Randolph County Asylum

Doris the kitchen-worker ghost rearranges porcelain dolls in her bedroom. The Judge haunts the attic where he held competency hearings.

In the preserved bedroom of Doris, a kitchen worker who spent her later years as a resident of the Randolph County Asylum, a collection of porcelain dolls sits on display. They move. Not all at once, not dramatically, but between one visit and the next they've repositioned themselves. Turned their heads. Shifted seats. The kitchen where Doris worked has the same problem with utensils and small objects. Whatever Doris is, she's still putting things where she wants them.

The asylum sits at 1882 US 27 South in Winchester, a four-story red-brick hulk of 58,000 square feet that opened in late December 1899. The land has housed institutional buildings since 1851, when a wooden asylum went up on a 350-acre farm to shelter nineteen people: the disabled, the poor, the elderly, the mentally ill. In 1857 the original wooden building burned to the ground by accident with no one killed. A brick replacement put up in 1855-1856 deteriorated quickly because the on-site bricks were poorly glazed, and only the current 1899 structure, built partially on the first asylum's foundation, survived.

Between 1899 and its 2006 closure, the asylum housed around 1,487 people and roughly 500 of them died on-site. Old age, disease, suicide, murder, and recurring tuberculosis outbreaks ran through the wards. There's an unmarked cemetery on the grounds for bodies nobody claimed. Before embalming was routine, the dead were laid in pine boxes and other residents held overnight wakes to make sure the corpse didn't show signs of life. An 1895 detail: the first toilet was installed in the basement with a drain running to a creek. An 1897 detail: a sewer inspection found the basement standing in 18 inches of raw sewage from a broken drainpipe. It was not a gentle place to die.

The second named ghost is the Judge. Local accounts hold that he was a magistrate who held competency hearings in the attic to decide who would be committed and on what terms. His voice has been captured on audio by investigators: gruff, angry, the voice of a man who spent a lot of working hours signing people into the wards below him. The attic is the building's most active space. A child's tricycle stored up there rolls across the floor on its own, apparently moved by child spirits who also laugh and scream in the corridors.

The rest of the building stays busy. Slamming doors, particularly near the old holding cell. Footsteps on the first and second floors. A woman in dark clothing has been seen walking from the dining hall toward the residents' wing and vanishing at the threshold. Shape-shifting dark forms near the holding cell. EVP recordings nobody can identify. Paranormal Lockdown on Destination America filmed here. Destination Fear on Travel Channel filmed here. The property was bought in 2016 specifically to run as a paranormal attraction, and now hosts private investigations, public ghost hunts, events, and film shoots nearly every weekend.

In Doris's bedroom, the dolls keep moving. Between investigations, nobody touches them, and between investigations they rearrange themselves anyway.