Visiting former mental asylums: Hopeful, haunted or ‘nightmare factories?’
By Jen Rose Smith
(CNN) — Steve Roberts isn’t sure he believes in ghosts. But without them, he can’t really explain what happened several months ago at Pennsylvania’s infamous Pennhurst Asylum.
In May, he joined a group of paranormal fans at Pennhurst Paracon, an event exploring the sprawling institution that closed in 1986 and has long been rumored to be haunted. “I just find the mystery of it fascinating — it’s the mystery of the unknown,” said Roberts, a tech worker from Sykesville, Maryland, of the ghost stories that led him, and his daughter, to Pennhurst.
Inside the old asylum, plaster peeled from mottled walls and holes gaped in the ceiling. Some rooms held battered bed frames or operating tables. In one basement room, empty aside from a single chair, the pair came across two women in the group using recording equipment and speaking to someone or something Roberts couldn’t see.
“She’s asking these questions: ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’” Roberts said. “And then she says, ‘Can you tell me the name of anyone in this room?’” By then he’d turned away, ready to move on.
As Roberts and his daughter approached the door, he recalls, the woman asked one more question into the darkened room: “Did you say ‘Steve?’”
He didn’t wait for whoever — or whatever — it was to clarify. “I was very freaked out,” he said. “I just walked into this room and something knew my name.”
Roberts and his daughter left the building, fast.
First opened in 1908 as the Eastern Pennsylvania Institution for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic, over time Pennhurst became notorious for inhumane treatment of people with both physical and intellectual disabilities. In 1968, it was the subject of an NBC exposé, “Suffer the Little Children,” which publicized the severe neglect residents experienced there.
Today, the former facility in Spring City, 30 miles from downtown Philadelphia, is a macabre tourist attraction. Decades after the last patient left Pennhurst, visitors can join “paranormal investigations” of the former institution that stretch until 2 a.m.
It’s an example of “dark tourism,” in which travelers explore sites around the globe precisely because of their morbid histories. And it’s far from the only historic asylum or hospital that’s become popular with visitors drawn to the institutions’ creepy settings and sometimes-harrowing reputations, which have become associated with paranormal activity.
In Wisconsin, the former Sheboygan County Hospital for the Insane is now the Sheboygan Haunted Asylum, with seasonal haunted houses featuring costumed actors. The Sheboygan Falls site also hosts guided tours with local paranormal enthusiasts Fox Valley Ghost Hunters, who explore buildings whose stained walls and corroded pipes seem ready-made backdrops for hauntings.
And after closing in 1981, the Eloise Psychiatric Hospital in Westland, Michigan, found new life as the Eloise Asylum. It’s partly an asylum-themed haunted house and escape room, while paranormal buffs use ghost-hunting equipment to seek out any lingering spirits in its rooms with exposed wires and ghoulish graffiti.
“It’s become kind of a bucket-list item for people,” said Alyssa Hill, who guides paranormal tours at the historical Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia. “Maybe they’ve never seen something, but want to … They want to, sort of, get that thrill.”
Like other tour guides, Hill has plenty of chilling tales of her own. She recalls windless nights when doors slammed, and instances where she heard mysterious knocking on walls. Not long ago, Hill watched a human-shaped shadow cross, back and forth, through a laser grid projected on the wall. And there have been many moments when Hill felt certain that she, and her guests, were not alone in the building.
“I don’t really know how to explain it,” she said. “I guess that’s why it’s paranormal. It’s unexplainable.”
The surprisingly hopeful history of asylum tourism in America
Thrill-seeking asylum visitors today might be surprised to learn that the appeal of visiting these institutions was once uplifting — not terrifying — for some.
A late 19th century traveler flipping through an 1872 copy of the guidebook “Miller’s New York As It Is” could find, along with its descriptions of museums and hotels, information on touring the 1821 Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane, a branch of New York Hospital at the time.
“It occupies a most beautiful and commanding site,” the guidebook read, noting that its grounds were adorned with cedars and flowers. Visitors were welcome to drop by the asylum’s central building, where sweeping views were among the city’s best. “The treatment administered to its unfortunate inmates, too, is of the most enlightened, humane, and rational sort,” it read.
In 1880, another book, “The Englishman’s Illustrated Guide Book to the United States and Canada,” noted that exploring a New York asylum will “well repay the tourist or philanthropist.”
That framing reflected a historical reality. In the 19th century, asylums were springing up across the United States — a building boom spurred by a changing understanding of mental illness.
“By the 1800s, mental illness had become recognized as a disease … and anything that is a disease was believed to be curable,” said Jennifer Bazar, the assistant director of the National Museum of Psychology at the University of Akron’s Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, which explores the evolution of the mental health care system. “The view that it was a disease factored into how and why these institutions were built.”
Many asylums of that era — including the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum — were built according to the Kirkbride Plan, a design approach created by physician Thomas Story Kirkbride. He hoped that newly built asylums could offer “moral treatment” that would contrast with grim scenes in older facilities, and held that fresh air, nourishing food and a healthy environment could assist in cures. Many Kirkbride asylums had beautiful grounds, and soaring architecture.
