Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

The largest hand-cut stone masonry building in North America and purportedly the second largest in the world after the Kremlin. Designed following the Kirkbride plan, the asylum operated from 1864 to 1994, housing thousands of mentally ill patients. At peak overcrowding in the 1950s, it held ten times its designed capacity.

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia, is the largest hand-cut stone masonry building in North America and the second largest in the world after the Kremlin. It is also one of the most haunted buildings on the continent, a place where 130 years of institutional suffering produced a concentration of paranormal activity that draws investigators and visitors from around the world.

Designed by architect Richard Snowden Andrews of Baltimore using the Kirkbride Plan -- a progressive design philosophy that believed architecture itself could cure mental illness through sunlight, fresh air, and staggered wings that maximized both -- construction began in 1858 but was interrupted by the Civil War. The facility finally opened to patients in October 1864, initially as the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane, and was not fully completed until 1881. A clock tower was added in 1871, and a separate ward for Black patients was constructed in 1873.

The asylum was designed to hold 250 patients. By the 1950s, it housed 2,400 -- nearly ten times its intended capacity. Patients were crammed into hallways, closets, and cages. Sanitation collapsed. Staff were overwhelmed. The treatments administered within these walls read like a catalog of medical horror: insulin coma therapy that induced diabetic comas with side effects including permanent brain damage and death, Metrazol therapy that artificially induced seizures so violent they fractured bones and tore muscles, and most notoriously, lobotomies. The Trans-Allegheny performed over 4,000 lobotomies using the ice pick method -- inserting a leucotome through the eye socket to sever connections in the prefrontal cortex. The procedure left patients with severe cognitive and motor dysfunction. Many died. Historian Titus Swan estimates the total number of patient deaths at the asylum to be in the five-figure range.

The asylum closed in May 1994 and sat vacant for over a decade before entrepreneur Joe Johnson purchased it at auction in 2007, reopening it as a tourist attraction in March 2008. Since then, over 200,000 visitors from around the world have walked its halls, and many have encountered its residents.

The most beloved ghost is Lily, a child who was born inside the asylum after her mother was admitted as a patient. Lily died of pneumonia at the age of nine and has never left her room. Visitors leave toys for her, and staff report that the toys move on their own between visits. Elizabeth, a nurse, continues her caretaking duties in the hallways, her phantom footsteps heard on night patrols she has been making for decades. Jesse -- or James -- haunts the bathing area, believed to have suffered a fatal heart attack in the bathtub.

The malevolent spirits are far more disturbing. Two unnamed patients who were documented to have brutally murdered a fellow patient by repeatedly jumping on a bed manifest as black shadow figures that drain energy from the spaces they occupy. Slewfoot, an enigmatic and murderous spirit, haunts the upper floors and bathroom areas. A tour guide who worked at the asylum for a decade reported hearing the word Evil through a spirit box device, followed by unexplained footsteps, and subsequently discovered a four-inch burn mark across his back that persisted for a week.

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum has been featured on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Paranormal Lockdown, Ghost Stories, and numerous other paranormal television programs. It offers both historical and paranormal tours, including overnight investigations where visitors can spend the night in the darkness of a building that housed, tortured, and killed thousands of people over thirteen decades.