by Aaron Mahnke
One effort to control the patients came in the form of the lobotomy. The man who pioneered the transorbital lobotomy, Dr. Walter Freeman, spent a good amount of time in Westin, traveling there in his van, which he lovingly referred to as the Lobotomobile. Conservative estimates place the number of lobotomies performed there by Freeman at around seventy, while other reports go as high as a few hundred.
And with each one, the goal was the same: subdue the patient. To physically sever the portion of the brain that controlled their psychotic behavior, cutting it off from the rest of their mind. According to one historian, only one-third of those procedures were effective, which left a lot of patients physically disabled or, worse yet, dead.
But it was clear why they were trying, however desperate those attempts had become. Some of the patients were horribly violent. Once a nurse went missing during her work shift, and the administration just assumed she had quit in frustration and gone home without telling anyone. Her body was found two months later, lying under a disused staircase.
Much of the violence was due to the mixing of patients. Children were kept in the same place as adults. Patients with a history of violent behavior lived on wards with other, more vulnerable people. Physical assault, rape, and murder were common occurrences because of this.
One powerful story tells of three men who shared one bedroom. One of the men reportedly snored, which bothered the other two. So one night they dragged the snoring man out of bed, pulled his sheets off, and tied them into a noose. Then they hanged the noisy roommate from a pipe overhead in an effort to silence him.
It didn’t work, though. When they untied him, he fell to the floor and began to struggle to get up. So the others lifted the man’s bed, placed one of the bedposts on his head, and then jumped on the bed.
When they were later asked about what happened, one of the men responded with a simple answer. “The ghosts did it.”
The hospital had come full circle. Created as a solution to the horrible conditions found by Dorothea Dix over a century before, it had somehow become just as dark, and just as horrifying, as before. There were efforts to fix it, to right the ship and save the mission, but it was too little, too late. The damage had already been done.
The hospital’s doors finally shut for good in 1994. Like the patients who once lived there, the Westin State Hospital was abandoned to the ravages of time, a shell of its former self.
But the story wasn’t over yet.
IF WALLS COULD TALK
Like a lot of abandoned buildings, the old hospital became the centerpiece of a number of new schemes. The governor of West Virginia at the time wanted to convert the facility into a prison, which speaks volumes about the perception of the place. When the most logical use for an old mental hospital is a place to lock up criminals…well, it’s revealing.
Over a decade later, in 2007, the facility came under new ownership, and the name was changed back to the original Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. As a whole, the old hospital is a massive complex of ancient buildings, but portions of it have been opened up to the public for historical tours. Which, as you might imagine, drives a good number of people through those old hallways—hallways that have seen the worst of human behavior.
And that’s a lot of watchful eyes, so it’s no surprise to learn that visitors have seen things. Things that are difficult to explain. Things that leave a chill in the air. As the old saying goes, if walls could talk, right? And if you believe the stories, the walls of Westin State Hospital do much more than that.
The morgue building—that separate structure near the main complex where dead patients were examined and prepared for burial—is one of the many places that have sparked tales. Visitors there have seen shadows moving in and around the back entrance, as well as in the exam room.
Most of the shadows seem to be centered around the large wall of metal racks used to hold bodies. And witnesses have said that these shadows are unnaturally large and evoke a deep feeling of sadness and oppression.
Inside the main building, though, is where the experiences have been the most unnerving. After serving strictly as the female ward of the hospital, Ward F transitioned in the early 1900s to the home of the most violent of Westin’s patients. Later, patients disabled by lobotomies were also moved there.
Visitors have seen more of the same shadow figures, sometimes appearing from around corners. The sound of footsteps has often been heard there, as well as the distant echo of laughter, and even knocking on some of the doors.
Speaking of doors, there is apparently a set of doors on the top floor of the hospital that have behaved in a rather unusual way. That’s the area that began life as an onsite residence for some of the staff before transitioning into the ward for drug and alcohol recovery patients.
These doors are never locked, and there is nothing blocking them on either side. But one historian reports being in the hallway one day and reaching out to try and open them. She gripped the handle of one of the doors and tugged, but nothing happened. She tried the other, and got the same result. So she pulled harder.
And that’s when something on the other side pounded on the door, rattling it in the frame. Whatever was waiting on the other side of that doorway, it didn’t want anyone coming through.
Ward 4 is home to a particularly chilling story. One tour guide reported coming into work early one morning, only to discover wet footprints in the hallway there. Wet human footprints. One set was apparently adult-sized, while the other was smaller, like a child’s.
The tour guide followed the prints down the hall until they ended at a chair, where it seemed as if they turned around and took a seat. They faded away a short time later, of course, because that’s what water does. But according to some of the tour guides, if the weather is damp enough outside, those prints mysteriously reappear.
