Horrific conditions that patients endured at a now-closed West Virginia mental institution have been examined by author Sherri Brake of Summersville, W.Va.
Brake, who also is a paranormal investigator, appeared at the Ohio County Public Library in Wheeling Tuesday, Oct. 28, to discuss her newest book, “The Haunted History of the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.” Speaking at Lunch With Books, she showed many vintage and current photographs of the asylum, later known as Weston State Hospital.
The asylum property, now owned privately, is being renovated to recapture its mid-19th-century grandeur, she said. Guided tours and ghost tours now draw visitors from all over the world.
Brake, who has written seven books, said she has been interested in the former asylum for years. Her aunt was a nurse at the hospital and told incredible stories of patients. “Some ghost stories don’t have to be fabricated; they’re scary enough,” Brake observed.
“We’ve come so far with our treatment of people. When it started, some of the treatments were barbaric,” she commented.
The old asylum and the former West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundville are the two largest buildings in the state. The four-story asylum, with its five miles of hallways, is “the second largest cut-stone building in the world, behind the Kremlin,” she said.
The commonwealth of Virginia began construction of the facility, known as the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, in 1858, she said. When the new state was formed in 1863, the asylum’s name was changed to the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. Its name was changed again in 1913 to Weston State Hospital. From 1980 until its closing in 1994, the facility was known simply as Weston Hospital.
The floor plan of the huge building was exactly the same on all four floors. The 19th-century building style was known as the Kirkbride Plan; its designer, Thomas Story Kirkbride, thought it was beneficial for patients to be in a structure offering extra sunlight and breezes, set upon sprawling grounds, Brake explained.
An impressive-looking building, the massive structure has more than 1,000 windows and a 200-foot clock tower with 6-foot hands, she said. Stone masons from Ireland and Scotland carved creepy faces in the facade “to scare away evil spirits,” she said.
About 300 Kirkbride buildings were constructed across the nation. Patients in these facilities received “pretty much standard treatments,” she said.
The asylum at Weston was designed to hold 250 people, but the population doubled within a few years. In the 1950s, she said, 2,600 patients were housed in the facility. By that time, the hospital was understaffed, overcrowded and plagued with unsanitary conditions.
In the early years, many patients died of influenza or tuberculosis. A tuberculosis sanitorium is used now as a haunted house. Three cemeteries are located on the property.
The term “lunatic” derived from the belief that epilepsy, madness and some other diseases possibly were caused by the moon, she noted.
“They treated the mentally ill horrifically in the past,” Brake said. Restraints were common; several confinement cages also were used in the asylum.
So-called treatment bordered on the bizarre and inhumane. When authorities thought a patient might be imbalanced because “fluids were out of balance,” one solution was to spin the patient in a chair really fast, she said. Bloodletting also was done as a possible cure in the hospital’s early years.
Exorcism might be practiced to “drive the devil out.” Trepination was a gruesome practice in which doctors would “drill out a portion of the skull and poke around,” she said. Later barbaric practices included hydrotherapy treatments entailing icy showers or ice-water baths.
Electroshock therapy was applied regularly and frontal lobotomies were common. In one year, she said, more lobotomies were done in the United States than tonsillectomies. In the mid-1940s, Dr. Walter Freeman of Philadelphia developed a technique to perform a lobotomy quickly by inserting an ice pick through a tear duct. He traveled across the country and performed 225 “ice pick operations” in 12 days in West Virginia, she related.
The asylum’s first nine patients were women, “probably suffering from menopause,” Brake said. In such cases, a man could have both his wife and their children committed; when the children reached age 16, a test was administered to determine if they should stay or be released, she added.
Brake circulated a lengthy list of reasons for admission cited in the asylum’s records from 1864-89. In addition to mental health issues and other medical conditions, many of the reasons were rather bizarre. For instance, people were committed because of “deranged masturbation,” “desertion by husband,” “immoral life,” “marriage of son,” “masturbation for 30 years,” “novel reading,” “political excitement,” “religious enthusiasm,” “superstition,” “suppressed masturbation,” “uterine derangement” and “vicious vices in early life.”
Describing ghost tours that take place at the vacant institution, Brake said leaders “hear the same stories over and over, in the same areas of the building.” Without prior knowledge of the layout, visitors smell pipe smoke in the Civil War section and see small shadow people in a children’s ward. “After the lights go off and it’s dark, you can really feel a connection with the people who were there. Some (patients) didn’t want to leave,” she said.
Brake showed a ” paranormal” photograph of mist shrouding a corridor and remarked that fog doesn’t form in a building normally. It is believed that “ectomist” occurs “when an apparition is trying to get up enough energy to form,” she explained.
“Any time you have a tragic death, a lot of paranormal experts believe that the spirit is left behind,” she commented. “You really do feel a connection with some of these patients when you spend time in the rooms.”
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