GHOSTS OF THE CRIMINALLY INSANE
During the darkest days of the Civil War, battlefield surgeon Benjamin Travis gives a name to the horror he sees in shattered soldiers: Soldiers' Heart. What starts as a makeshift diagnosis becomes the seed of the Benjamin Travis Hospital for the Mentally Ill and Criminally Insane - a sprawling asylum built to hold the most dangerous minds in the state, and, some say, never quite let them go.
More than a century later, the hospital sits abandoned across the Cape Fear River - until four college students choose it for a class project, urged on by a professor with an unsettling connection to the place. Behind its collapsed wings and flooded tunnels, they find patient files, a hidden experimental lab, and a cemetery of names no one bothered to remember. One of those names shouldn't still be walking free.
As their research digs deeper than any assignment should, the line between campfire ghost stories and real, present-day danger starts to disappear. An "undisturbed" grave. A faculty member protecting secrets that go back generations. And a killer who never needed the supernatural to be terrifying.
Blending Civil War-era history with a slow-burn modern mystery, Ghosts of the Criminally Insane asks how far the walls of an asylum really reach - and whether the monsters inside it were ever ghosts at all.