Laura Wright 
There are buildings that acquire ghost stories long after their original purpose has disappeared.
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia, hardly needed anyone to invent a dark history for it.
Its enormous stone wings housed psychiatric patients for 130 years. It witnessed changing ideas about mental illness, periods of extraordinary overcrowding, treatments ranging from nineteenth-century moral therapy to electroconvulsive therapy and lobotomy, and the lives and deaths of generations of people who called the institution home.
Today, the hospital is perhaps better known for something else.
It is considered one of the most haunted places in West Virginia.
Visitors report voices in empty rooms, footsteps in deserted corridors, shadowy figures, apparitions and the unmistakable sensation that someone is standing nearby.
Perhaps a building with this much history is simply very good at encouraging the imagination.
But after dark, inside a corridor stretching farther than the light can reach, that explanation may not feel quite as reassuring.
A Hospital Built for a Different Kind of Care
Construction began in 1858, when present-day West Virginia was still part of Virginia.
The hospital was designed according to the principles of psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride, whose ideas profoundly influenced nineteenth-century psychiatric architecture.
Kirkbride hospitals were intended to be therapeutic environments.
Patients needed sunlight.
Fresh air.
Exercise.
Pleasant surroundings.
Order.
Rather than simply imprisoning mentally ill people in jails, poorhouses or inadequate institutions, reformers envisioned hospitals where architecture itself could contribute to recovery.
The Weston hospital’s long, staggered wings allowed rooms access to natural light and ventilation. The enormous structure was originally intended to accommodate approximately 250 patients.
That number becomes important.
Because eventually there would be nearly ten times as many.
The Civil War Interrupts Construction
Before the asylum could be completed, the country went to war.
Construction stopped in 1861 following Virginia’s secession from the Union.
At the time, only the southernmost wing had been completed, while foundations and basement work had begun on the central portion of the building.
Then something remarkable happened.
Nearly $30,000 in gold intended to pay for construction of the asylum was being held at the Weston Branch of the Exchange Bank of Virginia.
On June 30, 1861, Union troops from the Seventh Ohio Infantry entered Weston under Colonel Erastus B. Tyler. Soldiers seized the money from the bank.
The funds ultimately helped finance the Unionist government that would become associated with the creation of West Virginia.
The unfinished psychiatric hospital had become entangled in the Civil War before it ever received its first patient.
The First Patients Arrive
After West Virginia became a state in 1863, the institution was renamed the Lunatic Asylum at Weston.
Patients began arriving in 1864, although construction continued for another seventeen years.
The enormous main building was finally completed in 1881. Surviving hospital ledgers confirm both the early admission of patients and the continuation of construction long afterward.
The institution would subsequently operate under several names, including the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane and, eventually, Weston State Hospital.
Today, the historic property again uses the name Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.
The Original Ideal
It is tempting to imagine nineteenth-century psychiatric hospitals as places designed primarily for cruelty.
That oversimplifies their history.
Institutions such as Weston emerged partly from a genuine reform movement. The intention was to remove mentally ill people from environments where they might be neglected, imprisoned or abused and place them somewhere designed specifically for treatment.
The Kirkbride system emphasized what was called moral treatment.
Routine, recreation, useful occupation, pleasant surroundings and humane supervision were considered therapeutic.
The building itself was part of the treatment.
That philosophy depended upon something essential, however.
The institution had to remain relatively small.
Weston did not.
250 Becomes 2,400
The hospital gradually became overcrowded.
By the 1950s, approximately 2,400 patients were living in a facility originally designed for about 250.
No architectural philosophy could survive numbers like that.
Privacy disappeared.
Staff resources were stretched.
Conditions deteriorated.
The hospital increasingly became custodial rather than therapeutic, part of a pattern occurring in large state psychiatric institutions throughout the United States.
People were sent to such hospitals for conditions we would recognize today as serious psychiatric illnesses.
But historically, institutions also received people for neurological disorders, intellectual disabilities, alcoholism, epilepsy, age-related cognitive decline and behavioral problems that families or communities were unable or unwilling to manage.
The asylum became a world unto itself.
Thousands of people lived portions of their lives there.
