The Smith’s Grove Sanitarium
Smith’s Grove Warren County Sanitarium is a fictional Illinois state hospital and psychiatric care facility named after the real-life town of Smith’s Grove in Warren County, Kentucky. It was the location of treatment and incarceration of now-serial killer Michael Myers from November 1963 to October 30, 1978.
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After Michael Myers brutally murdered a school bully, his abusive stepfather, his sister Judith, and Judith’s boyfriend, Michael was arrested and subsequently committed to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium. It was here where Michael was locked up for fifteen years, here where he gradually settled into a mute state, here where he continually put together crude homemade masks that covered his cell walls, masks he would wear to “cover up [his] ugliness.”
Just after he turned seven, he met child psychologist Doctor Sam Loomis. Myers would soon become the driving force behind Loomis’ career. For a period of six months, the genuine psychiatrist was ordered to spend four hours each day in therapy sessions with the young boy. Finally, on Friday May 1, 1964, Loomis tried convincing two superior doctors that Michael’s state of catatonia was a farce, “a conscious act.” He believed that there was “an instinctive force within him.” Michael was keeping himself silent, but still alert as if waiting for something; but Loomis did not know what it was.
In 1978, Michael, now 21, broke out of Smith’s Grove, setting several other patients free as well. Loomis and his colleague, Marion Chambers, had arrived at the facility only moments after Michael’s escape prompting Loomis to cry out, “He’s gone! The evil is gone!”
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