Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum aka Weston State Hospital – Weston, West Virginia

Supposedly, it’s haunted – TAPS Ghost Hunters did an episode on this asylum: [link] I’m a major skeptic, but if there is anywhere that is haunted, I have no doubt that this would be the place.

The original hospital, designed to house 250 souls, was open to patients in 1864 and reached its peak in the 1950's with 2,400 patients in overcrowded and generally poor conditions. Changes in the treatment of mental illness and the physical deterioration of the facility forced its closure in 1994 inflicting a devastating effect on the local economy, from which it has yet to recover

This hospital was home to tortured minds and torturous treatment by today’s standards. This institution performed hundreds of frontal lobotomies (if you don’t know what it is, look it up – its sickening) daily with NO anesthetics; “lucky patients” would receive electric shock therapy prior to a lobotomy.

Prior to insane asylums, those who had mental illness without family or friends who took responsibility for them were mostly placed in prisons in the company of common criminals, often chained to walls, unclothed regardless of temperature, and mired in their own filth. Some families did take responsibility although they were more concerned with hiding their problematic relatives to avoid embarrassment than trying to help them. They stashed them away in attics, secreted sheds, and even holes in the ground. It wasn't until the 1770's that facilities began to be constructed specifically to house the insane. But again, these places were designed to extricate the individual from society, not to help him or her reassimilate through curative methods because insanity was universally regarded as incurable.

They say once a person was committed into this asylum – they never got out and lived the remainder of their lives within the hospital walls.