"Start there."<br/><br/>Sarah ordered, pointing at the spot she wanted the woman to begin talking.<br/><br/>"1...2....3...Action!"<br/><br/>Sarah said and stood with her arms crossed against her chest. Paying close attention to everything around them. Her dirty blond hair was tied up into a messy ponytail. She was a short women, only five foot four, but she had a loud voice. She made people pay attention to her when she spoke. This was going to be the start of hopefully many more mysteries documentaries for her career. She hoped they would find some good shit in this place, maybe even a few ghosts. That probably wasn't likely, but let the audience think there were some in the asylum. That would bring more viewers and make them all more money.<br/><br/>"Camera 1... rolling."<br/><br/>Gavin checked his shot one last time before he began recording, at which point he let the weight of the camera set comfortably on his shoulder as his attention moved a couple of inches to the side, just past their narrator. A red-brick Goliath of a mansion loomed overhead, largely overcome by overgrowth, age, and graffiti.<br/><br/>“Is this on? One, two, three… great”. The voice, firm and feminine, belonged to a young woman. She was African-American, and had an intelligent expression in a pair of brown eyes covered by glasses. Standing at about 5 and a half feet, the young narrator was wearing a white blouse and a black pencil skirt, her hair braided so it wouldn’t be on her face.<br/><br/>“Hello, viewers, and welcome to Monogalia Lunatic Asylum”, the woman started, moving so the gloomy view behind her could be clearly seen. “As many of you know, it was opened for patients in 1853, but it was actually established in 1851. Monogalia Asylum was an excellent institution, looking more like a mansion than a mental hospital, and providing good and humane care for the patients and gainful employment for the staff”. Pausing a little, the young woman took a few steps towards a corridor. Everything in here looks so depressing, she thought to herself, moving further and keeping a slow enough pace for the cameras to follow her without any hindrance.<br/><br/>“Everything worked out pretty well until the start of the Civil War. After the first battle, and others that followed, many soldiers considered insane - suffering from what we now know as PTSD - were admitted to the hospital, despite the fact that it was already at capacity”. Poor men, she thought, carrying on with her presentation and taking a few more steps down the hallway. “By 1901, the asylum was way over capacity - where 200 patients should be housed, there were now 2400, making for unbearable living conditions. There was no way to set beds for all of the patients, and therefore seeing people on the floor, chained to the walls so they would not run away or attack anyone else, became a sadly common sight”.<br/><br/>Fighting off a shudder, the young narrator carried on. “As it was to be expected, the asylum changed administration pretty often, as no one doctor wanted to stay and take responsibility for the place as it was. That is, until Dr. James Green took over and took it upon himself to start over from the ground up, which he did, improving the conditions to the original plan, or even better. And yet, numbers dropped dramatically in the next two years, from the original 2445 patients Dr. Green inherited to a meager 812. An investigation - to which the results were not shared with the general public - was launched, resulting in the condemning of the asylum. What we do know is that the doors finally closed for good in 1928. The reason was not ever disclosed to the public either. And for the first time, a camera crew is allowed in here. So why don’t you join us while we explore and figure out the mystery of the asylum?”, or a lot of shit and old clothes, she completed mentally, trying not to let her disbelief out through the camera. Gotta sell the product, after all, and bring home the bacon.<br/><br/>"Cut!" Sarah yelled, ending their first take.<br/><br/>The weight of the camera slipped down off of Gavin's shoulder as he rolled it around to get the stiffness out of it. That hadn't been their first take. It might not even be their last. Just the thought of having to shoot this scene over again exhausted him, and considering it was only noon and they hadn't even unpacked the van yet, that was considerably impressive. Sarah had a way of doing that to you, but he supposed really any director does. That's kind of their job, and it's<span style="font-style: italic">his</span>job to deal with it and roll the camera. The film industry was such a glorious life.<br/><br/>Gavin grabbed the handle on the top of his prized Canon and let it dangle loosely yet securely at his side, his free hand coming up to rub the sleep out of his eyes. Sleeping in that van had been borderline impossible, especially on a 14 hour drive from Maine to Virginia and<span style="font-style: italic">especially</span>if you're the one driving. They'd left at 8:00 sharp yesterday morning, and they were in town by midnight. Where Gavin thought that they would get a hotel, the group consensus was that they would just sleep in the van since it was convenient and free, and he couldn't really argue with that logic.<br/><br/>After a moment, he dropped his hand and waited around for someone to say something. It couldn't stay quiet, not when they were working. Quiet meant that Sarah had time to call another take. When he was sure that no one else was going to say anything, Gavin dragged his free hand backwards through his sandy-blonde hair, shaking out the long, thin dreadlocks. "Hey. You want me to go ahead and start unloading?" he offered to Sarah, jerking his head over at the white beat-up commercial van for emphasis. "Sooner we get all our shit, the sooner we can get in there and get spooky."<br/><br/>He didn't wait for an answer, trotting past Sarah and jerking on the handle of the sliding door and clambering in, with as little grace as he ever had. The van, sick as it was, made a sick groan like somehow it was displeased with him being in there. He was almost tired and delusional enough to tell it to calm down, that he'd be out in a second. Not a lot of shit was his, after all. His camera, the shoulder strap, his grotesquely expensive tripod, some purple hair scrunchie he just found in the floor, and his satchel of accessories and extra battery packs. Gathering all of that up took him an all of a minute at most, and then he was hopping out and saying his silent apologies to the van for offending it.<br/><br/>It wasn't just because Sarah would have likely demanded a retake that he wanted to hurry up. In fact, he wasn't even sure if she<span style="font-style: italic">would</span>have wanted a retake, so he couldn't even have used that excuse. The real reason for the rush was the building. That red, brick colossus not even a stone's throw from where he stood. Vines poured in through cracked and broken windows, graffiti painted the sides of the building, the front doors had been scratched up from kids trying to break in. And yet even those things added to the grandeur of the place. Monongalia had been closed for<span style="font-style: italic">decades</span>for completely undisclosed reasoning, and for the first time they were opening their doors to them. To<span style="font-style: italic">them</span>, of all the documentary teams that the owner of the property could have picked. A rag-tag startup team with only a few good films under their belt.<br/><br/>The thought of it made him excited just like it did when he first heard of Monongalia opening its doors for the first time in his lifetime. He'd always been a fan of old hospitals and prisons, learning about the history from filming other peoples' interviews. And now for the first time, he got to discover the history of a place for himself. And to him, that was well worth the rush.