Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

The building is a quarter of a mile long.

You see it first from the highway, rising above the little town of Weston, West Virginia: a vast Gothic Revival fortress of blue-gray sandstone, with a clock tower at its center and long wings stepping away on either side, like a cathedral that someone stretched until it couldn’t stretch any further. It is one of the largest hand-cut stone buildings in North America. Stonemasons — many of them immigrants from Germany and Ireland — shaped every block by hand.

It was built for 250 people. By the 1950s, it held around 2,400.

For 130 years, this was where West Virginia sent the people it didn’t know what to do with.

The Kirkbride Dream

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a Philadelphia physician named Thomas Story Kirkbride became one of the most influential figures in American medicine with a radical idea: that mental illness could be cured, and that the building itself could be part of the cure.

The “Kirkbride Plan” called for an enormous, beautiful hospital set in open countryside, with fresh air and sunlight in every room. Long wings would stagger outward from a central administration building, so that each ward got light and ventilation. Patients would be separated by sex and by the severity of their condition — the calmest closest to the center, the most disturbed at the far ends. They would work on the hospital’s farm, tend gardens, make crafts and live quiet, orderly lives. Kindness, routine and beauty would restore their minds.

It was called “moral treatment,” and it was, at the time, genuinely compassionate. Dozens of Kirkbride asylums were built across the United States. The one at Weston was among the largest.

Gold and War

The Virginia General Assembly authorized the asylum in 1858, when the western counties were still part of Virginia. Construction began that year. Then came the Civil War.

Union troops occupied the unfinished building and used it as a camp. In 1861, according to the story historians tell, Union soldiers seized some $27,000 in gold that Virginia had set aside for construction at a bank in Weston and carried it off to Wheeling, where it helped fund the creation of a brand-new state. When West Virginia broke away from Virginia in 1863, the half-finished asylum came with it.

The first patients were admitted in October 1864, while the war still raged. The building wasn’t completed until 1881.

Too Many

For a while, it worked as intended. The early years at Weston were, by the standards of the time, relatively humane. Patients farmed, ran a dairy, worked in the kitchens and laundries. There was a chapel, a bakery, a library.

But the problem with a place for people no one knows what to do with is that it fills up.

Families sent relatives who were mentally ill, elderly, epileptic, intellectually disabled, alcoholic, or simply difficult. Courts sent people. Towns sent people. On the hospital’s tour today, there’s a list of reasons for admission recorded in that era — and while historians debate exactly where and when it was compiled, the categories reflect what nineteenth-century asylums across America accepted: “domestic trouble,” “grief,” “intemperance,” “novel reading,” “religious excitement,” “jealousy,” “bad habits.” Some patients were sent away because they had become inconvenient. Some stayed for the rest of their lives.

By the 1930s and 1940s, the hospital was hopelessly overcrowded. Patients slept in hallways. Wards designed for a few dozen held more than a hundred. In 1949, a reporter for the Charleston Gazette toured the asylum and described conditions that shocked the state: patients locked in cages, crowded into filthy rooms, some without beds, many without enough clothing. By the early 1950s, the population peaked at around 2,400.

The Icepick

The darkest chapter of Weston’s history came in the 1950s, with a doctor named Walter Freeman.

Freeman was the leading American advocate of the lobotomy — a procedure that destroys connections in the front of the brain, intended to calm patients with severe mental illness. Freeman had developed a fast version called the transorbital lobotomy: an instrument resembling an icepick was inserted above the eye, through the thin bone of the eye socket, and swept back and forth inside the brain. It took minutes. It required no surgeon and no operating room.

In the early 1950s, West Virginia launched a program to reduce the population of its overcrowded asylums. Freeman traveled to Weston and other hospitals and performed transorbital lobotomies on hundreds of patients across the state. Some became calmer. Many were left permanently impaired — dull, childlike, unable to care for themselves. Some died.

Within a few years, new antipsychotic drugs made lobotomies obsolete, and the procedure fell into disgrace. But for many of the patients at Weston, it was too late.

Closing

Over the following decades, attitudes toward mental illness changed, and the giant asylums of America began to empty. Patients were moved into community care, smaller hospitals, and — far too often — onto the streets. The hospital, renamed Weston State Hospital, held on for years with a dwindling population and a crumbling building.

It closed in 1994. A modern psychiatric hospital nearby took the remaining patients.

For more than a decade, the great stone building sat empty. In 2007, it was bought at auction by an asbestos demolition contractor named Joe Jordan for $1.5 million. He restored the original name, Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, and opened it for tours.

Lily

Of all the ghosts said to walk the halls at Weston, the most famous is a little girl named Lily.

Staff and visitors say she haunts a room in the old Civil War section of the building, where she is said to have lived as a child — perhaps the daughter of a patient, born in the hospital, or a sick child left in its care. No one has been able to find her in the records, and the name may simply be a nickname given by the tour guides. But volunteers have turned the room into a kind of nursery for her, full of toys, dolls and stuffed animals that visitors bring as gifts. Guests report that the toys move. A ball rolls across the floor. A music box begins to play. Some visitors report hearing a child’s voice, or feeling a small hand slip into theirs.

Other stories are less gentle.

People describe hearing screams and moans in the empty wards, especially on the fourth floor, where the most disturbed patients were once held. They talk about a former Civil War soldier who walks the halls. And in the medical wing, people say they have felt overwhelming dread near the rooms where the lobotomies were performed.

There are cold spots and slamming doors and shadowy figures in the long hallways. The building is so large, and so empty, that the smallest sound seems to come from everywhere at once.

The Graves

There is one more thing I want to tell you about Weston.

Like many state asylums, it had its own cemeteries — several of them, on the hospital grounds and nearby. Thousands of patients who died there were buried in those cemeteries over the years. Many were buried without names, their graves marked only with small stones or metal markers bearing numbers. Some markers have been lost. In some cases, no one knows exactly who lies where.

Those patients were sent away from their families, from their towns, from the world. And when they died, they were buried in the same place, in the same anonymity.

Families still search for them. Volunteers have worked to restore the cemeteries and identify the dead. When you stand at the edge of those overgrown fields, looking up at the great stone building on the hill, you begin to understand why people say the patients of Weston have never really left.

They were never allowed to.