St. Albans Sanatorium

ST. ALBANS SANATORIUM – RADFORD, VIRGINIA

Where pain and torment are experienced on a daily basis, ghosts are sure to dwell. And few places are as acutely stained with agony as old mental hospitals. That’s because both their facilities and staff left much to be desired.

In the 1900s, the mentally ill were basically lab rats for doctors, who were more than eager to test out experimental procedures on them. As a result, the dead usually outnumbered the living in early sanatoriums.

Those who weren’t killed during some pilot medical trial usually just chose to off themselves, so depressing were hospital environments. Thus, many of these old mental institutions are rumored to be haunted.

But only one has beaten out other types of paranormally busy sites (such as cemeteries and battlefields) to become known as the “most active location on the east coast” — St. Albans Sanatorium. The hospital’s haunted story begins before it was even built.

Think you’re brave enough to explore the most haunted hospital in America? Book a ghost tour with Colonial Ghosts and find out!

Is St. Albans Sanatorium the most haunted hospital in Virginia?

Deep in Virginia, there’s a place where the screams of the past still echo through the halls. St. Albans Sanatorium, once a mental hospital, has become infamous for its ghostly activity.

Patients who suffered from torment and mistreatment may still be trapped here, their spirits unable to move on. Visitors claim to hear disembodied voices whispering in the dark, see objects moving on their own, and feel an overwhelming sense of dread as they walk through its abandoned rooms.

Now a paranormal hotbed, investigators have flocked to this haunted sanatorium to uncover the truth. What terrifying encounters have they experienced? What spirits still linger in these decaying halls?

Virginia has a long and chilling haunted history, but this Radford asylum might just be the most haunted hospital in America. Read more to find out what lurks within its walls…

Echoes of the Past

St. Albans Sanatorium is located in Radford, Virginia. During the 1700s, the city’s close proximity to the New River Watershed attracted Native Americans and early European settlers alike. Competition over the area resulted in hostilities between the two groups.

In July 1755, a group of Shawnee Indians brought tensions to a climax. They attacked and looted the colonists of Draper’s Meadow, killing at least five people and taking others as hostage.

To survivors, the Shawnee left behind grisly reminders of their wrath. The Lybrook couple, for instance, was presented with a bag containing the decapitated head of Philip Barger.

Mary Draper Ingles was one of those held for ransom at the Shawnee town of Sonnontio. Before she was taken prisoner, Mary first had to witness the gruesome deaths of her fellow colonists, including her mother and sister-in-law’s baby. Though there are variations in what she saw, all accounts are extremely bloody:

“Eleanor Draper was tomahawked and scalped. Betty Draper’s infant child was brained against the side of one of the cabins…”

Mary’s Escape

Mary eventually managed to flee from Sonnontio, but her journey back home was not an easy one. Some sources say that she was forced to abandon the baby she’d given birth to during her captivity.

Others claim that her fellow escapee, a German woman, attempted to eat her twice, so hungry were the pair during their forty-three day, one-thousand mile trek.

The horrors Mary Draper Ingles faced during the Drapers Meadow Massacre are the first to contribute to St. Albans Sanatorium’s scary past. Next up are what soldiers endured during one of the Civil War’s most violent battles, the Battle of Cloyd’s Mountain.

According to St. Albans, “Union artillery bombarded the settlement of Central Depot from the ridge where St. Albans stands today.” This explains why many people who have visited the building report of hearing rifle shots, smelling gun smoke, and seeing spectral mists rise from the hospital’s surrounding grounds.

The Early Years of the Haunted Sanatorium

St. Albans Sanatorium was constructed in 1892, though it first functioned as a Lutheran Boys School. Unfortunately for George W. Miles, the man behind the school’s inception, students were a far cry from the “future southern gentlemen” he had envisioned.

As Headmaster, Miles demanded boys to perform well in classrooms and on sports fields. To meet such high expectations, many would turn to extreme methods. St. Albans thus “quickly developed a reputation for being a rough and competitive school where bullying was not only condoned, it was encouraged.”

Heated athletic rivalries may have allowed St. Albans to secure numerous football championships, but they also made homicides and suicides frequent occurrences on campus.

After Miles’ death in 1903, enrollment at St. Albans quickly fell, and so it closed eight years later. In 1916, Dr. John C. King acquired the property to now fulfill his vision: introducing the nation’s first top-notch psychiatric hospital.

The Horrors in this Radford Asylum

Unhappy with the conditions at the Southwestern Lunatic Asylum during his stint as superintendent, Dr. King wanted to open an institution where patients would be both well treated and well accommodated. Thus, he made several renovations to the school’s remnants, even adding a farm to the property in order to give patients a proper place to exercise and play.

Unfortunately, just as Miles’ school didn’t produce the “gentlemen” he’d wanted, neither would King’s St. Albans Sanatorium deliver his goal of high recoveries.

The history of psychiatric treatment methods during the 1900s is a story of failures replacing failures. Insulin-induced comas and lobotomies would leave patients either brain dead or really dead, for example. These procedures were also very labor intensive, and St. Alban’s staff-to-patient ratio in 1945 was a sad 48 to 6509.

When cutting people’s skulls open proved ineffective, doctors opted to simply shock them to their senses. Schizophrenics, for instance, were given electroconvulsive therapy, which was deemed safer than insulin coma therapy.

Still, ECT had many possible dangerous aftereffects, including “fractures, severe memory loss, and spontaneous seizures.”

The Walls of Terror

Some of Radford asylum’s most active rooms are where hydrotherapies were conducted. A hydrotherapy session didn’t always involve a brief, relaxing soak in the bathtub.

