Lunatic Asylum thrives with ghostly, ghastly appeal

Lunatic Asylum thrives with ghostly, ghastly appeal
January 1, 2012
by Vicki Smith
The Columbus Dispatch

WESTON, W.Va. — Usually, Rebecca Jordan will take all the free TV exposure she can get for the psychiatric hospital that she has turned into a tourist attraction known as the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum.

Syfy’s Ghost Hunters. Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures and Ghost Stories. Discovery’s Forgotten Planet. She even hosted an episode of CMT’s My Big Redneck Wedding on the 307-acre grounds.

But she drew the line when producers for A&E’s Paranormal State called. They didn’t want to meet the ghosts behind the 21/2-foot-thick walls, she says. They wanted to get rid of them.

“And I was like, ‘Well, maybe you’re not the right fit for me. We do not want to get rid of our spirits. We want them to stay in the building.’

“Unless they want to go home,” she adds with a laugh. “And then they can go home. I’m not trying to keep anybody here who doesn’t want to be here.”

Spirits, after all, make money. And the property that Jordan’s father bought three years ago for $1.5 million is generating enough revenue from overnight public ghost hunts and other tours to pay a staff of 33 and fund a never-ending list of maintenance and repair projects.

The main Gothic revival building is one of the world’s largest hand-cut sandstone structures and a National Historic Landmark. Virginia legislators authorized its construction in 1858, but it wasn’t until 1864 that the first patients were admitted.

The hospital repeatedly changed hands during the Civil War, ending up with West Virginia when it became a separate state. Originally intended for 250 patients, it housed almost 10 times that many during the 1950s.

Known in later years as Weston Hospital, it eventually closed in 1994, when the state moved patients to a more modern facility. Then it stood empty for almost 15 years, inhabited only by rats, security guards and the occasional paintball-playing trespasser.

In 2008, Jordan’s father, Joe, a Morgantown asbestos abatement and demolition contractor, bought it at auction for $1.5 million. He has since sunk at least another $1 million into the place, hiring crew after crew to repair the showpiece clock tower, the disintegrating floors and the leaking roofs.

Running the asylum is a family affair.

Rebecca handles marketing and sales. Her husband, a historian, applies for grants. Her brother handles advertising and maintains the website. Her 13-year-old daughter, Breonna Childress, is a full-time volunteer who hosts overnight birthday-party ghost hunts with her friends and talks about the day she will inherit the business.

Mainly by capitalizing on public interest in the paranormal, the Jordans have lured more than 115,000 visitors to the property since they bought it.

Chris Richards, director of the Lewis County Convention and Visitors Bureau, calls the following “phenomenal,” noting that people are traveling from all over the world to visit Weston.

The Jordans and local hotels co-sponsor one another, and the operators of gas stations, convenience stores and restaurants all tell Richards that business is up.

“We’re all tickled to death that someone is in there and using the space and bringing it back to its heyday and letting it be all it can be,” Richards says. “If you love architecture and you love history and you love the paranormal, you’re going to love that building, and that’s just all there is to it.”

Not that there aren’t critics. Some mental-health advocates were outraged by the name change and still are.

“I still think it is inappropriate to capitalize on the sad history of that place and to promote the stereotypes that are attached often to mental illness,” says Ann McDaniel, executive director of the Statewide Independent Living Council. “There’s enough fear out there about people who have mental illness. We don’t have to make it scary.

“It sensationalizes,” McDaniel says. “If they were just educating people, that would be good. But when you have haunted houses, . . . when you have trails called the ‘Psycho Path,’ that kind of thing is negative.”

About once every six months, Rebecca Jordan gets a call from someone concerned about the name.

“And then they book,” she says. “So who cares?”

The Jordan family has experience with mental-health issues, she says, and its exhibits educate people on treatments once considered state of the art and now considered horrifying — electroshock therapy, lobotomies, cold-water baths and cagelike cribs that were hung from the ceiling, to name just a few.

The seven museum rooms also feature more than 120 pieces of artwork — pottery, paintings, quilts — that patients made during therapy. Disassembled for the winter, when the building is cold and damp, the displays include the superintendent’s books, nurses’ logs and more.

The asylum is working with West Virginia University to create an interactive exhibit featuring storyboards, photos and recorded interviews with former patients and staff members. And the museum is a popular stop with not only junior-high and high-school history classes, but also nursing and psychology students.

“Primarily, there were people here who were trying to make it better for the mentally ill,” Jordan says. “But there were still people who believed in what they called ‘thump therapy’ . . . and that’s just the people who came in angry and would just beat the patients. Unfortunately, that did happen.”

The key to the Jordans’ success so far has been a diversity of offerings, from Civil War and hospital history tours to “mud bogs” for four-wheelers and trucks, and a 25-band Moonstruck Music Festival. It hosts year-round paranormal tours and ghost hunts, even inviting TV celebrities to give seminars and lead special private hunts.

The asylum is making about $600,000 or $700,000 a year now, Jordan says, but she still doesn’t take a salary, and every dollar goes back into the business.

“And I’m fine with that,” she says. “As long as we’re able to keep the building open.”

At the end of October, her payroll totaled about $161,000. But maintenance expenses were more than $295,000 — and that was before the wintertime shutdown and the ramping-up of repairs.

So she adds attractions, with plans to run a year-round business in

2012.

In the spring, she’ll open three new museum rooms, plus a Macabre Museum “with all the oddities, all the strange stories” in the basement.

Jordan is also working with bus companies on a “Kooky Christmas” and dinner-theater tour that will keep people coming through next winter.

But she faces an expensive hurdle: The unheated building is frigid — colder inside on a rainy December day than it is outside.

Employee Eric Skinner leans over and fake-whispers in Jordan’s ear.

“If you heat it,” he tells her, “they will come.”