On this month’s episode of Living Lore, with guest co-host Chris Markham, listeners will travel to Weston to hear the horrific history of the supposedly haunted Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic asylum- constructed in the late 1800s- started off with good intentions. At first, patients were well taken care of, but soon the building became overcrowded. Patients were living in generally poor conditions. Four of five individuals were crammed into rooms designed to house only one person, and there was not enough food on the farm to feed all the patients, leaving them starving and malnourished.
Conditions only worsened with the West Virginia Lobotomy Project was initiated in the early 1950s. Many patients, who were healthy before the operation, which used an ice pick-like tool to sever the connective tissue of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, were left in a nonverbal state or, worse, dead.
Today, the once-ornate building, intended for healing but destined for destruction, sits abandoned, as if the patients simply vanished into thin air.
Rooms are still filled with medical equipment, decrepit furniture, and wheelchairs sit in the hallways. Many say they have seen spirits- believed to be patients of the asylum- walking the decrepit halls. Although the asylum has been closed for many years, ghost hunts have been offered there since 2007.
Is the asylum truly haunted, or has its ghastly past left a lasting impression? Listen to Living Lore, Episode Seven here, and decide for yourself.