Insane Asylum- West Virginia Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

During the 19th century- Insane Asylums were no joke. Well, they never have been. One of America's most well known Asylums, "West Virginia's Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum" has been a topic of interest in the past eleven years for it's facility has reopened for the first time in 2007 since being closed down in 1994. This West Virginian Asylum was opened in 1863 and was built to house up to 250 patients comfortably, each with their own room and plenty of space for them to walk around and get fresh air.

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The building itself was incredibly stable, with long pillars and luxuriously long windows, it was hard to see a bad future for this Mental Health Asylum. On the Asylum's grounds, there was a working dairy and vegetable farm, there were waterworks and even an active gas well and cemetery. Life for the patients wasn't half bad until society became more warped in 1881. The diagnoses for mental health became incredibly warped and grew in numbers for the most peculiar things- including "Novel reading", "Female imaginary trouble", and "Spinal irritation".

In 1881 more than 750 patients crowded the facility which was only suited for 250-300 patients, and health standards declined extremely fast. Nurses and staff were swamped with the mentally unstable, and their mental conditions were only declining when the patients weren't getting the help and support they needed. It got so bad that they were holding up to 2,600 patients in the 1950s.

This neglect continued until 1994, when the cemetery couldn't get any bigger and conditions couldn't get any worse, the Gazette's Exposed movement got the doors to shut down for good until the doors reopened in 2007 to become a tourist attraction. Now the old hospital for the clinically insane hosts tours and ghost investigations, and is well known to create insulting and crude events like 'Zombie Paintball' and 'Crazy for Barbecue' on the very same grounds where the mentally ill lay on freezing cold floors and rotted away in rusty cages.



Works Cited

• (1) Evon, D. (2016, February 9). Reasons for Admission to Insane Asylums in the 19th Century. Retrieved from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/reasons-admission-insane-asylum-1800s/
• Evon, Dan. “Reasons for Admission to Insane Asylums in the 19th Century.” Snopes.com, 6 Feb. 2016, www.snopes.com/fact-check/reasons-admission-insane-asylum-1800s/.
• Serena, Katie. “The Horrifying History Of The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.” All That's Interesting, All That's Interesting, 2 Feb. 2018, allthatsinteresting.com/trans-allegheny-lunatic-asylum.
• Barnes, Jim. (2018, May 25). In West Virginia, a moving, respectful tour of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/in-west-virginia-a-moving-respectful-tour-of-the-trans-allegheny-lunatic-asylum/2018/05/24/03d476e6-5937-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.056a85945b21