Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum (Weston State Hospital)

Construction of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum (later known as the West Virginia Hospital for the Insane and Weston State Hospital) began in 1858. The massive Gothic Revival, Kirkbride-style facility admitted and housed patients beginning in 1864 and remained in operation until its closure in 1994, after which patients moved to the William R. Sharpe, Jr. Hospital in Weston. After a period of dereliction in some parts, the site reopened as a historical/tourist attraction in March 2008 and has since been promoted and operated in part around paranormal tours and investigations. The supplied sources consistently document the asylum's historical significance as a long-running psychiatric hospital and its architectural prominence. They also document its later role in popular paranormal culture: podcasts, paranormal teams, and tour operators have featured or investigated the site, and several online articles and promotional materials describe the building as a focus for haunted-site tourism. The available material emphasizes the building's reputation and use as an investigative/tourism site rather than providing corroborated, detailed first-hand reports of specific supernatural occurrences. Because the referenced sources are a mix of historical summaries, abandoned-site features, promotional material, and paranormal media, the surviving, verifiable claims are the institution's names, dates of operation, architectural type, location in Weston, WV, and its reopening as a tourist destination that hosts paranormal tours and investigations. Specific alleged incidents, named spirits, or detailed witness accounts were not corroborated across the supplied documents and are therefore not recorded here as verified phenomena.