In August 1899, a woman returned to the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane, where she had once been a patient, to testify against its superintendent. Her name was Mary L. Somerville. The board assured her she would be protected no matter what she said.
Three years earlier, Somerville had arrived at the same sandstone building as a patient, referred from Grafton. She recovered, was discharged, and then was hired by the hospital. By August of that year, she was in charge of the storehouse for an institution holding more than 1,200 people. The man she testified against was Superintendent W.
E. Stutters. She stated that he came to her room and on several occasions tried to persuade her to become, in her words, his “pet. ” When the defense attorney questioned her about her birthplace, age, husband, and marriage circumstances, her lawyer objected, noting that the hearing was about the superintendent’s conduct.
The board sustained the objection and adjourned. That hearing took place on just one afternoon out of 130 years. The building around it was designed to hold 250 people. By the 1950s, it held roughly 2,400.
The story begins with the law. On March 22, 1858, the Virginia legislature passed an act authorizing the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. Virginia already had two mental hospitals east of the mountains, both full. When there was no room, people needing care were held in jails.
Western counties spent decades demanding that Richmond build something on their side of the mountains. Three commissioners searched for a site and chose Weston in Lewis County. A nine-member board bought 269 acres along the West Fork River. They hired a Baltimore architect, Richard Snowden Andrews, and sent his drawings to two doctors for review: Dr.
Thomas Kirkbride of Philadelphia and Dr. Francis T. Stribbling of Staunton. Kirkbride’s ideas shaped the building’s design: long staggered wings allowing sunlight and fresh air into every ward, high ceilings, and windows everywhere.
The architecture itself was meant to be part of the treatment. The building was designed for an optimum of 250 patients. But Kirkbride also held another idea: the asylum should be in a remote rural area, where patients would live among strangers and be prevented from seeing anyone they knew or loved. In 1858, this was considered therapy.
The prevailing theory held that the mind could not settle while the people who caused the mental disturbance remained in the room. The two ideas came from the same people in the same set of plans, and they saw no conflict between them. Construction began in late 1858. The first work crew was not made up of paid builders.
By September 1858, the first crew had arrived in Weston: Black prisoners from the Staunton Western Lunatic Asylum. They did the simple labor of digging, hauling, and cleaning. Skilled craftsmen were brought in separately to cut and set stone, quarried from Mount Clare in neighboring Harrison County. Brick for the interior walls was fired on site.
Other materials were hauled by wagon from distant railroad stations and across the West Fork River. On June 28, 1861, Virginia ordered work stopped. About $98,000 had been spent. Another $27,000 sat in a bank in Weston.
On July 2, delegates of the newly formed Union-loyal Virginia government moved the money from Weston to Wheeling. That money, appropriated for a mental hospital, became part of the founding treasury of a state that did not yet exist. The war did not leave the site alone. Union and Confederate forces occupied the land and half-built walls at various points, and Confederate raiders seized building materials.
In 1863, West Virginia joined the Union and the institution was renamed the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane. The first patients arrived on October 22, 1864: nine people in a building designed for 250. The hospital remained small for three years. By the fall of 1867, there were 45 people in the south wing.
That same year, West Virginia residents held at the Staunton asylum were transferred to Weston. By 1868, nearly 200 people were inside. In 1873, separate rooms for Black patients were completed. The wards were racially segregated, and they remained so.
Now, the question few ask about a place like this: who was sent there, and why? The first registry in Weston recorded the reason for each person’s admission, covering October 22, 1864, to December 12, 1889. The list contains 125 causes. Some are known conditions: encephalitis, epilepsy, a gunshot wound, sunstroke, smallpox, opium addiction, excessive drinking.
