You know. I'll tell you: This was 1983. So this is way before you can just pull it up on Google somehow. It definitely did not look like any kind of a sanatorium or a hospital. The chains were huge and the hooks were these meathooks that are used to hang hogs in butcher houses.

After turning it around in my head for years, the best explanation I could come up with was that someone brought all these disparate elements together as a joke. I know that sounds weird. But let's say this place was being used for storage of items from some nearby town, by the town government or something; old desks from school, hooks from some old mechanic or butcher business. Someone decides to fake this setup precisely to freak out these pesky college students breaking into abandoned places to get high. All it takes is a good drill, some bolts and an evil mind.

This was also a time when students in colleges like the one I went to staged these "happenings" which was a left over trend from the 1960's. For example, as part of a class project a friend of mine staged a huge "happening" just outside the big dining-commons windows on a Parent's Day special dinner. Over 50 people/actors were involved with fake news crews, guys in radiation-protection suits and geiger counters, an ambulance, and the staging even used a set of twins to some very disconcerting results. The entire dinner was cancelled and parents got out of there as soon as they could, sick to their stomachs from what they thought they had seen.

So things like that were not unheard of around our college.

It's amazing what you could do when everyone did not carry around a smartphone.