Weston State Hospital has appeared in a cornucopia of TV shows, including Travel Channel’s Ghost Stories, Paranormal Challenge, and Ghost Adventures, Syfy’s Ghost Hunters, and Destination America’s Paranormal Lockdown, making it one of the most famous destinations for ghost hunting and dark tourism in America. Preservation efforts bore fruit in 2007 when Joe Jordan purchased the building for $1.5 million and opened it for tours.Īn abandoned insane asylum, with sprawling wings and rooms bearing reminders of past patients, was a natural incubator for ghost stories, and paranormal-themed tours were baked into Jordan’s business model. In 1999, local law enforcement officers used the abandoned hospital to play paintball, and it sat empty for years. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and the Weston Hospital Main Building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990. Like many large psychiatric hospitals, Weston State Hospital (as it came to be called) closed in the 1990s. Though I couldn’t find any concrete numbers, it’s believed over a thousand lobotomies were performed there. Lobotomy was a procedure designed to make patients docile by severing connections in the frontal lobe of the brain. During the 1950s, its population peaked at a staggering 2,600 patients, with state and medical officials resorting to lobotomy to reduce overcrowding. Originally designed to accommodate 250 patients in relatively comfortable surroundings with plenty of natural light and fresh air, conditions at the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane slowly deteriorated into a horror show. Construction on the sprawling grounds, with everything the hospital needed to be a self-sustaining community, wasn’t completed until 1881. When West Virginia seceded from Virginia in 1863 and was admitted to the Union, the new state government renamed it the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. In 1861, the Civil War’s outbreak interrupted construction on Virginia’s new asylum as Union troops seized its construction funds from a local bank (totaling nearly $30,000.00 in gold) and used them to help fund a pro-Union Virginia government in Wheeling. The furthest wings were reserved for the most violent or disturbed patients. Kirkbride theorized that exposure to natural light and fresh air would aid in curing the mentally ill, so he designed a long, narrow hospital with staggered wings extending outward from the center. Its main building was laid out according to the Kirkbride plan, brainchild of Superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane Thomas Story Kirkbride. Click to expand photosĭesigned by Baltimore architect Richard Snowden Andrews in Gothic and Tudor Revival styles, construction on the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum began in 1858. A menagerie of tortured souls is said to lurk in these corridors.
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