Others reflect the lingering effects of the Civil War: death of sons in war, exposure while in military service, a bursting shell, enlistment in the army through the seduction, excitement as an officer, and one entry that simply says “the war. ”
Others are grief written in the language of the time: disappointment in affection, disappointment in love, family affliction, remorse, grief, trouble. Some causes reveal women committed simply for being women: suppressed menstruation, menstrual derangements, uterine derangements, female diseases, imaginary female troubles, parturition (meaning childbirth), milk fever, contraceptives. Some reveal men disposing of wives: desertion by husband, ill treatment by husband, fits of desertion, seduction, illegal confinement.
Some reveal poverty or mere oddness: evil company, bad habits, political excitement, laziness, selfishness, greed, immoral life, vicious habits in youth, dissipated habits, superstition, politics, the Salvation Army, religious excitement, excessive study of religion. Two relate to reading: close study, reading novels. Others are simply bad luck: rattlesnake bite, dog bite, kick of a horse in the head, falling off a horse, firefighting, loss of an arm, fever and loss of a lawsuit, parents being first cousins, two years of chewing tobacco. In 1875, a West Virginia family with a relative they could not care for, could not afford, or did not want had somewhere to put that person.
The registry did not require a diagnosis. It required a cause, and almost any cause would do. Once admitted, a person worked. The sewing department in Weston produced 412 pairs of pants, 172 suits, hundreds of dresses, and 411 pairs of gloves in 1889.
That same year, it repaired 40,241 separate articles of clothing. Patients did this work. A 1927 report describes one skilled carpenter who made by hand most of the fine furniture in the superintendent’s office and rooms. The hospital farm was a self-sustaining project.
A 2008 dissertation by Kim Jacks, the most detailed study of the institution, notes that 532 acres were under cultivation. There were 133 milk cows, 35 sows, and 2 boars. The fields produced corn, hay, and soybeans, plus a large vegetable store for winter. A small coal mine on site produced 12,000 tons annually.
The food on the tables, the patients’ clothing, the office furniture, the coal in the boilers—all came from the people confined inside. The 19th century called this “therapeutic. ” The men who ran Weston in the 1870s understood it clearly. They also understood that the labor was free, and they never had to choose between those two facts.
Life inside was not all labor. Reports from the 1870s describe billiards and bagatelle in the wards, along with cards and dominoes. Regular dances were held every Friday evening. There were daily wagon rides for the women.
The hospital grounds were used for the football games of Weston High School. Townspeople came onto the grounds to watch, and patients watched along with them. One patient appointed himself a Coca-Cola vendor to the spectators and told anyone who challenged him, “You can’t throw me off this place. I live here, and this is my ground.
” It is one of very few patient words from Weston to survive. Staff lived there too. An employee handbook from 1907 details a workday beginning at 5:45 a. m.
, with attendants making patients ready for breakfast, waiting tables, collecting and counting silverware, cleaning wards, and being responsible for patients’ hygiene and entertainment. They were required to be in by 10:00 p. m. , or 11:30 with special permission.
Most slept in the hospital buildings. The institution was not their workplace; it was their residence. The main building was completed between 1880 and 1881, 23 years after the cornerstone was laid. The facade stretches nearly 1,300 feet.
The building has 902 windows. The central tower rises 200 feet; the other four towers rise 150 feet. By most accounts, it is the largest hand-cut sandstone building in North America. By the time it was finished, it had already exceeded its design capacity.
State archives record a population of 717 by 1880. Jacks, based on the hospital’s own reports, gives 491 for that year and describes the institution as overcrowded. Both figures represent two to three times the 250 the building was designed to hold. West Virginia’s response was to build another hospital, beginning work on a second one in Spencer in 1890.
It did not help. The building rarely held the number it was built for. Kirkbride’s design assumed one patient per room, with light, ventilation, and privacy measured per person. Put four people in a room designed for one, and nothing of that remains.
The windows still shed sunlight on four times as many people, and no privacy is left to protect. In August 1899, the institution held more than 1,200 patients and employed fewer than 200 staff, according to contemporary newspapers. Stutters had held the superintendency since June 1897; he was 51. The accusations came from women working in the building.
