This month, Sherry Ortega’s house plays host to the ominously titled Dead Pond Road Hospital, employer of dead doctors and sliced-up surgeons. Located up the quiet street from the jukebox dive Sweet Jane’s and right below Mafera Park, a front yard’s Halloween display tells a dark tale of scorned wives and poisonous revenge. Visitors are welcome to take it in before the month ends.
“It is said that the ghost of Mrs. Lux and the past inhabitants still roam the grounds of the condemned hospital seeking revenge for their untimely death,” a placard on Ortega’s lawn reads. On a bench leading to her door sits a corpse, slumped in a pink maternity gown and a rather regal grey wig.
They died in a sort of mass poisoning, the story goes. Following Mrs. Lux’s discovery of her husband’s affair with one of his nurses, named Jezebel, revenge was leveled on all in a kind of pyrrhic gesture. “Ideas just come to me,” Ortega tells Bushwick Daily.