The most popular story, however, involves a particular room in Ward R, up on the fourth floor. There are a number of slightly different stories, but the core legend is that a pregnant female patient was admitted long ago. When the child was born—a daughter—that child remained in the hospital, where she was raised by the staff and other patients.
This little girl, called Lily by some of the people who tell her tale, was said to have died at the age of nine from pneumonia. And while her body was most likely taken across the yard to the morgue, her spirit is rumored to have remained behind. Trapped in death, just as she had been in life, within the walls of Westin.
Her room is still there, too. Or at least that’s what visitors believe. There is a room. Its walls, once a calming shade of pale green, are peeling and spotty. Those who have stepped inside have reported incredibly odd experiences: the feeling of a child reaching out and holding their hand, the faint sound of giggling, objects that move on their own.
And scattered all across the filthy tile floor are tributes, left for Lily by her many visitors: dozens and dozens of toys.
FRAGILE MOMENTS
Humans are, by and large, a well-intentioned species. We try. We really do. We see brokenness and need, and we step into the gap to help out. A lot of the time, that turns out really well. Sometimes, though, we fail. Miserably, in fact.
The world of mental health has come a long way since the days of Dorothea Dix and her reform mission. True, there are those who still put an unnecessary stigma on mental illness, while others simply ignore it, as if it doesn’t exist at all. But for the most part, it’s viewed today as a legitimate struggle for millions of people around the world, and we’re slowly getting better at caring for them.
Buildings like the old Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum stand as a reminder of how far we’ve come. The chains and hydrotherapy tanks and surgical theaters for icepick lobotomies are still there, abandoned by time and enlightenment. They were brutal and inhumane when they were new, but somehow in their decay they’ve grown even more horri
fying.
We’ve all seen photos of abandoned hospitals, with rusted wheelchairs and medical implements tossed in a corner. The peeling walls, the water damage, the makeshift nests where something—maybe human, maybe not—has taken up residence in the dark. These are clearly not friendly, inviting places. But it’s just a building, right? Thankfully, the old cliché is far from true: walls can’t really talk.
Or can they?
One historian who visited Westin State Hospital claims to have had a very unusual experience. She toured the facility with a friend, walking down those long, dark hallways and peeking inside its countless rooms. There’s a lot to see there, after all. And all the while they captured their experience on a voice recorder.
When she reached the room where the stories say the little girl named Lily had lived and died, she decided to have a snack, and pulled a box of crackers from her bag. After setting it down on the floor, she wrote some notes down in her notebook, and then stopped.
The box of crackers was moving. In fact, she claimed that it was actually levitating. It moved through the air a foot or two, and then returned to where it had been. A moment later, she heard the distinct, unmistakable sound of crunching. As you might imagine, it was an unsettling experience, and she left feeling oddly disturbed.
Later, after returning home, she began to listen to the audio recordings of her experience there at the old hospital. After listening for a while, she finally came to the portion of the recording that had taken place in Lily’s room.
She heard herself set down her bag, and the noise from the box of crackers being taken out and opened. To her surprise, she also heard the crunching that she assumed she had imagined. And then she heard something else. Something unexpected that sent a shiver down her spine.
It was a voice. A fragile, tiny voice, barely more than a whisper. But as soft as it was, she could clearly make out the words the voice spoke. Someone—or something—in the room had spoken five chilling words.
“Thank you for the snacks.”
WHEN THE MUMMIFIED body of a prehistoric man was discovered encased in ice in the Alps of northern Italy back in 1991, it was like stumbling upon a five-thousand-year-old time capsule. Along with his remarkably well-preserved body, the Iceman, as he came to be known, also introduced researchers to well-preserved examples of prehistoric clothing, weapons, and tools. And something else.
It was a lump of organic matter about the size of a walnut that had been strung onto a leather strap to keep it safe. After getting the unusual object under a microscope, microbiologists realized what it was: a fungus known as Piptoporus betulinus.
This fungus has an amazing property: it contains substances that kill off harmful bacteria and parasites. For a prehistoric hunter, traveling through all sorts of harsh environments and eating anything he could find, this fungus would have acted as a sort of antibiotic.
Humans, it seems, have been medicating themselves for millennia. And while the reasons have always been the same—to relieve the symptoms of illness and disease—those tools of medicine have varied greatly over the years. Every new wave of sickness has driven us to find better solutions, fresh cures, and powerful weapons with which to fight back.
So when a fresh wave of disease swept across America in the late 1800s, one community decided to use every tool at their disposal. The solution they proposed would lean heavily on both social compassion and the power of nineteenth-century medicine. It was their last stand against a disease that was killing so many people.
That desperation meant that no option was left off the table, however drastic it might be. And honestly, it’s hard to blame them. But when the experiment ended five decades later, it was far from a success. In fact, while countless lives were saved, they were paid for with blood.