Somerville testified first. The defense wanted her history. Her lawyer, J. M.
Foster, objected that the superintendent’s conduct, not hers, was the subject of the hearing. The Weston Democrat covered the proceedings. When the hearing resumed, the defense succeeded: private letters Somerville had written to Morris Smith, Stutters’s nephew, were read aloud to the board while she sat in the room. The Democrat described them as passionate love letters.
She remained on the stand until Friday afternoon, when she told the men running the hearing she was too tired to continue. Grace Bossey testified that Stutters won her confidence by telling her he was a Mason. She stated that he later suggested she accompany him on a trip, saying there would be no harm in it unless discovered. Bossey also admitted that part of an earlier affidavit she gave was false, saying she had been pressured to provide it.
She stayed at the hospital afterward because she was poor and needed the work; she later resigned. Alice Kester told the board the superintendent complimented her appearance and once put his arm around her. Alvaretta Wilson testified about the night of April 30, saying Stutters entered her room after she had gone to bed, turned off the electric light, sat on her bed, and tried to hug and kiss her. She said he told her he did not intend to hurt her and that she would lose nothing by becoming his pet.
By the time Wilson testified, she had already filed a lawsuit against him seeking $10,000 in damages. The reviewed records do not show how that suit ended. Then two hospital physicians testified, and the case was no longer just one woman’s word against the superintendent. Dr.
George Snyder, a former assistant physician, told the board about a trip the two men took to a political convention in Buckhannon. Snyder testified that Stutters made an improper remark to him about Somerville and suggested Snyder help arrange a relationship with her. The Weston Democrat reported what Snyder said about the offer: Stutters told him he would pay half a year’s salary for certain privileges with her. Then there was the trip.
In May 1898, Stutters traveled to St. Louis. A ticket agent at the Grafton railroad station testified that he saw Stutters there on May 6, buying Pullman tickets to St. Louis.
At the same window, a mileage book was sold to a woman who claimed her name was Maud Stutters. Dr. Mark Perry, an assistant physician at the hospital, testified about this name. The superintendent’s wife was named Virginia.
There was no woman named Maud Stutters at the institution. Perry and another doctor gave the board another piece of information: a former employee named Harriet Green had been absent from the hospital during those same days. Green denied everything. She testified she had been in Grafton but traveled from there to Washington with her sister.
She denied buying the mileage book, denied using the name Maud Stutters, denied going to St. Louis, and said Stutters had always treated her well. Green and her sister then endured lengthy questioning about Washington—the buildings, parks, monuments, museums—testing whether they had actually visited the places they claimed. Dr.
Louella Ballard, one of the hospital’s two assistant physicians, also testified. She treated Green after a suicide attempt involving a dose of bromochloral. She said she knew no reason for the attempt but had heard rumors about Green and Stutters. She confirmed Perry’s testimony: Green worked the night watch, which she filed her reports in the superintendent’s private office rather than the general office designated for them.
Other employees had commented on how often she filed reports. The defense called hospital employees who said they would not believe Somerville under oath. Some at least admitted their opinions were based on what they had heard from others. The hearing dragged on.
One board member resigned during it, saying he had no patience for the delay. On August 19, the board met in closed session. Lawyers and journalists were barred. The meeting lasted through the morning and afternoon.
The board issued a resolution finding that the prosecution had not proved the charges against W. E. Stutters and acquitted him. Six board members voted for the resolution; one, Alex McPherson Miller, voted against it.
During its deliberations, the board also considered a prosecution request to call O. C. Range, superintendent of the St. Louis asylum, who could have testified about whether a woman had accompanied Stutters in St.
Louis and who she was. The board refused. Its president, Meegan, said both parties were supposed to have presented their strongest cases, and the board was not expected to seek additional evidence that might convict its superintendent. The Wheeling Sunday Register published the decision on August 20 under the headline “The Board Says Not Guilty,” and beneath it posed a question to its readers: was it a just verdict or a whitewash?
