Athens Lunatic Asylum (The Ridges)

Patient Margaret Schilling vanished from this 1874 asylum in December 1978 and was found dead 42 days later in an abandoned ward, leaving a permanent body stain in the concrete that no one has been able to remove. The former Kirkbride asylum, now part of Ohio University, also holds three cemeteries with 1,930 patients buried under numbered headstones.

On December 1, 1978, a patient named Margaret Schilling vanished from the Athens Mental Health Center. Staff searched the buildings. Police were called. Six weeks passed. Then, on January 12, 1979, a maintenance worker checking an unused ward on the top floor of Building N. 20 found her. She was naked, lying on her back with her arms crossed over her chest. Her clothes were neatly folded on a nearby chair. She had been dead for 42 days.

The official cause of death was heart failure, likely from exposure. The ward she wandered into was unheated, locked, and abandoned. Forensic experts later noted that her undressing was consistent with paradoxical undressing, a known symptom of severe hypothermia where the dying brain tells the body it's burning up. When workers moved her remains, a permanent stain had formed in the concrete beneath her. The outline of her body, head, back, arms, thighs, is visible on the floor. Every attempt to remove it has failed. A forensic team that examined the stain in 2007 determined it was caused by adipocere, a waxy substance produced when body fat breaks down. Sunlight hitting the body through the window accelerated the process, baking it into the concrete.

The asylum opened in 1874 as the Athens Lunatic Asylum, a Kirkbride Plan hospital designed by architect Levi T. Scofield. At its peak it housed over a thousand patients, including Civil War veterans, children, and people institutionalized for reasons that wouldn't pass any modern standard. In the 1950s, Dr. Walter Freeman, the man who popularized the transorbital lobotomy, made regular visits to the facility. Freeman could perform more than twenty of his "ice-pick" lobotomies in a single day, hammering a sharpened instrument through the patient's eye socket to sever connections in the prefrontal cortex. Hundreds of patients at Athens underwent the procedure.

The facility was renamed the Athens Mental Health Center in 1972 and closed for good in 1993. Ohio University acquired the property, renamed it The Ridges, and converted buildings into classrooms, offices, and the Kennedy Museum of Art. The ghost of Margaret Schilling is the most reported presence. People claim to see a woman's face staring from the window of the room where she was found. Others describe door handles rattling on their own and mysterious writing on walls, including the phrase "I was never crazy."

Three cemeteries on the grounds hold 1,930 former patients. Most headstones carry only a number, no name. Seven hundred women and 959 men are buried this way. In one section, the graves are arranged in a circle, which local legend calls a witches' meeting point. Visitors to the cemeteries report shadowy figures and unexplained lights moving between the rows.

The campus sits within a geographic formation that feeds another local legend: Wilson Hall, an Ohio University dormitory, reportedly sits at the center of a pentagram formed by five area cemeteries. Athens itself consistently appears on lists of America's most haunted cities, and the density of reported activity at The Ridges is a large part of why. But the most unsettling thing about the asylum isn't the ghost stories. It's that stain on the concrete floor of Building N. 20, proof that Margaret Schilling lay there for six weeks while hundreds of people searched for her one floor below.