Fighting back, it seems, can often lead to horrific results.
DEATH AND HOPE
They called it the “white plague.” It can be found in historical records dating back thousands of years, from the ancient Near East and India to China and Africa. Classical writers such as the Greek physician Hippocrates and the historian Herodotus all mentioned it within their body of work. Every culture had a name for it, and all of them meant roughly the same thing: death from within.
When European culture moved into the nineteenth century, the illness became a sort of romantic focal point, and took on the poetic name “white plague.” But it was easy for those who remained untouched by its effects to paint it so lovingly. To many, it was just another disease, one they called consumption.
Today, in the modern age of information, we refer to it by its scientific name, tuberculosis. But you can dress a disease up in any clothing you want—be it romantic or gothic or utterly modern—and it still won’t change how powerful it is. Whatever people were calling it, tuberculosis was devastating, and as urban populations exploded across England and America in the mid-nineteenth century, this silent killer expanded with them.
But consumption did more than make people sick and kill them; it consumed hope. There was a palpable fear in the air, spreading as fast as any infectious disease, and people were desperate for a solution. So with an eye toward just how contagious this sickness was, they proposed a new idea: humane isolation.
It was an idea that had been proposed by an English physician named George Bodington in 1840, but while his own proposed facility never came to fruition, the idea spread, quickly reaching America. And one of the first places it was put into action was a location in Kentucky known as Mammoth Cave.
The cave happened to be owned by a physician named Dr. John Croghan, and he saw it as a perfect setting for healing. Caves have a tendency to maintain a constant internal temperature, and with the wide opening supplying the interior with fresh air, Croghan felt that tuberculosis patients could only benefit.
In late October 1842, he transported fifteen patients to the cave and set each of them up in small stone huts. Those who were able would share meals together, while the rest stayed in their little homes, resting and hoping. It was rustic living with the goal of recovery.
The experiment didn’t last very long, though. By early February, two of the fifteen patients had died from the disease. The remaining thirteen packed up and went home, and over the following three weeks, the rest of them died as well. Even the project’s mastermind himself, Dr. Croghan, couldn’t escape the grasping hands of tuberculosis, dying six years later at his home ninety miles to the north in Louisville.
It would take another sixty years, but eventually someone else in Louisville tried implementing the idea of an entire facility devoted to the care of tuberculosis patients. With the city positioned right in the wetlands of the Ohio River, it was in a sort of horrible sweet spot for the spread of the disease. Which is why, in 1910, a fresh outbreak began to take lives.
In response, an open-air hospital was built with the goal of caring for the sick. But a year later plans changed and the location was moved south of the city, into the hills of the Kentucky countryside. It was there that the hospital planners purchased the land that had long been known as Waverley Hills, named by a young schoolteacher in the 1880s after a series of novels by Sir Walter Scott.
When the first Waverly Hills Sanatorium opened its doors in December 1912, the physicians had a lot of hope. With open-air environments and room for over forty patients, it was the perfect location to care for the sick. Two years later, another fifty beds were added. But as the years went by, that initial hope began giving way to creeping despair. There simply wasn’t enough room for everyone who needed help.
So funds were raised and construction began on a new, larger, more modern facility. It would take them nearly three years to complete it, but when it was finished in 1926, the new Waverly Hills Sanatorium was an impressive beacon of hope. At five stories tall, the new facility boasted room for over 400 patients. Surely that would be enough, right
?
Sadly, that wouldn’t be the case. As the years went by, more and more buildings were added to the original, expanding the hospital’s capacity and ability to help. But while their intentions were good, some of the methods they used in the service of that goal were much less humane than we might imagine.
Modern medicine was offering the doctors there a fresh batch of new treatments. And just as humans have done for thousands of years, Waverly Hills was quick to put those new tools to the test. Still, no one fully expected just how many tools would need testing. And with all that experimenting came pain.
Pain…and so much blood.
LAST RESORT
In the 1920s, our understanding of tuberculosis was far from complete. People understood it correctly as an infectious disease, and that it focused on the lungs in most patients. But as far as treating it went…well, the medical profession was still in the dark. What they were fully aware of, though, was the destructive path the disease carved through each new victim.
The infection would set off a chain reaction inside the body of each patient. Breathing would become difficult, even painful, and this would often be accompanied by violent fits of coughing. And it was common for those fits to produce blood. As you might expect from any sort of infection in the body, fever was common, as were digestive issues.
It was the weight loss and fatigue that earned the disease the common name of consumption. And it was also the most visible sign that caretakers could see. Tuberculosis was clearly gaining ground if the sick person was withering away day after day. In the age before X-rays and MRIs, it was hard to argue with proof you could see with your own two eyes.
