, we all know it wasn’t.

As the taxi driver pulls up to the hospital, my mind immediately switches to photography mode. I get out of the car, pay the driver and ask him to be back here at 8 am tomorrow morning; he nods and pulls away in a hurry. You’re left to your suitcase of cords and wires and your backpack of cameras.

At first glance you see shattered windows, vines growing immensely over the building, and a dark shadow gloomily set over the top of the building. You set your first camera down and turn it on so the green light is blinking. You mark this camera as number one, set outside to capture any footage of spirits lurking in the windows or jumping from third story floors. You turn around and face the camera and begin by saying, "Hello, my name is (insert your name), and I am currently standing in front of Lier Mental Hospital in Buskerud, Norway. I am here to document the standing images of this hospital to show in the United States New York Times when I get back home. But, if I don’t make it out alive then you could say these were my last words.

I am exploring this institution out of my own will and curiosity for haunted places and this hospital is on the list of top 10 most haunted hospitals in the world. So with that being said, I will now start my excursion to take photographic images and footage of the 1926 Lier Psychiatric Hospital. Wish me luck."

You turn around and start walking onto the grounds of the hospital with my back facing the camera. It’s only 9:30 am and you can already envision this day as a long and brutal one.

I glance up at the third floor window and spot a white speck in the corner of one of the shattered windows. You smile and move forward, walking up the decrepit, broken front door. You take out your fully charged GoPro Hero 5.0 and turn it on, holding it in your right hand. You push the door open, careful not to break it in half and step in. You first notice the chemical and deadly smell. It smells like seeing a million bodies in the Nazi concentration camps, dying from the toxic showers. It’s almost unbearable, but you cover up your mouth with your sweatshirt.

You glance up at the stairwells and decide to put your second camera at the top of the stairwell of the third floor where most of the hauntings occur. You quickly trot up three levels and feel a hand touch your shoulder, like a weight pushing you to the floor. You turn around and see nothing but you swear someone was behind you. But you shake it off and set up the second camera so it’s facing the third floor hallway; an endless corridor of open, cracked doors, some resembling numbers on the top. You turn on the camera and hold two fingers in front of it, then you turn and walk down the third floor hallway.

It’s broad daylight, so you don’t think much of seeing or feeling any spirits. You walk into the tragically known electroshock room and see a table with thing ropes hanging down from the metal holders on the shiny table. You set your third camera up on the barred window sill, you turn it on so it’s blinking green and hook it up to a charging cord in the suitcase. You back out of the room and look at the table where a thousand patients were electroshocked into pure insanity. You automatically get chills with that feeling that someone is standing behind you. A cold air brushes behind you and you turn around to see absolutely nothing. So you move back to the second floor where the most brutally insane patients were kept. You place your fourth and final camera up at the end of the second floor so the images are focused on all the open doors and the dark, emptiness. You hook it up to the same charging cord and place the suitcase next to it. Then you take a walk back down the stairs and outside into the bliss daylight with the sun shining into your eyes and the cool air resting around you. It’s peaceful and you’ll remain outside until the clock strikes 6 pm, the time when it starts to get dark and all the spirits come out to play.

You eat your lunch out in the front of the hospital, taking note of the graffiti, shattered windows, dark hallways, overgrown vines and bushes, dead trees, bloodstained bathtubs, peeling wallpaper remains, the long squiggles drawn on the walls of the first through third floor walls, and the bright yellow painted staircase. You turn your notes into a journal to document the emotions and the footage you’ve caught. So you hook up your GoPro to your Macbook and take a glimpse of the recently shot images.

You pause the video as soon as the camera shows the third floor. You see another white speck at the end of the hallway; you play the video and then pause it again. The white speck is in front of the camera, staring into it with glowing red eyes. You take note of it and continue watching the video. You see the electroshock table and the camera picks up a shadowy figure in the corner of the room, an outline of a small child. But, as soon as you hook up your third camera to the window and you are walking back to the door, the figure follows you. You hear a small audio of this figure saying, "Help... Me." You save the audio and lay back on your backpack, falling asleep.

