Fairfield Hills State Hospital

The buildings of Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown, Connecticut don't come with a single famous ghost. What people report there instead is everything at once: voices in empty corridors, footsteps where no one walks, figures in white standing in doorways, and cold spots that drop across half a room. There's no name to give it. There's only the building, and what was done inside it.

It opened in 1933 as one of New England's largest psychiatric hospitals — a red-brick campus laid out to look like a college, with cottage-style halls spread across the grounds instead of one looming asylum. On June 23, 1933, the first patients arrived, transferred from the state hospital in Middletown. At its peak it held thousands, as many as 4,000 by some accounts.

The treatments arrived with the decades. Insulin and Metrazol therapy in 1937. Electroshock in 1941. And starting in May 1946, lobotomies — 107 of them performed in a single fourteen-month stretch, under superintendent Dr. William Green and his colleague Dr. Samuel Friedman, the results later written up in a 1949 psychiatry journal.

The dark didn't stay underground. In 1941, five attendants were charged in two separate beatings of patients; one patient died, and two of the men were convicted of manslaughter. A network of concrete tunnels linked the buildings, used to move patients and supplies — and former staff have said they moved bodies through them too.

The state closed Fairfield Hills in 1995. The buildings emptied out and drew urban explorers, ghost hunters, and an MTV crew, who disguised the place as "St. Agnes." Its director remembered "weird cold spots" and getting sick on set.

Most of the campus is sealed now. The town sealed the tunnels in 2009 and moved its offices into one of the old halls. And in 2020, a brewery opened in the building where the staff once ate lunch. They named it NewSylum — a pun on asylum — and they pour the beer where the keys used to tell the doctors from the patients.