Some never left.
Treatment Changes
Psychiatric medicine changed enormously during the hospital’s 130-year existence.
The institution that opened during the Civil War belonged to the era of moral treatment.
Later generations experimented with very different approaches.
Hydrotherapy was used.
Electroconvulsive treatment arrived.
Psychosurgery eventually appeared.
Patients at Weston underwent lobotomies, including procedures during the period when Walter Freeman promoted his controversial transorbital technique across American psychiatric hospitals. A detailed historical study of Weston documents the institution’s progression from moral treatment through hydrotherapy, electric shock, lobotomy and eventually psychotropic medication.
Some treatments were considered modern medicine in their own time.
Others are deeply disturbing when viewed today.
And some patients benefited from treatments that later generations tend to remember only through their worst abuses.
The real history is more complicated than the horror-movie asylum.
It is also more tragic.
Life Inside Weston
The surviving records provide glimpses of the people behind the institution’s enormous reputation.
Hospital documents recorded admissions, diagnoses, occupations, places of residence, ages, treatment outcomes and the supposed causes of mental illness. Employee records document the people who worked there, while correspondence between superintendents discusses individual patients and the ordinary business of keeping such an enormous institution functioning.
That bureaucracy is strangely important.
The asylum wasn’t merely a frightening building filled with anonymous “lunatics.”
It was a community.
Patients ate there.
They slept there.
They worked there.
Employees spent entire careers there.
Relationships formed.
People recovered and went home.
Others deteriorated.
People grew old.
People died.
And over more than a century, an enormous accumulation of human experience settled into those stone corridors.
The Hospital Closes
By the late twentieth century, American psychiatric care had changed dramatically.
Large state institutions were disappearing as treatment increasingly moved toward smaller facilities, community programs and pharmaceutical management.
Weston State Hospital finally closed in 1994 after 130 years of operation.
The closure affected more than the remaining patients and employees.
The hospital had been deeply connected to Weston’s economy and identity for generations.
For a time, the enormous complex stood largely silent.
But not everyone believed it was empty.
The Hauntings of Trans-Allegheny
The asylum eventually developed one of the strongest paranormal reputations of any former psychiatric hospital in the United States.
Visitors have reported hearing voices and conversations when nobody else was nearby.
Footsteps have been heard moving through corridors and rooms.
People describe doors apparently moving without explanation.
Shadowy figures are reported at the ends of hallways.
Some witnesses claim to have seen partial or full-bodied apparitions.
Others report something considerably less dramatic but perhaps more unnerving.
The feeling that they are not alone.
These experiences do not establish that Weston is haunted.
But their variety and persistence helped transform the former hospital into a major destination for people interested in paranormal phenomena.
Lily
Perhaps the best-known supposed spirit at Trans-Allegheny is a little girl commonly called Lily.
Visitors and paranormal investigators have reported experiences attributed to a child in one portion of the hospital.
Toys have consequently become associated with attempts to communicate with her.
Balls may be placed on floors.
Music boxes and other objects are sometimes used.
People report hearing what sounds like a child’s voice, laughter or movement.
Over time, Lily acquired a biography.
Different versions attempt to explain who she was, why she was at the asylum and what happened to her.
Here we encounter one of the recurring problems with famous hauntings.
The experience and the explanation are not necessarily the same thing.
Reports of something resembling a child are one matter.
Identifying that presence as a particular dead child with a detailed biography requires historical evidence.
The latter should not automatically be accepted simply because the former is compelling.
Perhaps visitors really have experienced something childlike inside the building.
Who or what they encountered is a different question.
Voices in Empty Rooms
Disembodied voices are among the most frequently reported phenomena in old institutional buildings.
Sometimes witnesses describe indistinct conversation coming from another part of the building.
They follow it.
Nobody is there.
Other reports involve individual words or whispers.
Electronic voice phenomena, or EVPs, have also become enormously popular among paranormal investigators visiting the asylum.
Such recordings are controversial.
Random sounds can resemble words once listeners are told what they are supposed to hear. Buildings also contain countless sources of environmental noise.
But an audible voice heard directly by several people is more difficult for the witness to dismiss afterward.