You wake up to crickets whispering and a dark sky. You check your watch and it’s 6:30 pm. You bolt up and grab your backpack and turn your GoPro back on; you head into the pitch black Lier Hospital with only the light on your camera and flashlight to see out of.

You walk back into the hospital and immediately feel dizzy. Your head is spinning and your stomach is churning. Well, this was a bad idea., you think. You walk up the stairs to the second floor hallway and feel the same sense of cold air and dizziness. Your mind blurs out to a thought of a child, his screams are bloodcurdling and his cries are helpless. His legs are thrashing around and his arms are hitting every possible item in his way. He is dragged by his white, long gown; his face is bright red and his eyes are wide open. He is shoved into a room and tied down to the small, white bed. He is injected with a needle and it quickly calms him into an unconscious state. He is left in the room for days without food or water. One week later the nurses come back for his cold, limp and lifeless body. Then, you snap yourself out of the dream and fall back gently onto the stairway banister. You clear your mind and start walking into room number 23, the same room the boy died in. You walk in and the door slams itself behind you; in the corner is a small shadow of a young boy, quivering and pointing at something behind you. You turn around and there stands a nurse with a white gown and a large needle in her hand. She speeds towards the boy. Then, they disappear and the door opens again. It’s a sign of someone’s past, a sign that their death wasn’t any accident but an act of vengeance.

You walk down the rest of the hallway and into another empty room. with an electric wheelchair standing perfectly still in the corner of the room, facing the window. You walk towards it but it suddenly moves and turns itself towards you. A young woman is sitting in the chair; she is smiling and her eyes are open wide. She laughs and points at the blank wall. Then she is standing in front of you, her eyes glowing red and her smile fading away. She screams in your face and runs out the window; suicide. You walk back out and see someone standing in front of your setup camera at the end of the hallway, you quietly walk up to the figure. You hear it crying, it turns around and jumps into you, pushing you to the floor. Its mouth is foaming and its eyes are flaming white, then it just disappears.

You walk up to the third floor where the most known spirit is said to haunt all intruders. The spirit is known as the doctor who was in charge of electroshocking all the patients. You’re excited but as soon as you enter the room, you feel someone tugging at your wrists. You follow them into the room, the lights are on, they’re industrial size lights that blind your eyes. You feel yourself being tied onto the cold, metal table and strapped down. You now cannot move, you’re stiff. You hear the nurses laughing and hear them bringing out a large box. You feel your skin being clipped at, wires are stuck onto your skin and your head is locked into a brown box. You can’t see anything anymore except darkness then you feel a jolt of life in your body. You feel pain, your mind is twisting and turning, your body is being electrocuted.

You wake up and it is daylight outside, you’re lying on the floor of the electroshock room and your GoPro is on the other side of the room. You slowly get up and feel blood rushing to your head. You gather all your cameras up from the spaces in the hospital and head back outside to where your taxi is waiting for you. You look at your wrists and you see cuts all over your arms and legs; your head has a black bruise on your forehead.

As you arrive back at the hotel, you clean yourself up and send the videos of the footage to your boss as well as your article for the New York Times. For the first time since you were outside watching the first clip of the footage, you view the entire video from each camera.

The outside camera you see nothing for hours on end and then once it turns, dark lights begins to turn on inside the hospital. You see a bright flash of electric current from the room you were in before you blacked out. Then the camera dies but the face of a spirit lurks on the black screen. You turn off the first camera and check the third floor camera and find the same amount of electric current. But, this time, apparitions are walking back and forth down the hallway as if every night the hospital comes to life. You view the same footage in all the other cameras, except you don’t see yourself walking around, you watch as you become one of the patients.

You view the footage on your GoPro and see the life of a patient in a blink of an eye. You were electroshock-ed and experimented on for drugs. You were a patient of the Lier Mental Hospital, and you should be lucky you’re alive.