Patty.
The new nurse at the Inn, the really young one, just out of school. Vi hadn’t met her yet, but she’d seen her driving up to the Inn in her little yellow Volkswagen Beetle, her long hair feathered back, the skirt on her uniform a little shorter than the skirts of the other nurses. Patty was Dr. Hutchins’s niece, and he’d pushed hard to get her the job. Vi had heard him and Gran discussing it for weeks. Gran was against it from the beginning, saying she lacked experience. Dr. Hutchins said that was exactly what made her perfect—that they could train her, could mold her into the ideal employee for the Inn.
“So what did you tell her about B West?” Dr. Hutchins asked now.
Vi bit her lip. B West! Gran had written about it in her notebook.
There was a pause, while Gran inhaled, then blew out a slow, hissing breath. During important calls, or when she was trying to solve a difficult problem, she paced and smoked, said smoking helped her think. Vi listened hard, pressing her ear against the phone. “I told her we didn’t use B West for patients. Not anymore. That the basement is just for storage.”
This was followed by silence, another intake of breath, then an exhale. More pacing, the swooshing shuffle of Gran’s slippers across the wooden floor.
Eric moved toward Vi again, pulling at the phone, but Vi held tight.
“Then today she decided to try to see for herself. I caught her going down into the basement.”
Dr. Hutchins made a funny grunting sound.
Gran continued, her voice rising in exasperation. “I told her she needed to stick to her assigned area. She said she’d heard some of the patients talking. Telling stories about B West.”
“What kind of stories?” Dr. Hutchins asked.
“She wouldn’t say. But, Thad, I’m telling you right now, you need to put a leash on her, or we’ll have to let her go.”
Eric tugged at the phone again and Vi shoved him away. He tripped over one of the kitchen chairs, sending it crashing to the floor.
Vi kept the mouthpiece covered, held her breath.
Had Gran and Dr. Hutchins heard? Did they know Vi was listening?
Iris helped Eric up.
Vi kept her ear pressed against the phone, listening. It was quiet. Too quiet. Only a slight crackle in the line.
“I understand,” Dr. Hutchins said at last. “I’ll talk to Patty. She won’t ask anything about the basement again. You have my word.”
“Good,” Gran said, and hung up so hard Vi jumped.
Vi gently placed the handset back in the cradle of the kitchen phone.
“You idiot,” she said to her brother. “She could have heard us!”
“You could have let me listen,” Eric whined. “Who was she even talking to? Was it about Iris?”
“It was Dr. Hutchins. And I’m not sure exactly what they were talking about,” Vi said. “But I know what we have to do next.”
“What?” Eric asked.
“Get into the Inn and take a look around. Talk to the new nurse, Patty.”
Eric shook his head. “How are we going to get past Miss Evil?”
“We’ll find a way,” Vi said, looking at Iris. “We have to.”
The Helping Hand of God: The True Story of the Hillside Inn By Julia Tetreault, Dark Passages Press, 1980
Patty Sheridan was a twenty-two-year-old, hired right out of nursing school at the University of Vermont to come and work at the Hillside Inn.
She’s left nursing for good now, she says. She currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she waits tables and takes painting classes. She’s got a serious boyfriend, and they’ve just adopted a dog.
We met up in a café on the plaza in Santa Fe. Patty’s wearing denim overalls spattered with paint. Her hair is pulled back in a perky ponytail. She’s got bright blue eyes that seem to be watching everything at once. But I can see sorrow and regret there, just beneath the surface.
“No way would I go back to nursing,” she tells me, fiddling with a turquoise and silver bracelet she wears. “Or even back to Vermont. I had to get away, you know? Go somewhere where no one knew me, where no one had ever heard of the Hillside Inn.”
She explains that she should never have been hired there to begin with. Other than a two-week rotation during nursing school at the Vermont State Hospital, she had no experience in a psychiatric setting. “I had no business being there,” she says. “This was an elite institution, and I was totally green.”
Her uncle, Dr. Thadeus Hutchins, codirector of the Inn, got her the job.
“They offered me way more money than any of the entry-level positions I’d been thinking of taking,” she explains. “My friends, the gals I went to school with, they said I’d be crazy not to take the job. And the building… it’s beautiful, right? Did you know it’s on the National Register of Historic Places?”
I nod.
“It seemed like the dream job at first, you know? For the most part, our patients were pretty high functioning. And Dr. Hildreth was brilliant. Totally charismatic. When she walked into a room, everyone just stopped and focused on her. She was hot shit—a woman who wasn’t just a pioneering psychiatrist, but the director of a nationally recognized mental health center. She looked like a grandma—real tiny with this halo of gray hair, cat-eye glasses, always in a pantsuit with a pretty scarf—but when she spoke, everyone stopped to listen. The patients and staff all had so much respect for her. I felt so lucky to be there at first.”
She fiddles with her teacup, then explains that almost immediately she knew something wasn’t right at the Inn. As she speaks, she hunches over, shrinks down in her seat like she’s trying to disappear.
“I worked the overnights,” she says, voice low, confessional. “Patients would talk to me. Tell me stuff when the doctors and other staff weren’t around. I heard rumors.” She shakes her head, turns away. When she turns back, there are tears in her eyes. “Honestly, I blame myself. I could have stopped things much sooner. I should have gone to the police, or the board of nursing, someone—told them what I thought was going on. Then maybe things would have turned out differently. My role in it all keeps me up at night.”
THE BOOK OF MONSTERS
By Violet Hildreth and Iris Whose Last Name We Don’t Know Illustrations by Eric Hildreth 1978
HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER
Sculpt it from mud, ashes, and bones.
Stitch it together with body parts dug up out of the ground.
Bring it to life with electricity and light.
Do a spell on a full moon with thirteen black candles and the blood of a wolf.
Mutter the words of an ancient curse.
Blend a terrible potion.
Use radiation.
A bite.
A sting.
A kiss.
There are as many ways to make one as there are monsters.
But you must ask yourself: Who is the real monster? The creature being made, or the one creating it?
Vi
June 12, 1978
AS VI WALKED up the front steps to the Inn, she thought of the old photographs Gran had shown her from back when it was a Civil War hospital, and then later, when it was a sanatorium for people with tuberculosis. Vi had studied the images: nurses in uniform tending to patients in wheelchairs on the lawn or in metal-framed beds tented over with crisp white sheets. She wondered how many people had died in that old hospital: soldiers missing limbs, people coughing up blood.
And how many of those who’d died were trapped there still, roaming the halls, stuck forever in the place where they took their last breath?
She’d asked Gran once if anyone had ever seen a ghost there. Gran had looked at her with an amused smile. “It’s a psychiatric hospital, Violet. People see all kinds of unusual things. But if you’re asking me if I think it’s haunted, then, no. I don’t believe places can be haunted. Only people, and not in a supernatural way. People are only haunted by their pasts.”