That doesn’t make it supernatural.
It simply makes it unexplained.
Footsteps
Footsteps are another recurring feature of the asylum’s folklore.
This is particularly appropriate for a Kirkbride building.
The corridors are enormous.
Sound travels.
A noise made in one portion of a wing can seem to originate somewhere else entirely.
Old buildings expand and contract.
Animals move inside walls.
Visitors elsewhere in the structure may be audible from surprising distances.
All provide reasonable explanations.
Yet witnesses sometimes describe something more specific.
Footsteps approach.
They become louder.
The listener waits for someone to appear.
Nobody does.
Then the steps stop.
The Shadow People
Dark figures have reportedly been seen throughout the complex.
Some appear briefly at doorways.
Others seem to cross corridors.
Occasionally a visitor sees what appears unmistakably to be another person standing at a distance, only for the figure to disappear.
Human vision is particularly vulnerable under poor lighting conditions.
Peripheral vision sacrifices detail for sensitivity to movement, making shadows especially easy to interpret as human forms.
Inside an enormous abandoned psychiatric hospital, expectation adds another powerful ingredient.
That explains many shadow-person reports.
Whether it explains every one is another matter.
The Weight of the Building
Perhaps the most common experience at Trans-Allegheny isn’t visual or auditory at all.
It is emotional.
Visitors describe particular rooms as oppressive.
Some report sudden sadness.
Others experience anxiety or the sensation that they should leave.
Skeptically, there is nothing surprising about this.
A visitor knows where they are.
They know what occurred there.
They have probably heard the ghost stories before entering.
The architecture itself can be overwhelming.
But believers sometimes interpret these sensations differently.
Perhaps intense emotion leaves something behind.
Perhaps suffering somehow becomes attached to a place.
There is no established scientific mechanism demonstrating that this occurs.
But the idea is ancient.
And few buildings offer a better setting in which to contemplate it.
Separating the Asylum From the Horror Story
Trans-Allegheny presents the same problem found at many famous haunted institutions.
Its authentic history is gradually buried beneath increasingly sensational stories.
The hospital becomes a torture chamber.
Every patient becomes a victim.
Every medical treatment becomes sadism.
Every death produces a ghost.
Eventually the real people disappear.
That does them a disservice.
The history of Weston is disturbing enough without embellishment.
A hospital designed for 250 people really did hold around 2,400.
Patients really did experience treatments that ranged across radically different eras of psychiatric medicine.
People really did spend decades there.
Some recovered.
Some suffered.
Some died.
And generations of employees spent their working lives trying, with varying degrees of success, to care for them.
We don’t need to turn them into props for a haunted attraction.
Does Correcting the History Make It Less Haunted?
Not necessarily.
This is where the history and paranormal claims should remain separate.
Proving that a dramatic story about a particular patient is false does not prove that nobody heard footsteps.
Discovering that a supposed murder never occurred does not explain an apparition.
Correcting an invented biography attached to a ghost doesn’t establish that witnesses never saw something.
It merely returns us to the original mystery.
What did they experience?
That question is considerably more interesting than forcing every strange occurrence into a convenient story.
The People Who Never Quite Left
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was built with optimism.
Its designers believed sunlight, fresh air, beautiful surroundings and humane care could help people whose conditions were poorly understood.
Then history intervened.
War interrupted its construction.
Overcrowding overwhelmed its design.
Psychiatric medicine changed.
Treatments came and went.
Thousands passed through its doors.
And eventually the enormous hospital closed.
Today, people walk those same corridors for entirely different reasons.
Some come for the architecture.
Some for the history.
Others come hoping to encounter the dead.
Most probably leave without seeing a ghost.
Some don’t.
They report a voice.
A shadow.
Footsteps approaching from an empty hallway.
A child’s laughter in a building where no child is supposed to be.
Perhaps these experiences arise from acoustics, expectation, darkness and the extraordinary psychological weight of the place.
Perhaps an old hospital is particularly capable of making living people feel surrounded by the dead.
Or perhaps 130 years of human life cannot be emptied from a building quite as easily as its furniture.
The doors closed in 1994.
But according to some who have walked its corridors since then, not everyone left.
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