GHOSTS IN THE ASYLUM
This article is from author John Kachuba. John has written several books on ghost hunting ("Ghosthunting Ohio" and “Ghosthunting Illinois" from Clerisy Press) and has sent us this story from his book called “Ghosthunters: On the Trail of Mediums, Dowsers, Spirit Seekers and Other Investigators of America's Paranormal World”. This is a great story and we think that you’ll enjoy it.
Check up on John through his MySpace page.(myspace.com/johnkachuba) You can find out more about John, this book and other books from him.
Ghosts in the Asylum
There are many spooky stories about Athens, Ohio, a place the British Society for Psychical Research recognizes as one of the most haunted places in the world, and a community profiled on Fox Family Channel’s World’s Scariest Places. Modern psychic researchers believe that the Athens area contains an extremely active vortex, that is, a portal between our world and the spirit world that allows spirits to easily travel between these realms. The Shawnee and ancient Native peoples before them knew the area as a center of strong energy, a place in which the spirits dwelt. For centuries, Native shamans and healers sought guidance and inspiration from the spirits here, especially those atop Mount Nebo, the highest peak in the region, just over 1,000 feet high. In the nineteenth century, an internationally renowned Spiritualist center was located upon Mount Nebo. There could be no better town for a ghost hunter to call home.
From the balcony of my apartment in Athens, I can see the twin Gothic towers of The Ridges rising above the trees on the other side of the Hocking River. The Ridges is the popular name given to the sprawling institution that was founded as the Athens Lunatic Asylum in 1874, and is now owned by Ohio University. At its peak in 1953, the asylum sheltered 1,749 patients and was comprised of 78 buildings spread over more than 1,000 acres. The hospital was mostly self-sufficient and had its own dairy, greenhouses, gardens, vineyards, and even a piggery.
Now it has ghosts.
The story most often told about The Ridges concerns the eerie figure of a woman imprinted upon the floor in one of the old abandoned wards, a woman who died there in 1978 under tragic and weird circumstances.
In the 1970s, the institution was known as the Athens Mental Health and Retardation Center and reflected the many advances in mental health care that had come about since the hospital’s founding one hundred years before. As a result of these advances, including new pharmaceuticals that allowed many patients to function in society, the huge buildings began to empty out. Many wards stood empty and abandoned.
On December 1, 1978, a 54-year old patient who had the privilege of leaving the grounds as long as she returned in the evening went missing. After an intensive three-day hunt and a week long follow-up search, the woman had not turned up. Six weeks later, a maintenance man found the woman’s body in a sunlit room on an abandoned third-floor ward. She was lying naked on the cement floor beneath tall windows, arms crossed and legs composed as if she had deliberately settled herself in that posture. Some accounts say that her clothes were found neatly folded in a pile on the window sill, others that she had dropped her clothes piece by piece out the window in an attempt to attract attention to her predicament, which was that she had become accidentally locked inside the abandoned ward. The coroner listed the cause of death as heart failure.
The woman’s death is strange, but what is even stranger is the impression she left upon the floor. When her body was removed, a stain was left behind that clearly depicts her body. It is believed to have been created by the interaction of her own bodily chemicals with the bright sunlight that streamed through the windows during the weeks that she remained undiscovered. Maintenance workers say that trying to scrub the stain out of the cement only darkens it.
I had heard ridiculous tales of a curse attached to anyone who dared to touch the woman’s image, including the story of an Ohio University co-ed who hung herself in her dorm after touching the figure. A newspaper reporter broke the news of her death to the astonished co-ed during an interview a few years after her supposed suicide. Despite the silly stories about the unfortunate patient, I snapped a photo of her image during a nocturnal ghost investigation at The Ridges conducted by the Ohio Exploration Society.
The ghosthunters had been invited to The Ridges by Barrett Skrypeck, a fine arts graduate student and teaching associate at Ohio University. I first met Barrett after I sent an email to the university’s fine arts department, looking for artists to convert my rusted-out 1987 Buick Skyhawk into a Ghosthuntermobile. Such a car would be a unique way to advertise my books, I thought, and I wasn’t risking much with my old clunker. Barrett and a team of a half-dozen or so fine arts grad students went to work on the car and painted it all over with ghosts, demons, gravestones, haunted houses, and other assorted paranormal symbols.
