The number that matters is not a ghost story. The building at Weston was designed to hold about 250 patients. By the 1950s it held more than 2,400. Almost everything people find unsettling about the place follows from that one fact rather than from anything supernatural.
It was built between 1858 and 1881 and took patients from 1864, designed by Richard Snowden Andrews of Baltimore on the Kirkbride plan. Thomas Kirkbride's idea was that the architecture itself could treat people: long wings set in a staggered line so that every ward got sunlight and moving air, with grounds to walk in. It was a humane theory, and the result is a serious piece of Gothic and Tudor Revival building. It is the largest hand cut stone masonry building in North America, and the property it stands on ran to 269 acres across the West Fork River from the town.
The theory only holds while the numbers hold. At close to ten times its intended population, wards meant to give each patient light and space became something else, and the institution ran that way for decades. It closed in 1994.
It has carried several names: the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane, then Weston State Hospital, and now the older name again. It was made a National Historic Landmark on 21 June 1990, which is worth knowing because it is the reason a building this expensive to keep was not simply pulled down, as most Kirkbride hospitals were.
It reopened in March 2008 and is run as a museum. Heritage and history tours run in daylight; ghost tours, flashlight tours and overnight events are booked separately. Take the history one at least once. The corridors are far stranger when you know what they were for.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
