Norwich State Hospital

Norwich State Hospital in Preston held over 2,000 psychiatric patients across 20+ buildings before closing in 1996. Ghost Hunters scored one of their highest-rated episodes here, capturing a door opening by itself and moaning in the Salmon Building. Visitors still hear beeping from the lobotomy rooms where the power has been off for three decades.

The beeping comes from the lobotomy rooms. Visitors hear it on the upper floors of the Salmon Building, a rhythmic electronic tone, as if medical equipment is still running. The power has been off since 1996.

Norwich State Hospital opened in October 1904 with 95 patients. By the 1950s, it held over 2,000 people across more than 20 buildings spread over hundreds of acres in Preston, Connecticut. The patients were mentally ill, tubercular, or chemically dependent. Many never left. The treatments they received read like a catalog of institutional cruelty: starvation, beatings, sexual abuse, ice-packing. In 1919, a water heater exploded and killed two employees. In 1904, the year the hospital opened, a patient hanged himself.

The Salmon Building was the maximum-security unit for the criminally insane. Steel doors, barred windows, cell-block rooms. It's the building that generates the most reports now, and it's the building where the suffering was most concentrated when the hospital was operational. The connection isn't subtle.

Norwich State closed on October 10, 1996. The patients were transferred elsewhere. The buildings were left empty. The town of Preston bought roughly 400 acres in March 2009 and created a redevelopment agency to figure out what to do with it. In the meantime, the campus sat there, rotting.

Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson of TAPS had wanted to investigate Norwich State for years. They finally got official access for Ghost Hunters Season 6, Episode 10, which aired May 5, 2010 and scored an 8.0 on IMDb, one of the highest-rated episodes in the series. The investigation was worth the wait.

In the Salmon Building, Jason and Grant spotted a moving shadow in a stairwell, followed by a strange noise and a faint light. Then the moaning started. Low at first, like a man in pain, then it shifted into something higher, a whimpering sound, almost like a puppy. In the tunnels connecting the buildings, Kris and Amy heard voices and what they described as wild noises. During their EVP session, the noises never stopped. The team captured video of a door opening on its own near Kris and Amy, swinging inward as if someone was walking into the room with them.

TAPS left Norwich with their assessment confirmed: the place is haunted. The evidence they presented included the door footage, audio of the moaning, and multiple personal experiences across the campus.

The tunnel system is its own horror. Underground passages connect the buildings, originally used for transporting patients and supplies. People who have entered the tunnels, legally or otherwise, report them as the most active area on the grounds. Voices. Movement. The feeling of being followed through darkness that runs the length of the campus.

Former security guards who patrolled the empty buildings after closure reported disembodied voices in hallways, footsteps following them, sudden cold spots, and shadowy figures at the edge of their flashlight beams. Screaming has been heard coming from the Salmon Building when no one is inside. A woman sobbing. Children on the second floor. The Earle Building generates its own set of reports.

The grounds are not open to the public. Security patrols the area, and recent fires on the property have intensified enforcement. The buildings that remain are unstable. The redevelopment plan envisions the Preston Riverwalk, a new use for land that held over 2,000 involuntary patients for most of a century.

Norwich State is the kind of haunted place where the ghost stories feel like the least disturbing thing about it. Whatever walks through the Salmon Building at night is secondary to what happened there in the light of day. The beeping from the lobotomy rooms, the moaning in the stairwells, the door swinging open for no one. These are echoes. The building remembers what was done inside it. The patients who were starved, beaten, and cut open in those rooms didn't have a choice about coming here. Some of them, it seems, didn't have a choice about leaving either.