The grad students’ studios were located on an upper floor of The Ridges, in what had been one of the hospital wards. The university could not afford to renovate the floor so maintenance men simply moved the hospital furniture out and let the artists in. Reminders of the patients who had once lived there were everywhere, especially in the religious and profane graffiti they had scratched into the exterior windowsills as they gazed out at the world, wishing for wings. Barrett’s studio, like most of the others, was a cramped, airless space that had been a patient’s room. His artwork covered the walls and every available inch of surface area was filled with art supplies.
Barrett had called the Ohio Exploration Society because of the ghosts roaming the decrepit halls of The Ridges.
“Several times, I’ve been sitting in my studio and, out of the corner of my eye, I’ll see a figure glide past the door,” Barrett told me. “When I get up to see who it is, no one is there.”
The final-straw ghost for Barrett was the one he saw in the men’s room. As he entered the lavatory he saw a man in a black coat reflected in the long mirror above the sinks. The position of the image in the mirror indicated that the man was already in the restroom, but when Barrett entered, he found himself alone in the room. The man could not have left the room without Barrett’s knowledge since there was only one door and Barrett had just come in through it.
“I got the hell out of there quick,” Barrett said.
As you can imagine, I accepted Barrett’s invitation to join the investigation in a heartbeat.
I arrived early at The Ridges the night of the investigation. Standing outside the locked doors I looked up and saw the lights on in the tower windows where the studios were located. Against the night sky the shadowed turret with its lighted windows looked like something out of an old Dracula movie. The Ridges is an isolated complex, cut off from the rest of the university by the river and the high ridge itself, so the parking lot was empty, except for my Ghosthuntermobile. It was a moonless night and if anyone, or anything, was waiting in the shadows beneath the towers, I couldn’t tell.
After a few minutes, a car pulled up and three men and a woman got out and approached me. This was the Ohio Exploration Society, headed by Jason Robinson. The other investigators were Jason Colwell, Misty Jones, and Abraham Bartlett. They were all, I guessed, in their mid-to-late twenties and had driven down from Columbus. I was particularly pleased when they showed me the copy of Ghosthunting Ohio that they had in the car and had been reading on their way to Athens. Since they didn’t know I would be at the investigation, they weren’t simply trying to impress me by reading my book; I loved these guys.
Barrettt arrived, along with his wife Becky, and Howie* from the university’s maintenance department, who would act as something of a guide for our group and would unlock doors that weren’t supposed to be unlocked. We all headed upstairs to the artists’ studios.
The OES crew, each of them wearing shirts emblazoned with the group’s name and logo, assembled their equipment on a table in an area the students had set up as a makeshift lounge. The room was done up in a Modern Goodwill motif and furnished with hideous orange upholstered chairs oozing their stuffing out of various rips and tears, an old battered TV, a small bookcase, and a weird assortment of decorative items hanging on the walls, including a collection of different colored teddy bears and the naked torso of a doll, whose face had been garishly painted a la KISS’s Gene Simmons and whose chest bore a crude pentacle. Artists, I thought, go figure.
The lounge was situated in one of the building’s towers and it was through its long narrow windows that I had seen the light from down below. Unlike the rest of us, Howie was an Athens native and had actually known some of the patients who were housed in the building when it was in use as a hospital. He was decked out in a ball cap, denim jacket, and jeans with a silver belt buckle the size of a dinner plate.
“This area right here,” he said, “used to be the patient’s day room. You could see them looking out the windows, just wandering around here. I knew one of them, a family friend, maybe a distant relative, I don’t know, named Hazel. My family used to visit her and I’d come along.”
Howie walked over to the window and stood looking out at the parking lot down below, washed in yellow light from a single lamppost. He jingled the large ring of keys he wore on his belt, and then turned back to us.