Prominent names got involved. Famed Central Park landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed the grounds of New York’s Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane. (It’s now the luxurious Richardson Hotel, which some believe to be haunted.)
The new asylums intrigued the public, too. “People were curious about these new buildings that were being constructed … they were built with public dollars, and they were immense structures, on huge properties, with manicured gardens,” Bazar said. “But also, the conversation about mental illness was starting in the public, with discussions about how treatment should take place, and what treatment looks like.”
“There’s a real hope there,” Bazar said. “There was this change in attitude. It was like ‘Here’s an opportunity to educate the public about what these institutions are doing.’”
The other side of asylums: ‘Nightmare factories’
If early asylum tours were meant to be uplifting, there was also a darker side to the way Americans saw such institutions, said Troy Rondinone, an associate professor of history at Southern Connecticut State University, and the author of the book “Nightmare Factories: The Asylum in the American Imagination.”
Even as asylums cropped up to offer care across the US, popular culture depicted people living in asylums as objects of terror or ridicule. As an early example, Rondinone pointed to the 1845 short horror story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” by Edgar Allan Poe, which depicts a fictional asylum where patients have overpowered and imprisoned the staff. “It definitely makes fun of people acting in bizarre ways,” he said, noting that this reflected a broader stigma.
Other scary asylum stories highlighted a fear of institutional cruelty — of authority figures with total power over vulnerable patients. “There was this kind of edgy nervousness around them, where if you go into this place, you don’t know if you’re going to get out,” said Rondinone.
Those fears weren’t unfounded. “Narratives were coming out about the horrors taking place behind closed doors, and people that were locked up against their will,” Rondinone said. “The stigma and fear of mental illness began to go hand in hand with the stigma and fear of the institution.”
Such narratives included books such as the 1868 “The prisoners’ hidden life; or, Insane asylums unveiled,” an account by Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard, of her three-year internment in the Illinois State Hospital and Asylum for the Insane. (She was committed at the request of her husband, a preacher, in part due to her religious views.)
Pioneering journalist Nellie Bly feigned mental illness to gain admittance to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York (now known as Roosevelt Island) in 1887. From her time as a patient there, she wrote a series of newspaper stories exposing the asylum’s squalid conditions and abuse, later published as the book “Ten Days in a Madhouse.”
By then, institutions were chronically underfunded and overcrowded. Much of the earlier idealism about asylums had soured as the 19th century ended, explained Bazar with the National Museum of Psychology.
“This vision of short-term care became very long-term confinement for the majority of the population,” she said. “The hopefulness was gone.”
From abandoned hospitals to horror and hauntings
In 1950, more than half a million people were living in asylums in the United States. Over the following decades, as psychological treatments and laws changed, most asylums emptied. The once-grand buildings declined. It was then that the hauntings came in.
“When they started closing these huge institutions, they kind of turned into death traps — asbestos-filled, dilapidating, fenced-off things that people didn’t want to spend their tax money to fix,” said Rondinone. “They kind of turned into ready-made haunted houses.
First, they became popular with “urban explorers,” who sought out and photographed the crumbling spaces. Then over time, a few enterprising communities and entrepreneurs looked for ways to turn disused asylums into something productive, Rondinone said, something that could bring jobs and revenue back once again.
The trend has been particularly pronounced in the last decade and a half. Pennhurst Asylum near Philadelphia, for example, opened as a haunted house in 2010. And after selling at auction in 2007, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virgina began offering ghost tours to the public — and got a major boost in 2009, when a team of ghost hunters locked themselves inside for the night to record a live show.
Like many academics who have studied the history of asylums, Rondinone has been critical of the sensational tone some tourist attractions use. At times, the ghoulish, haunted house aesthetic can seem to make light of real suffering experienced by real people — often, within living memory. In a 2019 opinion piece for The Washington Post he argued that using “creepy asylums” as a Halloween trope could stigmatize mental health treatment and discourage people from getting needed help.
Now, he’s not so sure. “They lean into the horror, but some of them also take it very seriously,” said Rondinone.
And even the spine-tingling fear of asylums reflects an important historical reality, he said — they are reminders of what happens when a country fails its most vulnerable citizens.
“It puts a mirror up to our shortcomings as a society,” he said. “What’s really scary is the mistreatment of people suffering from mental illnesses … we kind of generate the horror ourselves.”
And even Rondinone is curious about the ghosts. Nearly a decade ago, he traveled to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, and spent the night with fellow ghost hunters in a place that was also once known as the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. He went all in.
“I took it seriously. I paid 30 bucks and bought a ghost detector on Amazon,” he said. “I just crept around, and used my ghost detector. I investigated.”
Rondinone didn’t see any ghosts. But he did get a taste of real fear, while shut up by himself in a tiny room on the asylum’s upper floors. He’d spent the whole night hearing guides and fellow visitors talk about ghosts, priming his imagination and leaving him jumpy. The cell was empty, but claustrophobic.
When he switched off his flashlight, his vision dwindled to zero.
“I think I even said, ‘If there’s something out there, make yourself known,’” he recalled. “If a mouse had scurried across the floor, I would have jumped 10 feet in the air.”
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