Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

History

The Gold in the Weston Bank

“Just now coin is infinitely preferable to crazy people,” the Wheeling Intelligencer told its readers in July 1861. The coin was $27,000 in gold, and it had been set aside to build the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.

Virginia’s General Assembly put up $50,000 for the asylum, and construction at Weston was under way by the end of 1858. Richard Snowden Andrews, a Baltimore architect whose other work includes the south wing of the U.S. Treasury Building, designed it. The first crew reached Weston that September. They were Black convicts sent from Virginia’s Western Penitentiary at Staunton, according to the architectural historian S. Allen Chambers Jr. Italian stonemasons came after them to cut and set the stone. The first wing went up in blue sandstone from a quarry at Mount Clare, in nearby Harrison County.

Then came the Civil War. In the summer of 1861, Virginia’s secession convention ordered the work stopped and the money returned to the state treasury. Virginia’s pro-Union government in Wheeling moved first. At daylight on Sunday, June 30, the 7th Ohio Regiment under Col. Tyler marched into Weston, and Capt. John List, commissioned by the pro-Union governor, demanded the gold at the bank. “No resistance was made,” the paper reported, and List brought the money back to Wheeling under a guard of six men.

The pro-Union government added $40,000 in 1862, and the work went on through the war. In 1863, the asylum was renamed the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. In September 1864, a Confederate raid into Weston stripped the unopened hospital of its blankets and sheeting, according to its first annual report. The replacement order from Baltimore was destroyed when Confederates raided the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and the people of Weston lent blankets and bedding to make up the loss. The hospital opened on October 22, 1864. Its first nine patients came from Ohio, where they had been kept while a wing was finished.

Full Before It Was Finished

The building followed the plan of Thomas Kirkbride, a Philadelphia doctor. That plan put patients in long wings, sorted by ward, in rooms “flooded with light and air,” as the building’s National Historic Landmark nomination puts it. Kirkbride himself was consulted on the plans, along with Dr. Stribling of the asylum at Staunton. The two put the finished hospital’s capacity at 250 patients.

By 1872, it held 286. “It is now but half done,” the superintendent wrote that year. He saw the effects in the hospital’s deaths. In winter, when patients couldn’t take exercise outdoors, deaths ran at more than double the summer rate, and 17 of the year’s 22 came between October and April.

The building was finished in 1881, still to the 1858 plan. It runs nearly 1,300 feet along its front, with 902 windows and a central clock tower that rises 200 feet. The travel guide West Virginia Explorer calls it the largest building of hand-cut stone in North America. The landmark nomination makes a more careful claim: one of the largest in the United States.

Weston State Hospital

In 1913, the legislature renamed it Weston State Hospital. On October 3, 1935, a patient started a fire in the main building that destroyed six men’s wards and brought a cupola down through the roof.

Counts of its peak differ. The state encyclopedia, e-WV, says it grew to house about 1,200 patients. Its administrators told The Inter-Mountain, a newspaper in Elkins, in 1994 that it had once held more than 2,500.

From 1952 to 1955, Weston was one of four state hospitals in the West Virginia Lobotomy Project. The project was launched by Walter Freeman, the American neurologist who renamed the operation the lobotomy and became a fervent champion of it. Freeman traveled from Washington to perform most or perhaps all the project’s 787 lobotomies, the encyclopedia says. Many of the patients never consented. He saw his simpler version of the operation as a way to relieve overcrowded hospitals. In all, about 900 West Virginians had a lobotomy, the most per person of any state.

Closed, Sold and Reopened

Weston State Hospital closed in May 1994, replaced by the new William R. Sharpe Jr. Hospital in Weston. The Inter-Mountain wrote that the new hospital would “consign to history the stately, but obsolete 136-year-old hospital.”

In 2007, the state sold the old building at auction on the steps of the Lewis County Courthouse. Joe Jordan, an asbestos demolition contractor from Morgantown, bought it for $1.5 million. Asked why, Jordan said, “Stupidity probably had a lot to do with it.”

The Jordans went back to the building’s original name and began daily tours in March 2008, covering the history of mental health care, the Civil War, and the architecture. “It was never for sale. It’s still not for sale. This building will be in this family,” his daughter, Rebecca Jordan, told the Associated Press.

The Cemeteries

The hospital’s three cemeteries, used from 1864 to 1976, hold an estimated 2,400 to 5,000 people, according to the West Virginia State Hospital Initiative, a group that campaigns for them. Most of the graves are now unmarked, because the numbered brick markers that identified them were removed in 1979 and 1980. In 2025, the group announced that the state historic preservation office had found the cemeteries eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

Hauntings & Lore

The asylum’s own ghost-tour page keeps its claims general. It lists apparition sightings, plus voices and sounds nobody could explain. Guests, staff, and four TV crews reported them: Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters Academy, Ghost Adventures, and Paranormal Challenge.

The guides are more specific. In 2018, Marisa M. Kashino wrote about an overnight hunt there for Washingtonian, the Washington, D.C., city magazine. Her guide named a little girl born in the asylum, a man named Jesse who died of a heart attack in a bathtub, Civil War soldiers, and a patient murdered by his roommates.

Lily

The little girl is Lily. Michelle Graham, the asylum’s filming and events manager, told Group Tour magazine that Lily is its best-known ghost, and that guests often bring her toys and candy. In their 2014 book America’s Most Haunted, Eric Olsen and Theresa Argie place Lily’s Room on the first floor, in the eastern corner of Ward Four. The toys left there, they write, “have been known to move by themselves or in response to commands.”

Who Lily Was

The most detailed version of her story names her mother, Gladys Ravensfield, and dates Lily’s birth to 1863. Stephen Wagner, then About.com’s paranormal guide, wrote that version in October 2009 as “a short, fictional story.” Bloggers had been invited to write one to promote Ghost Adventures’ live broadcast from the asylum on October 30, 2009. Olsen and Argie write that it then spread across the internet as a “historical account.”

The asylum itself, its FAQ says, has no medical records of the patients it admitted.

Big Jim

A cultural historian from Southern Connecticut State University visited the asylum for the travel site Atlas Obscura. A guide told the historian about Big Jim, who, it is said, murdered another patient with a bedpost. The guide also explained how to reach him. Sit in the dark room, unscrew your flashlight until the bulb just loses contact, then ask Big Jim a question and wait for the light to flicker on. The historian heard sounds and thought they saw things in the shadows, “though nothing that couldn’t be explained a dozen ways by animals, architecture, and the psychology of the unknown.”

On her overnight hunt, Kashino set up in a room said to be haunted by a ghost named Jim James.

Frank and Larry

Graham says two male ghosts on the fourth floor, Frank and Larry, love to play cards and listen to jokes. She says she has seen two full-bodied apparitions at the asylum herself.