The Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane opened its doors in Gotham City, NJ,
during the year 1879. The asylum's founder, Amadeus Arkham, was inspired by the trending
construction of mental hospitals in New England throughout the 1870s.
He himself was from Danvers, MA, which had its own asylum opened up just a year prior,
in 1878. His brother, Jeremiah, also moved there, along with Jeremiah's wife, Helen, and daughter,
Martha. Martha Arkham would eventually go on to marry Thomas Wayne years later.
For the building's construction, Amadeus was inspired by the floor plans developed
by Thomas Story Kirkbride in the 1840s, known as the ''Kirkbride Plans.'' Amadeus was familiar with
this style of building from his time in Essex County, which was popular among the hospitals
he worked at. Being an orderly who witnessed first-hand the abuse and malpractice against
the patients, he became disgruntled and vowed to invest his earnings in his own hospital,
which would treat its patients humanely and with modern medical practices, not
crucifixion therapies and exorcisms. Throughout the years, Arkham Asylum has held some of the most
infamous and bizarre criminals in Gotham's history within the confines of its stone walls.
One of the first patients to be incarcerated at the asylum was Victor Zsasz,
a man who went on a ''mercy'' killing spree after experiencing an existential crisis.
Victor had a mundane job as a tax collector, collecting debts for the city government. He
would go knocking on doors, regretfully informing people of the money they owed.
It was a job that Victor felt bad for having. He would catch brief glimpses into the lives
of those he visited, being able to see over their shoulder a stack of bills piling on a
desk, or a couple of starving kids, or a sickly wheelchair-bound spouse.
These people's lives were broken, and all Victor did was worsen their circumstances.
That was his whole job description: squeezing money out of people going through hard times.
Ironically, Victor often owed money to others himself, as he had a severe gambling addiction.
Supposedly at the lowest point in his life, Victor stumbled across the philosophies of
Solipsism and Nihilism. It's unsure how exactly he was introduced to these subject matters,
but according to his interrogation, once he discovered them, he was never the same again.
He felt a veil had been lifted and he could finally see things clearly for the first time.
Everyone else was a zombie. A mindless philosophical zombie. Empty and hollow, but all
the characteristics of a live functioning human being. Victor, with this newfound revelation,
went on a killing spree, stabbing the poor, unfortunates of society: the homeless, the sick,
the starving, the elderly, the poor. For each one, he carved a tally mark into his flesh.
After being caught by police, he stated that the killings were all mercy killings,
as he was not forcing them to die, but was instead freeing them from being forced to live.
He argued in court that anyone who would force existence upon someone was worse than a murderer.
The lunatic's existential ranting was all the judge and jury needed to hear to know a padded
room and lithium injections were in his immediate future. In 1886, Arkham became home to Garfield
Lynns, a pyrophilic arsonist who was responsible for starting several forest fires. But more
notoriously, he also lured local prostitutes and set them on fire while they were chained to a bed.
Neighbors suspected him to be responsible for the fires when they noticed he always
reeked of smoke and ash and had several burn marks on his hands and fingers
(it would later be revealed that these marks were self-inflicted, as Lynns was so fascinated by fire
that he would burn himself for pleasure). In police custody, Garfield confessed to having
burned down several buildings that were previously ruled as being accidental gas lamp mishaps.
He also described in great detail the arousal he felt from inhaling the smoke and watching the
bright embers dance around him like “fireflies.” It supposedly started in his childhood,
when he would entertain himself by lighting a lantern, blowing it out, and then re-lighting it.
He claimed his crimes were his attempts at replicating the excitement he felt.
Another one of Arkham’s earlier inmates was a woman named Margaret Sorrow,
former leader of The Thieving Magpies, a shoplifting ring made up primarily of women.
Margaret would instruct the women to pickpocket and steal valuable items to bring back to her.
The deal was that anything “shiny” belonged to her, while anything else the women managed to
steal, like paper currency, would be split between themselves. Margaret squatted in a decrepit house,
always wearing the same worn raggedy dress and with feathers and dust scattered all
over the place (think of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations). Her house was referred to as “the
nest” by those working under her. In exchange for the “shinies,” Margaret would provide the women
a network of others to help aid them, as well as personally teach them thieving skills and tips and
tricks. Margaret had been a thief since her youth, meaning she had plenty of experience to share.
As the years went by, Margaret’s demands became more bizarre and neurotic.
She went from requesting they steal valuable things like silver and jewelry
to stealing useless junk like spoons and pots and pans. On one occasion, she asked the women to go
to a department store and instead of stealing one of the valuable handbags, to steal the
glass case it came in. Margaret complained the handbag wouldn’t be shiny enough to her liking,
while the glass case would be. Because of this, the gang eventually disbanded and turned her over
to the police, who found her in a catatonic stupor, clutching several of her “shinies,”
with a hoard of several other metallic items scattered and piling up all around the house:
Christmas tinsel, silverware, keys, tin cans and other such items. he was escorted out of
the rickety house, diagnosed with Photomania (the obsession with bright and shiny things) as
well as compulsive hoarding, and sent to Arkham Asylum, where she would spend the rest of days.
The Thieving Magpies would later take the name "Gotham City Sirens" under new leadership.
