Back in San Francisco, her physician, Dr. Tilton Tillman, was waiting for her at the hospital. He told her that she had appendicitis and led her to a room where a psychologist named Mary Scally then started asking her a bunch of seemingly random questions related to history.
After the initial visit, Ann returned to the hospital four days later for her scheduled appendectomy. She stayed at the hospital for a few weeks to recover.
During that time, she overheard a few staff members refer to her as an “idiot patient.” She also heard her nurse telling Dr. Tillman over the phone that the patient “didn’t suspect a thing.”
That was when Ann learned her mother and Dr. Tillman had told everyone that she was mentally unsound.
She figured out that her appendix had been taken out, but her fallopian tubes were removed along with it. When she finally went home, she was prohibited from leaving her room. It was kept locked from the outside.
“My mother made me act as my own maid,” Ann claimed. “Not one housekeeper entered my room during my convalescence. I was forced to live with little more than the bare necessities or comforts of a poorhouse waif.”
She wasn’t allowed to communicate with anyone. The most human interaction she got during her imprisonment was when the maid wordlessly delivered a plate of cold food to her door. The heiress also revealed that this sort of treatment wasn’t new.
As a baby, she was kept in a crib with tall sides, so it was essentially like a cage. Her father was the only one who cared for her.
When Ann was 7 years old, her father died. Afterward, she hardly left the apartment. Her mother wouldn’t let her make any friends or have any boyfriends, even when she got older.
“Mother didn’t have one spark of affection for me, and she refused to permit others who did. She always called me an ‘imbecile’ and an ‘ugly duckling,'” Ann recalled.
“She hated my buck teeth and my humped shoulders. And the way my eyes cross when I am tired. She sometimes struck me when she noticed my eyes were going.”