Patients who weren’t mummified in icy cold towels were strapped into steaming water vats, where they lay immobile and confined for days. Others were “blasted with water from a fire hose.” No wonder one of these rooms is now known as the Suicide Bathroom.

There are many other rooms in this haunted sanatorium that are paranormally hot. The Bowling Alley in the basement, for instance, is known to be haunted by two female spirits: “Allie” and Gina Renee Hall.

Allie is rumored to be the young daughter of one of the hospital’s patients, and Gina was a woman who was murdered on June 28, 1980 somewhere close to St. Albans Sanatorium, along Hazel Hollow Road.

St. Albans Sanatorium: A Paranormal Hotspot

In the 1990s, the Carilion Health System acquired St. Albans Sanatorium, but vacated the property in 2003 (perhaps ghosts drove them out?). After a brief stint as an abandoned “site of theft, vandalism, and late-night parties,” St. Albans got the attention of Tim Gregory, a previous patient at the hospital.

As the property’s new owner, he made it his mission to renovate its remaining buildings and transform it into “a Research and Enlightenment Center.”

Today, to fund these efforts, he hosts “a number of macabre events” at St. Albans Sanatorium, including an annual Haunted House Halloween extravaganza. As guests roam through the building, they encounter zombies and mental patients, but can’t always be sure if they are staged or real.

Both private and public ghost hunts are also held at St. Albans Sanatorium. They are conducted and led by teams of paranormal experts, such as 3:33 AM Paranormal and Seven Hills Paranormal.

During a visit in 2011, 3:33 AM Paranormal recorded a ghost whispering what sounds like “Deborah” in the infamous Electroshock Therapy Room.

Black Raven Paranormal, in search of a new fascinating case, stopped by St. Albans Sanatorium in 2013.

In the small bathroom located in the women’s ward (the aforementioned Suicide Room), one team member was definitely touched by something. Perhaps it was the ghost of one of the four people rumored to have killed themselves in the spooky laboratory.

One year later, Maryland Ghost Trackers would also experience a similar “spirit jumping” at St. Albans Sanatorium. During that memorable investigation, they also recorded several audio anomalies and captured a strange shadow fleeing down the stairs.

Shadows in the Halls of the Most Haunted Hospital in America

Today, the conditions inside this haunted sanatorium are a mix of good and bad, of real and staged damage. On walls that have not been destroyed or fallen apart, graffiti stains their plaster.

Broken wheelchairs and rusted gurneys lie scattered in old operation rooms, and patient wards seem more “cellblock” than dormitory. Staff quarters are just as gloomy and in a state of disarray.

Besides seeing how horrible things were at the Radford asylum during the 1900s, visitors can also sense it. The hospital reeks of torment, because this was what was experienced by both patients and staff.

The admitted were prodded and probed, abused or neglected by practitioners. The employed were overworked, inexperienced, and probably became very depressed themselves. Even in death, they cannot rest peacefully.

St. Albans Sanatorium thus quickly earned a reputation for being a hotbed for paranormal activity. Much evidence supports this notoriety.

Full body apparitions have been photographed in the old alcoholics’ ward, for instance. Tourists and experienced ghost hunters alike have heard disembodied conversations, screams, and footsteps. Some have seen objects move on their own, or been pushed by invisible forces themselves.

Lights, Camera, Haunting: Radford Asylum’s Rise to Paranormal Fame

The hospital’s maze-like configuration also makes it easy for visitors to get lost, making explorations both scary and dangerous. For several paranormal film makers, then, St. Albans Sanatorium was the perfect place to shoot some scary footage.

In 2011, The R.I.P. Files featured the institution in one of their web series episodes. After that, SyFy’s Haunted Collector team took a trip to the hospital, in hopes of giving it a much-needed spiritual detox.

St. Albans also starred in the Travel Channel’s The Dead Files, a show about a psychic medium who teams up with a homicide detective to investigate places rumored to be haunted.

Finally, in the Ghost Asylum episode which aired on May 3, 2015, the Tennessee Wraith Chasers conducts a successful investigation at the property.

So if you are passing through Radford, Virginia, make sure to take a tour of St. Albans Sanatorium. Want to see a chair rock on its own? Stop by the hospital’s Rocker Room.

Looking to exchange some friendly whistles with a ghost? Check out the Whistle Room. Hoping to encounter a more hostile entity? The Boiler Room won’t leave you disappointed!

The Boiler Room.
Image Source: St. Albans 

Haunted Virginia

With its dark past of horrifying psychiatric treatments, St. Albans Sanatorium remains a place of torment and unrest. Patients who endured inhumane methods—from electroshock therapy to lobotomies—were often left brain-dead or worse, dead. Their spirits seem to linger, unable to escape the pain they suffered.

Visitors and paranormal investigators have captured audio anomalies, full-body apparitions, and chilling whispers echoing through its decayed halls. The eerie energy of the most haunted hospital in America continues to draw filmmakers, ghost hunters, and brave souls seeking the truth.

Could the tortured spirits of this haunted sanatorium still be crying out for justice?

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Sources

1. Duvall, James. Mary Ingles and the Escape from Big Bone Lick. Burlington: Boone County Library, 2009.
2. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/saint-albans-sanatorium
3. https://nkytribune.com/2016/10/mary-draper-ingles-woman-who-escaped-captivity-at-big-bone-lick-to-be-honored-with-statue-in-virginia/
4. https://www.cimls.com/data_sale/documents/document1_89537.pdf
5. https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/heroic-therapies-psychiatry
6. https://theweek.com/articles/732125/ghosthunting-abandoned-asylums-super-messed
7. https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1992/rt9201/920128/01280159.htm
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_IK8p8rPs4
9. https://minglemediatvnetwork.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/ep-5-st-albans-sanatorium-the-r-i-p-files-web-series/