The Arms That Howl

His name was Josias Kegal. He was the first to discover The Missing Walls.

Local Boys Discover Walled-Up Room at ‘Razor’ Asylum

April 13, 1952

NEWARK, N.J. – A trio of teenage boys made a gruesome discovery at the site of the former “Razor” asylum last night.

The three boys, after vandalizing one of the long-abandoned Hessh Asylum’s inner walls in what they termed ‘just a bit of fun,’ discovered a sealed-off room in the process.

“We just wanted to see in the Razor,” said Sherman Multin, one of the three teen boys. “We found a couple walls that weren’t torn up like the others. John brought a sledgehammer, so he knocked a hole out of one. That’s when we saw it.”

“It” was the full skeleton of a human male, imprisoned in a windowless room built at some point during the asylum’s operating years. It was slumped against one pitted cement wall, facefirst. On the walls surrounding the skeleton, the no-doubt former patient had painted a large number of weird symbols.

“Frankly, I don’t know what they mean,” said Patrick Wildfire, psychologist and nephew of Dr. Anna Wildfire, responsible for the construction and naming of the Hessh Asylum in 1804. “I never even knew about a room like this. All the symbols look like gobbledygook. Some poor soul’s ravings, I’d call it. That’s all.”

Nicknamed “The Razor” due to its high number of lobotomy patients, the Hessh Asylum operated from 1804 to 1849. It closed in the summer of 1849 due to a sudden, violent collapse of the main building and an alarming number of patients gone missing. Even today, over thirty patients remain unaccounted for.

Its last administrator, Dr. Henry Merriweather, made several bizarre claims about his patients’ behavior before the collapse. As Dr. Merriweather was committed shortly after the Razor’s roof caved in, these claims are likely baseless.

The three boys were released to their parents after they flagged down a police officer and drove with him back to the police station. None of the parents decided to comment for this story.

The symbols found on the room’s walls have been copied and sent to Dr. Stephen Crestfall, a linguistics expert at Stanford University in California, for study. Perhaps they had some meaning to the unnamed patient. Other efforts to determine the patient’s identity have turned up nothing.

In a bizarre final note, police found one word that was written in English on the walls. However the word – “Jurrecz” – has no known meaning.