ghost hunters

that building is just creepy.......

all those gothic, victorian buildings are creepy yet amazing...... I just love the character they have!

 

How come so many of these haunted places like Northampton, Danvers, and the one mentioned in Ohio are all former State Insane Asylums :H



Hotwater

 

long history of brutality

1874-1911: Athens Lunatic Asylum
1911-1944: Athens Asylum for the Insane
1944-1968: Athens State Hospital
1968-1969: Southeastern Ohio Mental Health Center
1969-1975: Athens Mental Health Center
1975-1980: Southeastern Ohio Mental Health and Retardation Center
1980-1981: Athens Mental Health and Developmental Center
1981-1991: Athens Mental Health Center
1991-: The Ridges


1. Water Treatment Patients were submerged in ice-cold water for extended periods of time. Sometimes they were wrapped in sheets which had been soaked in icewater and restrained.

2. Shock Therapy Electric shocks were administered to patients submerged in water tanks or, more commonly, directly to the temples by the application of brine-soaked electrodes. A patient held a rubber piece in his mouth to prevent him from biting his tongue off during the convulsions which followed a treatment. (See One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for a painful example of electroshock therapy.)

3. Lobotomy (Original) Patients had their skulls opened and their neural passages separated midway through the brain. This difficult and arduous procedure killed many people, but those who survived did in fact forget many of their depressive or psychotic tendencies. They also forgot a lot of other things, like how not to shit down your leg at dinner time, but with such an abundance of patients the only thing most doctors worried about was how to streamline the process. Open-skull brain surgery is a tricky business no matter how you slice it.

4. Lobotomy (Trans-Orbital) Developed by Dr. Walter J. Freeman in the early 1950s, this simpler lobotomy became something of a craze in mental health circles up through the 60s. Dr. Freeman's method involved knocking the patient unconscious with electric shocks, then rolling an eyelid back and inserting a thin metal icepick-like instrument called a leucotome through a tear duct. A mallet was used to tap the instrument the proper depth into the brain. Next it was sawed back and forth to sever the neural receptors. Sometimes this was done in both eyes. There is some evidence that this method actually helped some people with very severe conditions, but much more often the patient had horrible side effects and in many cases ended up nearly catatonic. It also killed a whole bunch of people, too.

http://www.forgottenoh.com/Ridges/ridges.html

 

yikes, lobotomies are worse than I thought! damn

 

seamonster66,

But are they really haunted, because they look haunted ?



Hotwater

 

well, there is such a thing as the funhouse effect............

old creepy , gothic buildings do make people think things happen there that dont...... like any noise could be just the house or building settling, old pipes could make noises, and fixtures could cause lights to turn on and off.....

plus, very large windows give that funhouse effect, you can see shadows, weird things etc.......

 

The Ridges at OU are NOT anything to be excited over. Most of the building(s) are now converted over to university classes and offices.

The only building that's completely vacant and completely offlimits(to those willing to follow the law) is the old TB ward...and it isn't because of ghosts...it's because of a high asbestos level.

As for TAPS coming to a place near you. They are extremely booked up and are about to start filming season 4. They spent half of season 3 filming in Europe. They should have some awesome footage from the old castles and towns there.

And Seamonster, yes Mansfield is completely filled for the entire 2007 season..and TAPS is partly to blame for that.LOL.

Right now, my team The Cuyahoga Ohio Paranormal Society are going to be heading out to Eaton Township to investigate a castle out there that was owned by a rather eccentric doctor. It even has a moat. Yay!

 

I remember this going down. My Aunt used to have to go and collect a lot of these poor folks..Social Services, tough business to get into.

I was going to ask about that after reading about the well sealed off TB ward.

Cool link. Was an interesting read. Either way, the old asylums do have a creepy lure about them.

 

when i was there it was the every end of its use, and then was vacant. we would go up there and still encounter the odd patient but the buildings were all empty and people would sneak in. I think they tore some of them down. there is some serious weird activity going on around there, you can just feel it if you live there/hope it hasn't lost that, but really i don't think it could be lost. Every house there just feels haunted, everyone kind of experiences it. The scariest houses I lived in were all there.

 

I had a ton of friends that went to OU, so I often spent weekends down there including during the infamous Halloween riots....errr street parties. That campus has built up so much hokem and they have adapted nearly every urban legend it's ridiculous. I'm empathic and never once did I ever experience anything paranormal. I did notice and feel the melodrama of fear-driven emotion though.

That might be what you were feeling rather than actual parapsychic activity.

The kids down there make campfire tales an actual sport and they spend vast amounts of time sitting around drinking beer, eating pizza, and talking about the Little Bo Peep massacre...which BTW, is the most popular college urban legend and about 100 individual universities around the country claim to have such a version of the story.

 

I'm familiar with various effects from the Gilmore Effect to The Butterfly Effect but I've never heard of the Funhouse effect. It's an interesting concept and unfortunately all too real.


Hotwater