Whispers from the Banks: The Asylum of Hurtville

A Hurtville Horror Story by Scott Farmer

Long before Table Rock Lake swallowed the valley, before Hurtville was reduced to a ghost on the map, there stood a building on the southern bend of the White River. Locals called it the Walls, though its true name was never spoken. It was an asylum. A place meant to heal minds—but built on rot, sorrow, and screams.

No records remain of when it was constructed. No photographs. Just stories passed down in hushed voices, especially when the mist rolls in thick off the lake and the cicadas go silent all at once.

They say the asylum was three stories tall, with barred windows and stone walls that sweated in the summer. The river ran behind it, quiet and constant, like it was listening. Patients came from across Missouri and Arkansas—those deemed too broken, too wild, or too inconvenient to keep in the towns above. Some had voices in their heads. Others just had secrets that others wanted buried.

That’s what the Walls were good at: burying.

People who worked there didn’t stay long. The ones who did, changed. They became pale, jumpy. Stared at nothing. Spoke in short sentences, or not at all. One nurse wrote in her journal, “The third floor hums at night. Not from electricity—from memory. And sometimes the locks undo themselves.”

Then came the Incident.

No one’s certain what happened. Some say a patient lit a fire in the basement that spread too quickly. Others insist it was an uprising—a riot of the forgotten, led by a man who never blinked and whispered in tongues. Whatever the cause, the asylum burned. Screams echoed across the river that night, and the air smelled of boiling blood.

When the smoke cleared, the building still stood—but blackened, hollow. Thirty-seven patients were never found. The asylum was sealed, abandoned. Forgotten.

Then came the dam. And the water rose.

Now, Table Rock Lake sits quiet over where the asylum once stood. But when the fog drifts low and the moon hangs yellow, boats near that stretch sometimes stall without reason. Campers hear moans rising from the water, and sometimes—God help them—they see windows just beneath the surface, glowing faintly.

They say the asylum still exists, just shifted. Trapped beneath the lake, yes—but not dormant.

Divers who go too deep in that part of the lake report seeing stone structures, black iron bars, even faces pressed to glass that shouldn't be there. One man came up screaming, claimed he saw his own mother—dead ten years—banging on a cell door below.

Some believe the asylum feeds off memory now, pulling the pain and madness of the living into itself.
Others say it waits for the water to lower.
That one day, the asylum will rise again.

They say if you camp near the southern edge of Table Rock, and you hear footsteps squishing just beyond the shoreline—don’t investigate.
If you see the faint lights of a three-story building where no building stands—don’t blink.
And if you hear your name whispered from beneath the lake, spoken in your own voice--

Run.

Because the Walls remember you.

Some places are forgotten by history.
Others are remembered by Hell.