“Hazel died several years ago, but she’s never left this building. I know. I’ve seen her. Sometimes I’d be working outside and I’ll look up and there she is, big as life, standing behind the windows, watching me.”
“How do you know it was Hazel and not one of the artists?” I asked.
“Well, first it’s because I knew her. I know what she looks like. Second, she was a different lady. Large. Red hair. She stood out in a crowd.”
“Did you ever see her inside the building?” I said.
“Yes,” Howie said, “I saw her standing in the doorway to what used to be the patient’s activities room, wearing a yellow dress. There’s plenty going on here, I’ll tell you. Late at night, I’ll be here by myself and I’ll hear doors opening and closing, footsteps, that kind of thing. And I don’t drink on the job,” Howie added, even though I hadn’t asked.
The OES investigators had unpacked their equipment and had laid it all out on the table. Jason Robinson explained to me how his group would conduct its investigation. A tall thin guy wearing an OES t-shirt and navy ball cap turned backwards, Jason held a video camcorder in his hand while he spoke.
“First, we’ll walk through the building and get an idea of its layout. We especially want to see the areas where people have reported something happening. Then we’ll set up a few cameras on tripods in those areas and run tape for a while, see what happens. We’ll also leave some tape recorders in other areas and see if we can pick up any EVPs.” I had done my homework and knew that EVPs were electronic voice phenomena, recordings of voices, supposedly spirit voices that were captured on tape although inaudible to the people in the room at that time. “Every so often, we’ll go around and check out the equipment, make sure everything is running right,” Jason said.
As we stood talking, I noticed that more people were congregating in the lounge. Some of the other artists whose studios were in the building had joined us, accompanied by friends they had invited along. There were close to two-dozen people now. Some of them were sipping beer, a commodity easily found among the artists. The investigation was rapidly taking on the complexion of a frat party.
“A lot of people,” I said to Jason. “Will that affect your investigation?”
He frowned. “It might, but it’s a big building. Maybe if we split up, it might work out better.”
It seemed, however, that everyone wanted to go along on the initial tour led by Howie. I couldn’t blame them since the abandoned wards of the hospital were off limits to the public, yet were the source of much local speculation about ghosts. There was no way, however, that any respectable ghost would put in an appearance as this rowdy, beer-swilling circus tromped through the dark and dusty halls.
The OES team, to their credit, remained aloof to the shenanigans of the others and tried their best to conduct a serious investigation. For my part, whenever Howie led us into yet another gloomy hall, I separated myself from the others as best I could in order to soak up as much of the environment as possible. This had been my modus operandi in countless other visits to haunted locations, simply to find a quiet place where I could be alone, open and receptive to whatever may reside in that place. It wasn’t easy to employ that method that night, but I tried.
I wandered in and out of dark rooms without a flashlight and wondered what had taken place in them. Had they been patients’ rooms. Were they treatment rooms? Nurses’ stations? Most of the furnishings were long gone, but every so often, I would stumble across an old chair, cabinet, or other small piece of furniture. I could hear the others walking in the hall, sometimes see the beams of their flashlights bouncing over the floor, as I stood quietly in a room, waiting. No positive emotions emanated from that place. Locked in their dementia, these poor patients had suffered. Hundreds of them lay buried in two cemeteries on the hospital’s grounds, many of them beneath stone markers that bore only a number. The reason for this anonymity seems to have been to spare family members the indignity and embarrassment of publicly revealing that a relative had been committed to the Lunatic Asylum. It was sad to think that these people, who suffered in life through no fault of their own and endured horrific “treatments” in an attempt to cure them of their maladies, would lie beneath the green grass still spurned by humanity. If ever there were a place where lost souls clamored for recognition, for dignity, for peace, it was those cemeteries.
I could hear the voices of the others growing fainter, so I trailed behind them as Howie led us all up a flight of stairs to the ward in which the woman had died in 1978. We entered the small room where the body had been found and I wondered once again how it was that she was unable to make her presence known through the tall windows to rescuers outside. The thought struck me that perhaps she wasn’t looking to be saved. Maybe it was simply her time to die and she knew it. Accepted it. Flashlights played across her image, still clearly visible upon the dusty concrete floor; the OES team shot some video and still photography.