The Civil War had ended in 1865, but its impact had still been left on the minds of soldiers, some
more so than others. In particular, cavalryman Mortimer Drake, and Union soldier Phillip Reardon,
both incarcerated in 1879. Drake joined the Union in 1863 at age 21. He was inspired by the
campaigns of George Armstrong Custer, whom Drake modeled his own eccentric, flamboyant personality
off of. This was both his most charming and most ostracizing feature, as it put off many of the
other cavalrymen from him. Many accused him of being a homosexual and making advances on others,
pushing for his discharge, however none of these accusations were ever proven.
Drake remained as part of the crew for the near remaining 2 years of the war,
having a strange mental break near the end. In his spare time at the camp, Drake would read adventure
and swashbuckling novels, often trying to recreate the dynamic poses depicted in the writings.
His favorite book was The Three Musketeers (1844) by Alexandre Dumas. He practiced lunging with his
sword, shouting “en guarde!” at others. He also began altering his speech to sound more formal.
One day, he challenged a taunting soldier to a sword duel. The taunter, not realizing the
seriousness of Drake’s request, took him up on it. Drake lethally stabbed the man by jabbing his
sword into his chest, and then when others tried to overpower him, he began fighting them as well.
The cavalry general came to investigate the camp, and found Mortimer dancing with his sword in hand
and a circle of bodies around him. He was arrested and sent to Blackgate, where he would stay until
being transferred to the Arkham Asylum upon its completion. Reardon’s story was a similar one.
Reardon was becoming paranoid that others were plotting to stab him in the back from behind,
where he wouldn’t be able to see them coming. So, in Reardon’s mind, the only rational thing
to do was kill them before they could kill him. He shot them all in their sleep, and then ran off
the camp and into the woods, where he hid for days until some Union soldiers found him. He
was starved and dehydrated, foaming at the mouth and babbling about how he could see everything.
After being sent to Blackgate and then transferred to Arkham along with Drake,
his vision started to deteriorate. This caught the attention of Dr. Hugo Strange,
who was looking for a patient with poor eyesight to use for experimentation purposes. The specifics
of these experiments were never revealed until historians unearthed the notes and journal entries
of Hugo Strange several years later. Warning, the material found may be disturbing to some viewers:
In 1888, Strange started projects to enhance the senses of human beings. He planned to cover all
five, but never fully got through with the first experiments dealing with sight. He started on a
smaller scale, initially planning to develop an experimental treatment to cure color-blindness.
For this, he used a psych patient named Paul Dekker, a crackpot artist who suffered from
Stendhal Syndrome, a disorder which inspired him to start stealing art pieces and destroying them.
Dekker seemed to make progress mentally while undergoing therapy with Dr. Arkham,
but was also progressively becoming color blind, which was making him depressed.
Strange offered to give him early release from the hospital in exchange for allowing
himself to be tested on. Dekker agreed, and so the experiments began. According to notes,
the experiments involved inserting colored lenses into the end of a cylindrical device
and beaming a laser from the other end into the patient’s eyes, essentially converting what would
be color-blind glass lenses in modern-day into a laser beam, zapped into the eyes of the subject.
Dekker was released to a halfway house and asked to document his symptoms and
progress in journal entries. Dekker’s results initially seemed promising, however overtime,
he started complaining about the saturation of everything being too bright and disorienting. Even
when closing his eyelids, he said, he couldn’t stop seeing bright colors. Then he started going
on psychotic rambling about being able to see colors that didn’t exist within this universe.
Things came to a head when he brutally murdered an orderly who came to check up on him
and knitted a crazy quilt out of his skin, which he wore around his otherwise naked body. After
coming upon the gruesome sight, Arkham sent him back to the asylum. Amadeus could not
understand how Dekker had gone from making so much progress to suddenly becoming a psychotic maniac.
(Arkham was kept unaware of the specifics of Hugo’s experimentation).
For Strange’s next attempt at vision manipulation, he selected Phillip Reardon. But this experiment
was much more ambitious as it dabbled in trying to bridge the gap between the scientific
and supernatural. The aim of this experiment was to restore Reardon’s vision to his fingertips,
allowing him to possess dermo-optical perception and 360 degree vision.
It started with blindfolding Reardon and trying to apply Braille to color perception. They would
lay out colored pieces of paper on the table for him to feel with his fingertips and get him to
memorize the different “feels” of the colors. He could recognize the darkness of colors due to the
fact they absorb more heat energy and are warmer than light colors. He could also recognize the
distance between him and another object from the vibrations and how his voice echoed around him.
Hugo unfortunately failed at transferring optic nerves to the fingers and cancelled the project,
however, Reardon remained mentally affected. He began having the delusion that he actually
could see through his fingertips and that his eyes were unnecessary. So he promptly gouged them out.
He was treated in the medical unit, where he insisted to doctors that he could still see
everything around him. He had developed a new neurological condition known as Anton-Babinski
Syndrome, also known as Prisoners Lightshow phenomenon. It occurs in people who are either
blind or stuck in a dark room, and the brain, to make up for the lack of imagery, projects its own
vision of the external world within their mind. Throughout the years, the asylum would continue to
be the holding place for several odd and unique characters, coming and going like a revolving
door, and also being the location where several morbid and harrowing occurrences took place,
such as the shocking murder of Martin Hawkins by Dr. Amadeus Arkham,
the riot of 1889 (or 1890, whenever the thing during the Jack the Ripper arc happens), the
experiments of Hugo Strange, and the arkham protest (a protest by mental
healthcare reform advocates to make the treatments more humane). Unfortunately,
in the end, Amadeus’s asylum became the living hell that he sought to avoid it from becoming…