Happy Birthday, It's an Asylum Fire: Seacliff Insane Asylum

This week, Melanie is WRONG, a bet is made, the Wendy's alligator goes out to pasture, TAG is an evil puppeteer, miners are poetic, history loves insane asylums, gold rushes, and white men, Brianne has hot takes on lobotomies, Robert Lawson ain't shit, and Melanie is doing Count Dante.

Content warnings:fictional addiction, alcoholism, housefire, deaths of children, and suicidal ideation, old-timey ableist language, sexism, domestic violence, murder to escape domestic violence, masturbation, mental illness, eugenics, graphic discussion of lobotomies, forced sterilization, fatal fire.

Links:
80-year-old woman sentenced to prison for killing ‘abusive’ husband while he slept
A survivor against the odds—noted New Zealand writer Janet Frame dies
Archives New Zealand
Asylum admission criteria in the 1800s means you might have qualified
‘Barbaric’ medical practices still used today
Filming in 'one of creepiest places'
Gold rush
Kirkbride Plan
Mania, dementia and melancholia in the 1870s: admissions to a Cornwall asylum
Otago gold rush
Robert Lawson (architect)
Scots Baronial Architecture: how to spot it
Seacliff Lunatic Asylum
The Anti-Insane Asylum Society
The sad saga of Seacliff: Built on shifting sands
The story of Seacliff, the most haunted place in New Zealand
Victorian Oppression of Women Through Psychiatry