![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Nov. 24th, 2013 07:39 pmFOUR YEARS IN THE MAKING!
Those of you who have been on the journal since 2009 may remember Hal Sanitarium, a location caption which popped up on Google Maps just outside the Clark & Division red line station in Chicago. Hal Sanitarium did not actually exist in 2009, and when I went looking I could find nothing about it. Eventually I concluded it was either a "trap location" -- a fake location meant to catch other map websites if they were ripping off code -- or an error in data entry. There was no record of a Hal Sanitarium, or anything like it, at the location.
For quite a while my posts about Hal Sanitarium were the first results that came up when you googled, so I would get a lot of random comments from other people searching for information on the mysterious Sanitarium on the Google Map. It was a bit like the first twenty minutes of a horror film.
Then yesterday, an anonymous commenter found a missing piece of the puzzle. Witness the obituary of Robert B. Hollingsworth, who only deepens the mystery.
Hollingsworth, who died in 1993, was an artist who ran his own ad agency in Chicago -- and then somehow became co-operator of the Halco Sanitarium, an alcohol treatment center which was located just north of Clark & Divison and which closed in 1972. Why a former ad man took over the management of the sanitarium with his mother -- why they were involved in it at all -- are new questions to answer.
But we have a name, now, and a firmer location for the Sanitarium. When I get back to Chicago I'm going to do a little more digging.
If I am eaten by the ghost of a mad inmate of Halco Sanitarium, know that I died as I lived, recklessly and gleefully putting my nose in where it doesn't belong.
Those of you who have been on the journal since 2009 may remember Hal Sanitarium, a location caption which popped up on Google Maps just outside the Clark & Division red line station in Chicago. Hal Sanitarium did not actually exist in 2009, and when I went looking I could find nothing about it. Eventually I concluded it was either a "trap location" -- a fake location meant to catch other map websites if they were ripping off code -- or an error in data entry. There was no record of a Hal Sanitarium, or anything like it, at the location.
For quite a while my posts about Hal Sanitarium were the first results that came up when you googled, so I would get a lot of random comments from other people searching for information on the mysterious Sanitarium on the Google Map. It was a bit like the first twenty minutes of a horror film.
Then yesterday, an anonymous commenter found a missing piece of the puzzle. Witness the obituary of Robert B. Hollingsworth, who only deepens the mystery.
Hollingsworth, who died in 1993, was an artist who ran his own ad agency in Chicago -- and then somehow became co-operator of the Halco Sanitarium, an alcohol treatment center which was located just north of Clark & Divison and which closed in 1972. Why a former ad man took over the management of the sanitarium with his mother -- why they were involved in it at all -- are new questions to answer.
But we have a name, now, and a firmer location for the Sanitarium. When I get back to Chicago I'm going to do a little more digging.
If I am eaten by the ghost of a mad inmate of Halco Sanitarium, know that I died as I lived, recklessly and gleefully putting my nose in where it doesn't belong.
