HALLUCINATIONS OF A FEW PRISONERS
Like all other penitentiaries, the Minnesota State Prison contains its quota of inmates who are slightly demented, or who have periodical fits of hallucinations. When these unfortunates give oral demonstrations in the evening after the prisoners have retired and all is quiet for the night they furnish considerable amusement. Their mental state, of course, is deplored by all, and it is only their language that arouses the risibilities of fellow prisoners.
THE TELEGRAPH OPERATOR.
One of these men imagined himself to be an operator in St. Paul; that he had a train going out and one coming in on the same line. He was vigorously tapping away on one of the walls of his cell when a night guard asked him what troubled him. “This,” said the prisoner in all seriousness, “is a telegraph station in St. Paul.” [pg 54] “Well, you had better cut this out and go to bed; the prisoners can't sleep with all this fuss going on.” “Fuss nothing,” angrily retorted the prisoner, “I'm attending strictly to business! The Governor is on one of those trains and if there is a wreck there will be trouble!”
The captain of the night watch immediately sent for the deputy warden to suppress the “operator,” who, when he arrived, and after a sharp command to be quiet, without glancing up from his “key” ordered the deputy to go away and “not interrupt him.” Of course this rejoinder caused the other inmates to burst out laughing, and no amount of discipline could check their merriment. By this time it was necessary to open the cell door and take the operator bodily from his “key” and transfer him to the observation ward at the solitary. Just as he was relieved from “duty” he shrieked at the deputy, “You will catch h— if those two trains come together!”
THE BEDBUG INCIDENT.
For some unaccountable reason the cellhouse building is infested with bedbugs, notwithstanding the fact that every effort is made to exterminate them. An afflicted prisoner one day stepped up to the deputy warden, respectfully gave the customary military salute, and, with a solemn face that would do credit to a judge about to impose the death penalty, remarked: “Say deputy, I have a complaint to make.” “All right, proceed,” said the deputy. “Well,” continued the prisoner, “there are about five hundred inmates who pass my cell every day going to and from their work and each man throws a bedbug into my cell. This d— foolishness has to be stopped or there will be something doing,” and the man looked as though he meant business. Telling of the [pg 55] incident afterwards, the deputy said that the story was so absurd he could scarcely refrain from laughing.
THE X-RAY MACHINE.
There was also a prisoner whose particular form of dementia was in imagining that the man in the cell above him persited in turning an X-ray machine on him, and the imprecations that he would voice every now and then are unprintable. The incident had its laughable side, nevertheless, and an outburst from him was always very amusing.
So, too, were the demonstrations of the man who imagined that he had a river on his back that emptied into his left ear. Every now and then he would exclaim, “Boys, the river is rising,” or that the “river was drying up.” He was absolutely harmless, but a trifle noisy.