Foster, who had spent the week being told his witnesses were liars, told the paper the board had simply carried out the instructions of Governor Atkinson, his superior, and that the investigation had been conducted unfairly and the verdict was not justified by the evidence. Prosecutors told the paper an ordinary jury would have convicted Stutters within 15 minutes. In October of that year, the same board that had acquitted Stutters asked for his resignation. He refused at first, but the board threatened removal.
He submitted his resignation and the board accepted it. Yet he remained in office while the board failed to agree on a successor. At a January 1900 meeting, votes were split: Dr. A.
H. Kunst of Weston received two votes, Stutters received two, and every other candidate received one. The board then voted five to four to postpone selection until April, leaving Stutters in charge of the building. The Weston Independent had lost patience with him, listing him under “Dr.
W. Stutters of Pullman sleeper,” a reference to the train tickets from the St. Louis trip. Stutters finally left on July 1, 1901, when a newly constituted board elected Kunst, nearly two years after his formal acquittal.
Ballard was not reappointed. She married, moved to Maryland, worked on child welfare cases there, and died in 1963. Somerville’s name appears in records after the hearing. One person saw the entire building from the inside and lived long enough to be asked about it.
Mary Ryan began working at Weston in 1882 and stayed for 52 years. In 1934, a newspaper interviewed her. She described the hospital before electricity and before reform, when two or three artificial gas lamps lit an entire ward, and nurses carried candles to inspect patients at night. She worked as a cook, maid, and nurse in six different wards over five decades.
She recalled the restraints—the locks, sleeves, straps, and beds to which patients were tied. She told the paper exactly when that ended: in 1893, a psychiatrist from Ohio named Crumbacher became superintendent and abolished those methods. His instructions were that when a person became violent, someone should sit with them and hold them. Twenty-nine years after the hospital opened, someone decided a nurse’s hands could do the work the straps had been doing.
By the end of her service, Ryan cared for a ward of 38 elderly women. The paper recorded why they were there: every one of those 38 had been cured of her mental disorder. They had been in the hospital so long they had no families left to return to. The hospital had admitted patients faster than it discharged them, and those it did not discharge, it kept until there was nowhere else for them to go.
In 1913, the legislature renamed the hospital Weston State Hospital. Fourteen years later, the state held another hearing. In 1927, a 38-year-old woman from Vermont died at Weston after 48 hours there. Records refer to her as Mrs.
Hoffmann. Her mental disorder began after attending a religious service in which she believed she was the Virgin Mary. She was taken to a hospital in Vermont, where she was given morphine. She arrived at Weston heavily sedated and became violent during admission.
Staff restrained her, tying her sleeves and ankle stockings to the bed and covering her with a sheet. She died within two days. The subsequent hearing revealed staff shortages: only three physicians for 1,300 patients in the wards, and three attendants for every 65 patients. Superintendent Dr.
G. J. Petit defended the use of restraints, saying they were necessary to prevent injury to the patient and protect the attendants. He then described the alternatives available at the hospital.
These included the continuous bath, in which the patient was submerged from the neck down, a procedure Petit testified could last up to 10 hours. Jacks describes the equipment: a patient placed in a suspended hammock inside a bathtub, with a canvas sheet secured at the top to prevent escape. Sometimes the patient’s eyes and ears were bandaged, sometimes an ice cap was placed on the head. There was the needle shower, with water at up to 40 pounds of pressure and as cold as 50 degrees for one to two minutes.
There were wet packs: patients wrapped tightly in sheets wet with cold or warm water and left wrapped for hours, sometimes days. These were the alternatives to restraint, listed by the hospital’s own superintendent in his defense at a hearing about a death. Witnesses at the hearing described bruises on Mrs. Hoffmann’s body and noted that she had asked to have her restraints loosened.
