The Dark Story of West Virginia's Spencer Asylum — Torn Down to Build a Walmart

🔔 Subscribe for new videos every week:    / @stateofruin1   A West Virginia Walmart stands where an asylum once held more than nine thousand patients across ninety six years, and logged the nation's highest concentration of ice pick lobotomies. This is Spencer State Hospital, in Roane County, West Virginia. Its cemeteries sit a short walk from the parking lot, holding two hundred sixty two patients nobody named. Here is how an asylum became a parking lot. A doctor who had to improvise mid surgery. A memo decided who got told they were being moved, and who did not. A demolition date nobody can fully agree on. Eighteen eighty five. Chapter One. The Land Roane County Gave. By the middle of the eighteen eighties, the state's only hospital for the mentally ill, opened at Weston back in eighteen sixty four, was dangerously overcrowded. In eighteen eighty five, the West Virginia legislature began holding hearings on building a second facility, and in eighteen eighty seven a commission was appointed to choose a site. Spencer, in Roane County, had not originally been on the list of communities under consideration. It won the hospital anyway, largely because the county was willing to do something few others offered: buy the land outright and hand it to the state for free.