The history of Courthouse-Collins Settlement District
Courthouse-Collins Settlement District's recorded ground centres on Asylum Drive in Weston, West Virginia, where the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum rose in blue sandstone between 1858 and 1881, served as a mental hospital for 130 years, and now stands open as a museum.
Asylum Drive in Weston, West Virginia, runs alongside the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, a Gothic Revival hospital built by hand from blue sandstone between 1858 and 1881. It operated as a mental hospital for 130 years, housing thousands beyond capacity, before closing in 1994 and reopening in 2008 as a museum offering history and paranormal tours.
War halts construction and soldiers seize the gold
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is a Gothic Revival hospital building, now run as a museum offering historical and paranormal tours. Its stone walls run for a quarter mile along Asylum Drive, built by hand from blue sandstone quarried nearby.
The Virginia General Assembly authorized the hospital in the early 1850s. Construction started in late 1858, using prison labor and enslaved workers, with skilled stonemasons later brought from Germany and Ireland. The architect was Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum of Baltimore, who designed it using the Kirkbride Plan. That plan, developed by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, held that fresh air, light and calm surroundings could help cure mental illness.
Work stopped in 1861 when the Civil War began. Union troops under Colonel Erastus Bernard Tyler occupied the half-built site, turning it into Camp Tyler. On June 30, 1861, Tyler's men raided the Exchange Bank nearby and seized more than $27,000 in gold set aside for the hospital's construction. Tyler's men shipped it to Wheeling to fund the new pro-Union government of Virginia.
When West Virginia became a state in 1863, the hospital took a new name: the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. Construction resumed, and on October 22, 1864, the first nine patients were admitted, all women. The building itself was not finished for another seventeen years.
Builders finish a hospital meant for 250 patients
Builders finally completed the hospital in 1881. It remains one of the largest hand-cut stone masonry buildings in North America, and some say the second largest in the world after the Kremlin.
The hospital was meant to hold 250 patients. People were admitted for reasons that look strange today: asthma, laziness, greediness, even "political excitement."
On October 3, 1935, a fire set by a patient destroyed six men's wards and brought a cupola crashing through the roof. Nobody died. The Works Progress Administration rebuilt the wing for $155,000.
Beds were shared in eight-hour shifts here
A survey in 1938 found 1,661 patients crammed into a building meant for 250, more than six times its capacity. By the 1950s, the number climbed to 2,400. Staff shared beds between patients, giving each only eight hours before handing the bed to the next person.
In 1913, the facility had already taken a new name, Weston State Hospital, a label that stuck through its worst years.
Between 1951 and 1953, Dr. Walter Freeman performed more than 770 transorbital lobotomies here, part of the West Virginia Lobotomy Project. The method used a thin blade inserted above the eye, driven into the brain with a mallet. Other treatments included insulin shock therapy, ice baths and solitary confinement.
An empty hospital reopens as a tourist attraction
The hospital closed in 1994, 130 years after its first patients arrived. Doctors moved everyone to the new William R. Sharpe, Jr. Hospital nearby. The old building sat empty for over a decade.
In 2007, the state auctioned it off. Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum bought the 242,000-square-foot building for $1.5 million. Joe Jordan reopened it in March 2008 as a tourist site, offering both history tours and paranormal investigations.
The building had already earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and became a National Historic Landmark in 1990.
Guides lead tours through Room 319's legend
Visitors today walk the same stone hallways where patients once lived three and four to a room. Guides point out Room 319, where staff and tourists report meeting a presence they call Lily, said to be a girl who died here of pneumonia at age nine. The story has no single fixed version; some say her mother came in pregnant and died giving birth to her. It is told as legend, not as recorded history.
Other stories passed along by guides describe a violent patient called Slewfoot, said to have died in a bathroom fight, and a third-floor presence some call Big Jim. Staff over the years have reported hearing gurney wheels squeak down empty halls and doors swinging shut on their own. These accounts are part of the tour, not part of the hospital's documented record.
The gold that Union soldiers carried off in 1861 never came back to pay for construction. The state found other funds, and work dragged on for two more decades after the war ended.
The building standing today is a quarter mile of hand-cut blue sandstone, quarried near Weston and set by masons from Germany and Ireland. It held the sick, the overcrowded and the experimented-on for 130 years. Now it holds tour groups instead.
The old asylum stands open for tours, its stone halls walked by visitors instead of patients.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.