15 of the eeriest abandoned hospitals and asylums around the world

Location: Colchester, Essex, England

Located just north of Colchester, England, Severalls Hospital – originally known as the Second Essex County Asylum – opened its doors in 1913, housing up to 1250 patients in 22 ward blocks. By 1937, four additional blocks had been added, bringing the capacity up to 2000. In 1942, the German army bombed Severalls Hospital, killing 38 female patients. Other tragedies within the hospital’s walls included the use of experimental treatments – like prefrontal lobotomies – on patients in the 1940s and ’50s.

The patient population of Severalls gradually declined throughout the 1970s, then dropped rapidly following deinstitutionalisation initiatives in the early ’80s. Buildings no longer in use were shuttered until the last elderly patients moved out of the hospital when it closed in 1997. After sitting abandoned for two decades, demolition began on some buildings to make room for new housing.

Location: Massachusetts, USA

Originally known (ominously) as the Medfield Insane Asylum for the Chronic Insane, Medfield State Hospital opened in 1896, the first state psychiatric facility in Massachusetts built on the ‘cottage plan.’ This meant that instead of a single, massive structure, the hospital consisted of smaller buildings that provided patients with better ventilation and access to natural light. By 1897, the complex housed 1000 patients, and it reached its peak population of more than 2300 patients in the 1930s and ’40s, at which point it was extremely overcrowded.

As with other now-abandoned asylums, the hospital’s patient numbers began decreasing in the 1950s, following the introduction of psychotropic medication, and continued to drop in the 1960s and ’70s, as treating people living with mental illness in long-term psychiatric facilities was discouraged. The last patients were transferred to other hospitals in 2003, and today, 44 buildings still stand on the 52-hectare campus while the town of Medfield considers how to best preserve and reuse them.

Location: Fort Logan, Colorado, USA

After years of westward colonisation that included forcibly relocating Indigenous people from their lands in the eastern United States to reservations in the west, it was determined that the army needed to have a larger presence in the western territories. In 1887, a site was chosen about 16 kilometres from downtown Denver, and American troops moved onto the land, which was named Fort Logan. Over the next decade, multiple buildings were constructed around the 13-hectare grounds, including officers’ quarters, barracks, a headquarters building, commissary, guardhouse and hospital.

From 1909 to 1922, Fort Logan operated as a recruit depot for new soldiers, and it was passed between different parts of the army until World War II, when the former medical facilities were used as a convalescent hospital. After the war, the army no longer needed the facilities and closed Fort Logan, though the Veterans Administration used the medical buildings until their new hospital in Denver was completed in 1951. Many of the fort’s original buildings remain abandoned – but still standing – as an eerie reminder of their former lives.

Location: Roosevelt Island, New York City, USA

Located on a narrow island in the East River, between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, the ruins of a smallpox hospital stand out among the skyscrapers. That’s because in a city where real estate is at a premium, what remains of the historic structure is still standing. Architect James Renwick Jr – who’s also behind St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and the Smithsonian Institution Building in Washington, DC – designed the Smallpox Hospital, which opened in 1865. Though New York City began vaccinating residents against smallpox in 1801, the virus continued to spread throughout the large unvaccinated population through the 1850s.

When the Smallpox Hospital was built, it was the first major hospital in the United States dedicated to treating the disease. In 1875, the city took control of the facility, renamed it Riverside Hospital and began to accept patients with other diseases as well. In 1886, Riverside Hospital closed and was converted into a nursing school, which remained in operation till the mid-1950s – leaving the hospital abandoned. After falling into disrepair in the ’60s, it became the only landmark ruin in the United States, and it’s currently registered as a federal, state and city landmark. Though the inside of the Gothic structure is off-limits to the public, it’s possible to view the hospital from its exterior, making it one of the few abandoned places in New York City you can still visit.

Read on for the stories behind these abandoned mansions.

Location: Sokołowsko, Poland

In the early 1850s, a German physician and researcher named Dr Hermann Brehmer hypothesised that pulmonary tuberculosis was the result of a person having a heart that was small, relative to the size of their lungs. Based on this logic, he believed that breathing air with lower levels of oxygen, found at high altitudes, could encourage tubercular patients’ hearts to grow, thus ridding them of the disease.

Brehmer’s sister-in-law owned a hydrotherapy spa in the mountain town of Görbersdorf, Germany, and in 1855, he partnered with her to open what is widely considered the world’s first sanatorium dedicated to the treatment of TB. Others soon followed, but by 1904, Brehmer’s was the largest facility of its kind, boasting more than 300 beds.

After World War II, the name of the town was changed from Görbersdorf to Sokołowsko (which is in modern-day Poland) as a tribute to Dr Alfred Sokołowski, a Polish pulmonologist who worked at the sanatorium with Brehmer. After antibiotics that effectively treated TB were created in the 1950s, facilities like the Sokołowsko Sanatorium began to close. The buildings were ultimately abandoned, until the In Situ Contemporary Art Foundation acquired the complex in 2007.

Location: Montana, USA

The first iteration of the North Valley Hospital opened in 1905 in Whitefish, Montana, USA. It was owned and operated by the Great Northern Railway until 1912 and mostly treated people injured in railroad accidents, until its closure in 1923. From 1923 until 1936, Whitefish didn’t have a hospital, but it reopened after that period and moved to a new location in 1947, where it remained throughout the 1950s and ’60s.

North Valley Hospital’s penultimate location (pictured here) opened in 1971, thanks to funding from $2 million in bonds, a federal grant and local donations. The hospital was expanded in 1975 and remodelled in 1988, and a medical office building was built next to it in 1993. The nearly 9290-square-metre complex was abandoned when the hospital moved to its current location in 2007.

In 2013, there were talks of converting the former medical facility into a four-year college, but the plans never materialised, and the abandoned North Valley Hospital was demolished in 2016.

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Source: RD.com