Former asylum renowned as paranormal hot spot

[GhostHunting]

Former asylum renowned as paranormal hot spot

https://www.indianagazette.com/news/local/haunted-halls-former-asylum-renowned-as-paranormal-hot-spot/article_655a229f-7f2d-52df-80cb-a992eee3045d.html

WESTON, W.Va. — Tour guide Rob Fowler and I walk down a hallway at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, all alone on the fourth floor. Or are we?

A bathroom stall door slowly creaks shut off in the distance. A figure of some sort briefly blocks out the light streaming into a window at the end of the hall on this sunny morning, prompting Fowler to stop what he's saying, midsentence. And is that faint whistling we hear?

I've come to the Kirkbride Building, the hulking main structure in the asylum complex — at 242,000 square feet the second-largest hand-cut stone masonry edifice in the world, after only the Kremlin — to see if the place lives up to its billing as one of the most haunted sites in America. It doesn't disappoint. It rarely does.

"I've been to a lot of famously haunted places," said paranormal investigator Aaron Sulser, who has explored the Kirkbride Building on numerous occasions. "It's certainly one of the most active places I've been to. I've always gotten something that you can't quite explain — a voice or a feeling or something. I've never drawn a blank there, ever."

Asylum employees have no doubt it's a paranormal hot spot.

"All of our staff here, we have unexplainable experiences on a regular basis," said office manager Bethany Cutright, who started at Trans-Allegheny as a paranormal tour guide. "I've never had Casper jump out and give me a high-five, but I have had things happen that I couldn't explain. And when I walk through those areas, the hair stands up on the back of my neck."

Employees and guests have reported seeing full-bodied apparitions, shadow figures and misty forms. They've heard moans, whispers, anguished cries, thumping and banging noises, the squeaky wheels of invisible gurneys rolling through the hallways and the sound of doors slamming. A few have reported being touched — or even pushed — by an unseen presence.

Some of the most compelling evidence is provided by electronic voice phenomena (EVPs), defined as recorded voices or sounds not heard at the time by the human ear. Direct a question into the darkness and you might just get an answer. I entered a room in the third-floor violent men's ward during a recent late-night paranormal tour and asked: "Why are you here?" When I later listened to my tape, the breathy reply — "manslaughter" — gave me goose bumps.

Paranormal guide manager Valarie Myers knows the feeling.

"You can be in there and think nothing's happening," she said, "but then when you play back your voice recorder, you might have to scrape your chin up off the floor."

Weston State Hospital had been shuttered for 13 years when asbestos abatement and demolition contractor Joe Jordan purchased the property for $1.5 million in 2007. He restored the facility's original name and a year later opened the complex for tours.

The imposing 1,296-foot-long Kirkbride Building, with its Gothic appearance and clock tower looming over the front entrance, gives off an eerie vibe, even in broad daylight. As I pass some of the dungeon-like seclusion cells where dangerous patients were caged, I can't help but shudder. I can leave here anytime I wish; others were not so fortunate.

Only the slightest understanding of mental illness existed back when Trans-Allegheny admitted its first patients in 1864. Doctors relied on treatments that would today be deemed barbaric: electroshock therapy, ice-water baths and, most horrific of all, transorbital lobotomies. Using mallets, they drove ice picks through patients' eye sockets and into the brain, which was thought to relieve their most severe symptoms.

The unrelenting misery of life behind these walls led some residents to take their own lives — or the lives of others. Paranormal activity has been reported in one room where a fatal stabbing occurred, and in another where two patients murdered a third by crushing his skull with a bedpost. A display in the first-floor museum indicates that 50,000 people died at Trans-Allegheny, although Myers suggests the actual count could be twice that. Given their traumatic lives and sometimes violent deaths, is it any wonder these tormented souls are restless? Or that strange sounds whose origins can't be pinpointed echo through the Kirkbride Building?

"You'll hear furniture moving," said operations manager Rebecca Jordan Gleason, Joe Jordan's daughter. "You'll be in the building by yourself and you'll be on the second floor and you'll hear like stuff being moved up in the nurses' quarters on the third floor. And you go up and no one's there and everything's where it was. You're still by yourself — or, at least, you know, kind of."

Sulser was once sitting with a group in complete darkness in the southern wing of the fourth floor — the only section of the building with wooden flooring — when something unseen paid a visit.

"There wasn't much going on and I was getting irritated, so I started kind of doing a little bit of antagonizing, which you're really not supposed to do," Sulser said. "I was like, 'If you don't like what I'm saying, why don't you come down here and shut me up.' And at that moment we heard very loud, very heavy footsteps coming down on that wood floor towards us. When we turned on our lights, there was no one there."

