Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum (Weston State Hospital)

In 1858 the Virginia General Assembly authorised a new hospital for people with mental illness west of the Allegheny Mountains, in the small town of Weston. Architect Richard Snowden Andrews designed it on the Kirkbride Plan, the reform model of the day, which staggered long wings so every ward had light and fresh air, set in grounds with lawns, walks and ponds. Work began with the forced labour of incarcerated African-American workers, was interrupted by the Civil War – Union troops seized construction funds from a local bank – and the main building, with its 200-foot clock tower, was completed in 1881. It is one of the largest hand-cut stone buildings in North America.

The hospital admitted its first 20 patients in the autumn of 1864, by which time the new state of West Virginia had renamed it the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. Built for 250 people, it held nearly 500 by the end of the century and more than 2,000 by the mid-20th century, when overcrowding, understaffing and harsh treatments – among them insulin shock, electroshock, cold-water therapy and lobotomies under the West Virginia Lobotomy Project of the early 1950s – defined life for many patients. Admission diagnoses in its early ledgers ranged from epilepsy to “menstrual” complaints. Later renamed Weston State Hospital, it closed in 1994 after a court order and a long decline, and its patients were moved to a modern facility.

After standing empty for more than a decade, the property was sold at a state auction for $1.5 million to Joe Jordan, a Morgantown demolition contractor – in August 2007, according to most histories, though an Associated Press report gives 2008 – whose family revived the original name and reopened it in 2008 for history tours, events and, above all, paranormal tourism. Television investigators from Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures and others followed, and the site now runs overnight ghost hunts in the main building and outer medical, forensic and geriatric buildings. Guides tell visitors of apparitions, voices and the spirits of named patients, while the museum rooms display patient artwork, nurses’ logs and treatment devices.

The business has revived a struggling town, but it remains controversial. Mental health advocates have criticised the use of the word “lunatic” and events that play on fear of mental illness, arguing that they stigmatise real people who lived and died here; the owners reply that the name is historical and that their exhibits educate visitors about past treatments. A historian of American culture who joined a night-long ghost hunt for Atlas Obscura concluded that everything he heard and glimpsed could be explained by animals, architecture and the psychology of the unknown – and that the asylum’s terror lies largely in how Americans have imagined such places.

Guests, staff and TV crews report apparitions in the wards, disembodied voices and footsteps, doors moving, cold spots, the smell of cigarette smoke, and flashlights that flicker in answer to questions – a technique guides use in rooms linked to particular patients.

The wards of the main Kirkbride building, especially upper floors and the old medical and seclusion rooms, and the outlying Medical Center, Forensics and Geriatrics buildings. Ghost hunts run from 9 pm to 5 am; daytime historic tours run in season.

The asylum has appeared on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters Academy, Ghost Adventures, Ghost Stories and Paranormal Challenge, was reimagined as “Fort Defiance” in the video game Fallout 76, and features in Jayne Anne Phillips’s 2023 novel Night Watch. It is a National Historic Landmark.