The hearing concluded the hospital bore no responsibility for her death, suggesting the morphine injection she received in Vermont was the likely cause. A woman entered a state hospital and died within 48 hours, and the panel found nothing that happened inside the building contributed to her death. On October 3, 1935, around 10:00 a. m.
, a fire broke out in the main building. It was set by an 18-year-old patient who confessed. He said he had started a small fire with some papers on the unoccupied fourth floor of the south wing. The flames spread to six wards, destroyed the slate roof, and collapsed the dome.
Fire companies from eight neighboring towns rushed to Weston. Attendants evacuated the patients, and no lives were lost. Fire Chief Gary Marsh climbed a ladder to the fourth floor and brought out a patient trapped there. Governor Herman Guy Kump was attending a forest festival in Elkins when word reached him; he left for the scene.
Patients were temporarily housed at Camp Jackson’s Mill 4-H while the state studied its options. President Roosevelt announced $115,000 in Works Progress Administration funds to rebuild. The building was restored and remained in use for nearly another 60 years. The restoration also gave the hospital a measure it had never had before: a way to evaluate its own performance.
The burned section became Ward 6. It was rebuilt, clean, warm, lit, and properly furnished. After 1935, anyone walking through the building could see the difference: on one side, the ward the federal government had just paid to rebuild, and on the other, the wards the federal government had not. Three years later, a survey commission came to inspect.
The 1938 report, prepared by a commission formed by a group of North American medical organizations, found a shortage of beds and outdated facilities. It also recorded who was in the building: people with epilepsy, alcoholics, drug addicts, and people the report described as “uneducable mental defectives,” a 1938 term for anyone with an intellectual disability for whom the state had no other plan. The population that year was 1,661. Eleven years later, a newspaper walked the wards.
In 1949, the Charleston Gazette published a series of reports on conditions inside Weston State Hospital. Reporters found poor sanitation, and a shortage of furniture, lighting, and heating throughout most of the complex. There was one exception in the entire building: Ward 6. The ward rebuilt after the fire was in relatively good condition.
It was the clearest available evidence that the rest of the building did not have to be the way it was. The hospital admitted more than 1,800 people that year. After the Gazette series, some renovations were done. Staff conditions were no better.
Before 1948, an attendant at Weston worked 12-hour shifts, from 6:30 a. m. to 6:30 p. m.
, with very few days off and very little pay. Jacks records what followed. By 1950, one of the institution’s biggest problems was retaining male attendants. Turnover in the men’s wards was an ongoing crisis.
If experienced staff kept leaving, the person supervising 60 or 70 new patients was often hardly trained themselves: underpaid, undertrained, working 12-hour shifts, responsible for more patients than anyone could reasonably care for. In such a ward, things go wrong without anyone meaning them to. The hospital’s 16th report, covering 1948 to 1951, is the clearest surviving record of who was inside. Many patients had schizophrenia.
Many had what the report called manic-depression, now known as bipolar disorder. A large number had intellectual disabilities. Many were there for alcoholism and drug addiction. Four completely different groups of people needing four completely different services, confined in one building under a staff that could not keep its workers.
In the 1950s, it peaked. The West Virginia Center for the History of the Region puts the number at 2,400 patients in a building designed for 250. Jacks counts more than 2,300; some accounts reach 2,600. Even taking the lowest figure, that is more than nine times the number the building was designed to hold.
The wards are fixed, and the rooms are fixed. The sandstone does not stretch. So additional patients move into occupied rooms, then into rooms with two people, then beds are placed in the larger rooms meant for recreation. After a point, beds run out, and patients sleep in shifts on the same bed.
The 16th report itself stated that the hospital’s official capacity was 1,250 beds, with a census of 2,007—acknowledging it held 757 more people than its capacity. The same report noted people still on waiting lists, held in jails while they waited. West Virginia built this hospital so the mentally ill would not have to stay in jails. Ninety years later, they were back in jails, waiting for a bed.
