Happy Ghost Hunting

Every year, people of all ages dress up and door to door saying, "trick or treat!" Some, go to haunted houses, or corn mazes, and others.....to insane asylums. I asked Kim Riggin, a psychology major graduating in 2015, about her trip to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. "It was creepy!" she says. The asylum was open in the mid-1800's and holds a plethora of historical information from Civil War raids to being the largest hand-cut stone masonry building in North America. Located in Weston, WV; not too far from our little town of Frostburg.

Originally designed to house only 250 patients when the doors opened, in 1864, the premises boasted 2,500 patients by the 1950's. Patients were routinely subjected to ill treatment and children as young as four years old had procedures called lobotomies performed. The most common form of the lobotomy is probably the ice pick lobotomy; invented by Walter Freeman. He would drive an icepick above the eye of a patient and get the same results of the labor-intensive surgical method developed by Antonio Moniz.

Kim went on to describe how haunted this asylum really was, "There is this window that you can through and sometimes there is a face looking back, they put chairs stacked and than leave the room and they will be unstacked and in a circle. They throw a ball and a little girl throws it back. footsteps can be heard in the hallway." This is on place I will definitely be staying away from on Halloween!

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/lobotomy.html

http://trans-alleghenylunaticasylum.com/index.html