This is 99% invisible.

I'm Delaney Hall, filling in for Roman Mars.

Maybe you've heard a story like this,

how once upon a time on the outskirts of the town where someone grew up or where they went to school.

On the edge of the woods, there was a scary old asylum.

Over the last few years, so many people have told me versions of this story.

That's writer Sandy Allen.

They wrote a book called A Kind of Miraculous Paradise

about mental health care in America.

And often when somebody learns that I write about mental health,

they will launch into their old asylum story,

how they used to break into one with their friends,

or how someone they knew saw a ghost there.

The details vary.

But the one detail that almost never varies, the thing that seems to make an asylum story

an asylum story is that the asylum is nearly always

abandoned.

Oh boy. The former Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane is an imposing stone

structure on the north side of Buffalo, New York. It's nearly 150 years old and its resident historian Corey, Phoebe and Barrett

recently took me inside. This is pretty much what happens in you leave a building

sit by itself 40 years. The interior was everything you would expect from an old

abandoned asylum with boarded up windows and long derelict corridors. You've got all

...