The historical nomination describes what followed in bureaucratic language: overcrowding, a growing orientation toward maintenance rather than rehabilitation, a chronic lack of funding, and then one line: new buildings are filled as soon as they are completed. That is the whole mechanism in one sentence. West Virginia could supply more beds, but it could not, or would not, limit how many people were committed to them. In the summer of 1952, a doctor from Washington arrived with a proposal to solve the overcrowding in mental hospitals.
His name was Walter Freeman, and he had already transformed American psychiatry. In 1936, with surgeon James Watts, Freeman brought a Portuguese brain surgery to the United States and renamed it. Egas Moniz had called it leucotomy; Freeman called it lobotomy. Over the next decade, the two men performed hundreds of operations.
In 1946, Freeman simplified the procedure. The transorbital lobotomy, in his view, required no operating room and no surgical training. The instrument was called an orbitoclast, resembling an ice pick, the name most people remember. It was inserted under the upper eyelid, tapped through the bone into the skull cavity with a mallet, then moved back and forth to sever connections between the thinking and emotional regions of the brain.
The whole thing took minutes. Speed was the point, and Freeman was explicit about why: his stated goal was to relieve the overcrowding of mental hospitals and the financial burden that overcrowding placed on the states. Compare that with everything heard about Weston, and the fit is exact. West Virginia had four state mental hospitals.
It had more patients than it could accommodate. It had a legislature that could not fund the buildings it already owned. Freeman was based in Washington, D. C.
, a few hours away by car. The first lobotomy in West Virginia was performed in January 1948. In the summer of 1952, Freeman launched the West Virginia lobotomy project. He did so with the approval of the state Board of Control, the body overseeing mental health protocols.
The stated purpose was research: comparing patients who had received lobotomies with matched individuals who had not, measuring how well the operation worked. Between 1952 and 1955, 787 West Virginians received lobotomies. The operations were performed at the four state mental hospitals: Huntington, Spencer, Weston, and Lakin, the state hospital solely for Black patients. Freeman traveled back and forth from Washington and performed most, possibly all, of the operations himself.
Adding those operated on before 1952 brings the total to about 900 state residents, the highest per capita of any state in the country. Many of these patients did not consent to the surgery. The West Virginia Encyclopedia’s account of the project is precise about the outcome. The lobotomy was a palliative procedure.
Sometimes it made difficult-to-control patients calm enough to allow discharge. Spencer’s phrasing about the cost delivers its verdict obliquely: “a comparable blunting of will and abstract thought and personality. ” That was the trade the state made. A person returned home, but the part of them that wanted things, connected ideas, and formed a personality did not return with them.
Why West Virginians specifically? The encyclopedia says clearly it is unclear, then lists likely contributing factors: enough patients, a sympathetic and financially burdened state government, proximity to Freeman’s Washington base, and laws in other states that limited his work there. Each was a fact about the state. None was a fact about the patients.
The project ended in 1955. It did not end because any authority stopped it on principle. Psychiatric drugs appeared in the middle of that decade. Long-term studies began to undermine Freeman’s claims about how well the operation worked.
None of the 787 patients is named in the sources recording the project. What followed the drugs was a gradual draining. During the 1960s and 1970s, West Virginia moved toward community mental health services like the rest of the country. Patients who would once have been sent to Weston were treated near their homes, and the building’s population declined.
But the decline did not improve conditions inside. In 1985, the Charleston Gazette returned to the hospital, this time with court-appointed inspectors. They described it as dirty and neglected, reporting patients held in filthy wards, bathrooms stained with feces, and many patients left naked. These inspections were conducted in 1985, not 1885.
In February 1986, Governor Arch Moore announced its dissolution, proposing to convert Weston State Hospital into a prison and build a new mental health facility in Jane Lew. Work began on the prison conversion but was never completed; the plan faded after a series of court battles and petitions. In the middle of all this, in the fall of 1988, a patient arrived at Weston whose name people outside West Virginia knew: Daniel Johnston, a singer-songwriter and artist from West Virginia. He was admitted by court order.