That area of the fourth floor seems particularly spooky. Cutright constantly checks over her shoulder when walking through there, even during the day, convinced she's not alone. Myers was once scratched during an investigation. And Jordan Gleason flat-out refuses to enter that ward anymore after hearing multiple doors slam when no one else was around. "I'm 100 percent creeped out up there," she said. "If I have something that needs to be done there, I send someone else."

Everyone at the asylum, it seems, has an unsettling story to tell about the fourth floor.

"I was up there one time with a tour group and we heard a huge crash — it sounded like a metal desk had been pushed down a stairwell," Cutright said. "We went toward the sound and investigated and there was absolutely nothing that we could find that would've created such a tremendous sound that close to us. We even went outside, thinking maybe something had fallen off of the roof — maybe a tree limb hit the roof and split. Nothing."

Employees have come to accept strange sights and sounds with a figurative shrug of their shoulders. Guests, on the other hand, are sometimes so freaked out they bolt.

"My guide Rob had a group of about 11 people on a tour this past October," Myers said. "He took them into Ward 2 on the second floor, and as he began his opening spiel, everyone heard this dragging sound coming from the end of the hallway. So they're looking down there and they see what looks like a man walking into one of the rooms. They were thinking there was somebody there that ought not be, so Rob goes down there to ask him what he was doing. Well, when they all got there, there was nobody in the room. Three or four of the ladies in the group refused to go on the rest of the tour."

Visit the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum and you might encounter Lily, Jessie, Jane or Ruth. Just don't be surprised to discover that while they sometimes appear among the living, they are not, uh, among the living.

The best-known of these spectral denizens is Lily, a young girl who, some believe, lived at the asylum after her mother was admitted. Staff members have dedicated a first-floor room to Lily, with toys, dolls and wrapped candy scattered about. She sometimes interacts with visitors.

"You get responses with a flashlight when you loosen the top of it slightly," Sulser said. "It'll start turning on and off. There's a little music box in there that she really likes. I've got video of the flashlight actually going on and off in rhythm with the music. That was pretty cool. And when the music shut off, the flashlight shut off."

There are also reports of Lily rolling balls across the room in response to requests by visitors.

Details about Lily's life — who she was, how she came to be at the asylum, if she died there — are a mystery. More is known about Jessie Albright, once a patient in the southern wing of the fourth floor.

"He was there because he was a recovering alcoholic," Myers said. "Well, he had some heart issues — he ended up having a pulmonary embolism while he was taking a bath and he passed away. There was a visitor who reported to us that something got really close up to him and whispered 'Jessie' in his ear. And often we put a flashlight outside of his room and we'll ask if we're talking to Jessie and he will turn it on. Sometimes if we ask for Jessie it will sound like metal clanking, as if someone's hitting a pipe ... or one of the big cast-iron bathtubs, maybe."

Jane Harvey, who hanged herself in 1884 using a bedsheet, asylum records show, also makes her presence felt on occasion.

"We have a lot of people on our paranormal tours who, in and around her room on the second floor, get like a strangulation-type feeling," Jordan Gleason said. "We have EVPs where folks have asked if she was a patient or if she was someone who worked here, and she said that she was a patient and that she had committed suicide. It's really remarkable when you can actually link the paranormal evidence that we collect to historic documents."

Like Jane, the belligerent Ruth apparently still roams the halls of the Kirkbride Building. In life she would grow agitated when men approached, hurling objects and insults. She's not so different in the afterlife.

"We actually do have documents about a patient named Ruth who spent a majority of her stay up in the violent women's ward," Myers said. "She ended up having a stroke that confined her to a feeder chair, so they took her down to Ward 4, which was primarily for the elderly and those who could not get around very well. We believe she still could be hanging out there, because a lot of the guys will get groped or slapped on their bottoms or pinched."

Not that females are entirely immune. Myers believes she, too, might have been a target of Ruth's wrath.

"One time I was walking through there and it felt like somebody grabbed ahold of the back belt loop of my jeans and yanked," Myers said. "Stopped my forward momentum and made me scream. I was so embarrassed — I was glad I was alone."

If indeed she truly was.

Last year, more than 70,000 visitors toured the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. They traveled to Weston from every corner of the country — every corner of the planet, in fact.

Many guests are drawn by the asylum's reputation as a hotbed of paranormal activity.

"I was just looking at this last 10 days — we've had people visit from 41 states and three countries," Jordan Gleason said. "They come from all over the world. We get 'em from everywhere. We've had people fly in from Bangladesh, and their flight time to get to us was longer than the weekend that they stayed."

Rarely do those visitors leave Trans-Allegheny disappointed. They return home with tales of disembodied voices, unexplained noises, even apparitions. And, as in my case, an EVP in which something unseen answered their question.