Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum (also known as the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane and Weston State Hospital) is a large 19th-century Kirkbride-style psychiatric hospital in Weston, Lewis County, West Virginia. Sources note its long operational history from 1864 until 1994, after which patients were transferred to the William R. Sharpe, Jr. Hospital; the site reopened as a tourist attraction in March 2008. Architectural and heritage-oriented writeups describe the building as a massive Gothic Revival, hand-cut stonemasonry institutional structure and it is treated as a prominent local landmark in Weston. In folkloric and paranormal contexts the asylum is repeatedly described as "reportedly haunted" and has been the focus of numerous investigations and media productions. Television and independent paranormal teams (notably Ghost Adventures, Soul Sisters Paranormal, and The 3:33 AM Files) have conducted overnight investigations and produced episodes or live events at the site. Popular haunted-history and abandoned-site sites also promote the asylum's haunted reputation and its suitability for investigator visits and tourist tours. The supplied sources emphasize the site's prominence in haunted-tourism and paranormal-media traditions rather than providing detailed, primary eyewitness case files or named entities. Architectural and historical resources are cited alongside paranormal-media coverage, indicating the site's dual significance as both a heritage landmark and a locus of contemporary haunted-site folklore.