He had stopped taking his medication and believed he was casting evil spirits out of a woman. She jumped out a window and suffered multiple fractures. Spin magazine interviewed him inside the hospital in October 1988, publishing a profile the following March. He had been there about two months by then.
Johnston sent the magazine a tape from inside the building. His self-introduction on the tape is worth hearing: “This is a message from Daniel Dale Johnston. ” Artist, cartoonist, singer, songwriter, a man in a state hospital in Weston, describing himself by what he made. There is a debate behind all of this, and it is the reason people search for places like Weston.
When the state hospitals closed, where did the people go? Jacks takes this question seriously at the end of her study, tracing deinstitutionalization to its documented consequences in West Virginia, including two measurable results: the number of mentally ill among the homeless, and the number held in prisons. This is not a justification for reopening such a building, and nothing in the source justifies that. Still, it is worth noting the common thread between the beginning and end of the story.
Weston was built in 1858 because the mentally ill were sitting in jails with nowhere to put them. When the hospital was overcrowded in 2007, West Virginians were still waiting in jails for beds. When the hospital finally closed, jails again became part of the answer for these patients. The building changed: opened, filled, overflowed, then was emptied and closed.
Jails were present on both sides throughout. Weston State Hospital closed in May 1994. Patients were transferred to a new facility, William R. Sharpe Jr.
Hospital, a $27 million building named after a West Virginia legislator. By that time, the main building had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990, the highest classification the federal government gives buildings. During its final four years, Weston State Hospital was a protected national treasure. It was also a place West Virginia was trying to empty.
For 13 years after its closure, the building stood above the West Fork River with no patients inside. It was not entirely left alone. In June 1999, a group of city, county, and state police officers, off duty, entered the empty building to play paintball. They damaged all four floors, including hand-carved walnut woodwork, light fixtures, and a mural in the hall.
Three officers were fired for it. Then the state sold it. On August 29, 2007, the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources auctioned the building publicly. The bidding opened at $500,000, and Joe Jordan, an asbestos demolition contractor from Morgantown, won it: 242,000 square feet of building.
Jordan changed the name. It was no longer Weston State Hospital, the name it had carried through 81 years of housing patients, but back to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, the name from the 1858 legislation, before any patient entered it. Tours began in 2008 and continue today. Some are historical, with guides taking visitors through the first floor, staff apartments, the morgue, and the operating room.
There are rooms with paintings, poems, and drawings made by patients in art therapy programs, along with a straitjacket. There is a hydrotherapy tub of the type Dr. Petit described at the 1927 hearing. Some tours are ghost tours.
There is no debate about that: a 242,000-square-foot building must cover its heating costs somehow, and proceeds from evening ghost-hunting tours help keep a roof over the art made by those patients. But it is worth stating plainly what the two tours actually offer in the same building on the same day. One tells the history of what West Virginia did to roughly 2,400 people. The other offers an entertainment narrative about their deaths.
This brings us back to Mary Somerville. Everything ever recorded about her could be summarized in one paragraph: her commitment to the Grafton asylum around 1896, her recovery, her work in the storehouse, her oath before a crowd of men, a question about her marriage, her private letters read aloud while she sat there, and her judgment against the superintendent. She is one of the few patients in this story whose words survive. The others are a man selling Coca-Cola at a football game, and a songwriter on a cassette tape ninety years later.
Not because those three were the only ones with anything to say, but because each happened to end up in front of someone whose job it was to write things down. The rest of the people in that building have only numbers: a line in the admission register with a cause beside it, like “reading novels, grief, women. ” The 787 who received lobotomies have only a number and a date range. There are three cemeteries on that land.
The building still stands, 1,300 feet of hand-cut sandstone, with 902 windows. People pay money to walk through it at night looking for ghosts. There are about 2,400 answers to who those ghosts are, and barely a name for any of them in the record.