VANNACUTT SANITARIUM
Location: The Vannacutt Sanitarium for the Criminally Insane is a distant
landmark located on the Pacific Coast Highway (U.S. Highway 1) between Malibu
and Santa Monica coast of
Description: The abandoned and deserted sanitarium was built around 1929 around the base of a lighthouse from 1859 that reached four stories up from the cliff. Overgrown paths, patios and gardens surround the property which was chosen for its isolation. The partially restored interior is Neo-Modern with some very retro art and sculptures decorating the place. The basement is a maze of offices, operating and examination rooms, chambers and assorted other rooms, including a top floor kitchen and eating area for staff and below ground kitchen for the patients. An old-fashioned Otis elevator from the main entrance, now long out of service, reaches to the top sixth floor down to the labyrinth of rooms in the basement. The entry room to the basement is filled with preserved autopsy and dissection displays while the rest of the dark chambers and confusing catacomb-like chambers are littered with debris left over from when the locale was a hospital. One of the more unique features of the huge structure is the complicated “lock-down” system that seals the entire place up by dropping lead plates over every door and window in the house to the outside. Partially deconstructed, it is largely intact today. It was created in its years as a sanitarium to keep patients inside in case of a riot; a reported secret staff escape tunnel has never been found. Because of the damage of some parts of the foundation and the fact some of the abandoned equipment is still working, it is a very dangerous and hazardous area to explore alone.
Ghostly Manifestations:
For a long time, the only thing that haunted Vannacutt Sanitarium was the memory
of a psychopathic doctor who indulged in experiments on his patients and the
cold, brutal murder of his staff and patients. Rumors that the place was haunted
soon came from Watson Pritchett, the sole owner of the property. Although he
never lived there, Pritchett has come to know the place intimately after having
people, tourists and the morbidly curious pay him for a tour of the building’s
grisly history.
“It’s my white elephant……….”
Pritchett admitted before interest in a horror movie filmed in the old hospital
came out. “I don’t really want it, plus I can’t sell it. It’s too big to
restore and no one wants to live in a place where almost two hundred people lost
their lives.”
Pritchett and visitors have witnessed and
documented enough manifestations to write a book. Sounds, sights, scents and
psychokinetic activity have been recorded at all hours. Voices of conversations
and heated discussions come from empty rooms. Phantom nurses prowl empty
hallways and vanish in to nowhere. The sound of squeaking wheelchairs come from
deserted corridors. Doors have slammed shut by themselves. A breathy gasp has
been heard from the shadows. A cold breeze accompanied by moving black mist
pours through the basement exploring the tunnels and twisting around corridors. A
tourist in 1982 had a heart attack in the downstairs catacombs when she turned a
corner alone and ran head first into the ghostly apparition of Dr. Benjamin
Vannacutt, the sadist who killed all those people in 1931.
“If I…” Pritchett adds with a frustrated
stare. “Had a quarter for every time I rushed downstairs thinking a tourist
was left behind or to catch a prowler, I could retire.”
“It’s a very creepy place.” Geoffrey
Rush is one of the actors who fictionalized the true events from one night in
1999. “I wouldn’t want to live there. You merely stand in one place for a
few minutes and you feel like Vincent Price !”
“We had equipment problems on site.” Bridgett
Wilson, another actress from the movie adds. “We heard noises as we stayed in
the upstairs bedrooms. Knocking noises sometimes halted production. Both Taye
Diggs and Famke Janssen complained of being watched. Props vanished…”
In 1999, Director William Malone started filming his movie about party goers trapped in a haunted sanitarium. Partly influenced by a real location on England, his location director focused on the former asylum and even worked into the script aspects about the location, such as the lock-down mechanism and some of Vannacutt's abandoned technology. "It was a really great location." He replies with a huge grin. "The location itself was as much the star of the movie with its presence and atmosphere plus the real stories truly gave me the inspiration to create what I think is one of my best films to date. I can't say I truly saw or felt anything, but at one time or another, just about everyone in the cast and crew had experienced at least something."
Crew members often found themselves watched by
other individuals - people not affiliated with the crew. The script girl saw
someone hovering near her as she looked behind her. Sounds of several people
shuffling together down a hall spooked more than one person when they'd hear
someone coming toward them from another hall, and then no one would appear.
“It’s a big place.”
Bridgett remembers once blocking an early
scene of the movie when they were planning the camera movements. Everyone, the
whole cast and crew heard a loud scream from somewhere upstairs as if someone
had just been pushed off the outside if the building. They stopped work, several
technicians ran upstairs and outside to see who was horsing around and no one
was to be found. Several scenes filmed for the movie had to be recast three to
eight times because of a shadowy extra image in the background or because the
scene was hazy with a thin fog through the room.
“Some of us….”
According to Pritchett, it is very easy to get
lost in the basement because of the eclectic layout and numerous rooms.