Howie took us up to the attic. The space below the sloping roof of the building was enormous and was divided into several large rooms, separated by brick walls. Arched doorways led from one room into another. Oddly, the floor was covered with a layer of soft dirt, rather than dust and none of us, Howie included, could account for its origin. We wandered around in the attic, poking into nooks and little rooms. The usual wiring and ductwork typical of an institutional building snaked through the attic, but there was nothing else up there. Jason’s flashlight did find evidence that someone had discovered the attic a long time ago. As he entered another long room, the light picked up some graffiti spray-painted on the brick wall in two-feet high letters. The graffiti read: July 11.1960 Kennedy for President. I had been only ten years old when some unknown Democrat painted the slogan in the attic. Where no one would ever see it.
From the attic we walked all the way down to the basement, a dark and dirty warren of rooms and tunnels. After so much trekking through the building, the most boisterous of the group were starting to flag and some had broken off from the group to find their way back to the comfort of the artists’ lounge. The remainder of us explored the basement, probing through piles of old junk, including sections of the hospital’s original wrought iron fences and gates. In a tiny brick room Howie showed us a cistern in which he said one of the doctors had kept a pet alligator. Howie didn’t know why.
We emerged from the basement and went back upstairs to the artists’ studios. There, the OES team decided where they would place their cameras and tape recorders. They set up a video camera on a tripod in a section of abandoned offices, and another in an ominous room on the same floor as the studios, a room in which blue ceramic tiles completely covered the walls. Drains were set in the floor. Metal jets protruded from the walls, maybe for gas or oxygen, no one knew. The room reminded me of an old-fashioned surgical suite, but it could just as easily have been a kitchen. A couple people in the group said that they felt some sort of “presence” in that room. Another camera and tape recorder were set up in the lavatory where Barrett had seen his ghost.
Then we waited. This is one aspect of ghosthunting that none of the popular television programs about ghosthunters ever seem to show—the boring wait for something to happen. Often, nothing ever does happen. Ghosthunters live for the momentary glimpse of something unusual on a video monitor, or for a few seconds of unidentifiable sound on a tape recording and it can take many hours of investigation to produce those few results. Ghosts don’t respond well to command performances and are notorious for making themselves known when all the cameras, tape recorders, and other monitoring equipment are already turned off or removed. Still, it is quite a rush when something does make itself known.
Every now and then, Jason or one of the members of his team would make the rounds and check the equipment. Sometimes, they would take still photos as they went. I accompanied Jason and Abe Bartlett on one such check. I asked them how often they had encountered ghosts on their investigations and, while they admitted that it was pretty unusual to actually see an apparition, they had collected a good number of EVPs from some of the places they had investigated. Although a relatively new group, the Ohio Exploration Society had already conducted investigations into dozens of haunted cemeteries, houses, hospitals, restaurants, Native American burial mounds (fairly common in Ohio), schools, and other assorted haunts.
Nothing unusual happened that night at The Ridges. The partygoers quickly tired of the whole thing and left, no doubt seeking the livelier haunts of the Court Street bars catering to Ohio University students. That left Barrett and Becky, Howie, a couple of diehard artists, the OES team, and myself to close down the investigation. Around 1 a.m. we packed up the equipment and called it a night.
It takes quite awhile for an investigative team to analyze the film, photos, and tape recordings that are made during the investigation, so it was a couple weeks before I again heard from Jason. Apparently, I had been wrong in thinking that nothing had happened that night. Although we never felt their presence, the ghosts of The Ridges certainly knew we were there and did their best to communicate with us. The OES team had recorded two EVPs. In a room that had formerly been a padded cell, Jason recorded someone yelling on his digital audio recorder. As the group came up from the basement Misty Jones’ micro-cassette recorder picked up a whispered voice saying, Would you help us?
Who are these ghosts? How can they be helped? After all those poor spirits endured when they were flesh and blood, it would be a blessing if someone could reach them and set them free.
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