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Just click the link in the show description to Terrify.

Welcome to Tales to Terrify.

I am Stephen Kilpatrick, and we have another stop on our road trip for the summer south in the mountains of West Virginia.

You will remember during our move from our old home in Chicago to the Shenandoah

that we made a pit stop in Athens, Ohio, to pay a visit to the

ridges, a former mental institution. I'm a fan of the building, in part being one of the

large institutions constructed using the Kirkbride plan, these enormous buildings built with expansive

wings to warehouse, whoever the the generations before ours, thought needed

to be put out of sight.

Today we'll visit the Trans-Alegany Lunatic Asylum.

The Virginia General Assembly authorized the construction of the facility in 1850.

Construction began, but found itself interrupted by the Civil War.

This notable building became one of the structures that began construction on Virginia soil and completed on West Virginia soil, due to the cessation of those Virginian counties to form

West Virginia, of course.

250 patients housed in solitude served as the initial plan when it had opened in 1864.

By 1880, the hospital held just shy of triple that.

The number would continue to swell as Americans sent her drug addicted, alcoholics, epileptics,

mentally challenged, hysterical, and criminal.

70 years later, at its peak, what had now been named Weston State Hospital held a staggering

...