Supposedly, the entire structure is constantly rearranging itself. People
wandering through one way can get easily lost because when they come back the
same way things will have moved and the halls will seem different. The truth of
the matter is that the lights down there are constantly going on and off and
while a passageway may not be lit up before, it may suddenly be revealed as
lights that were once off suddenly flicker on. Abandoned wheelchairs sometimes
appear out of nowhere and storage rooms of the old hospital gear often change
positions. During Ali Larter’s footage in the basement, one wheelchair in a
shot reportedly changed position no less than seven times between takes.
Since filming wrapped, tourists and sightseers
have claimed to see either phantom nurses, wandering entities or a spectral
surgeon wandering the crumbling edifice. Pritchett claims as well to have heard
the disembodied screams from the basement. He has insisted that cell phones do
not work in the house, and he is quite correct. In some places of the basement,
cell phones inexplicably do not work. Neither do flashlights.
“That entire basement…” Pritchett
continues. “Is like the belly of the beast. It’s dark, intimidating,
wretched and foreboding. Some people have had sudden inexplicable panic attacks
from being down there even while surrounded by a bunch of people. It’s as if
the walls are trying to close in on you, and digest you while you’re still
alive.”
He further insists that at least eleven people have vanished completely since he started giving tours.
History: In the 1930s, Dr. Richard Benjamin Vannacutt was a celebrated and most
well respected doctor. He was a handsome dashing figure of a man who dated
around as he was invited to nearly every social gathering, but in his private
life, he was a sadistic madman who inflicted surgical tortures on his hapless
patients. Believing that electricity was a valuable medical tool, he preferred
to shock patients in excess of eighteen at a time. He also designed a chamber
that inflicted and bombarded his patients with incoherent sounds and images.
Supposedly, whatever could drive a man to go insane could drive him to go sane.
The chamber still exists today as an oddity, but there is no record of it
actually doing what Vannacutt predicted.
On
There were five survivors who saved themselves
by escaping to the basement as the heat went up: pathologist Franklin Baker,
electro shock therapist Adolphus Jenzen, electrotherapist Thomas Stephen Price,
surgeon Jasper Marr and head nurse Ruthie Ann Stockard. Vannacutt himself
perished in the blaze with almost 113 employees and patients.
Rumors soon became passed that Vannacutt
haunted the structure looking for his missing staff members. The area was
nicknamed “Haunted Hill” and in 1955 Watson Pritchett Sr., the son of the
builder, died in an accident while trying to restore the place and disable the
lock-down mechanism. Because his grandfather had also died in the house, Watson
Pritchett, the current owner is more than a bit nervous about the place. In
1958, a movie very loosely based on the hauntings named “House on Haunted
Hill” was released starring Vincent Price, Elisha Cook, Richard Long and Carl
Ohmart.
In 1999, shock master and amusement park owner
Steven Price, the grandson of Thomas Price, apparently tried to reunite the
grandchildren of the 1931 survivors for one night in the haunted sanitarium. Two
of them were no shows reportedly uninterested in the deal, but also in attendance
was a Dr. Richard
Since 1965, the exterior and part of the interior has been used as a location in several movies with the 1999 movies filmed on location. However, for the 2008 sequel, Pritchett upped his price for film crews to use the site and they instead recreated it for far less on a soundstage. Of course, as he points out, if were just to take the structure off his hands, they could use it as however they see fit.
"I've been trying to get it registered as a landmark to no avail." Pritchett adds. "I once had a guy interested in turning it into a hotel and resort, but something spooked him out of that deal." He mentions with a roll of his eyes.
A short time before the sequel, a relative of one of Price's guests invaded the residence for a party of their own and ended up shooting even more holes with a rifle through the structure in trying to force the ghosts to appear for them. Parts of that account were dramatized in the sequel. As late, producers of of the TV-Series, "Most Haunted," have been approaching Pritchett to do an Live Television examination there, but he's been holding off, convinced that perpetuating the hauntings is holding off his sale of the place.
Identity of Ghosts: Everyone
agrees that Dr. Richard Benjamin Vannacutt haunts the place, but several
theories are trying to link him to Emeric Belasco, the Nineteen Century madman
who kept his party guests imprisoned in his home in
Witnesses: Frederick and Annabelle Loren, Dr. David Trent, Lance Schroeder,
Nora Manning, Ruth Bridgers, Watson Pritchett Sr. , Steven and Evelyn Price, Dr.
Donald Blackburn, Eddie Baker, Sara Wolfe, Melissa Marr, Jennifer Jensen, Watson
Pritchett Jr., Carl Schecter, Geoffrey Rush, Peter Gallagher, Taye Diggs, Ali
Larter, Bridgett Wilson, Chris Kattan, Jeffrey Combs, William Malone, Dick
Beebe, Janet Keijer...
Comments: House on Haunted Hill (1958/1999/2008) Loosely compared
with the Danvers Mental Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts, Waverly Hills Sanitarium in Louisville,
Peter Gallagher (Dr. Donald Blackburn) also starred as Father Tony in "High Spirits."
Jeffrey Combs (Dr. Richard Vannacutt) also starred as FBI Special Agent Milton Dammers in "The Frighteners."