Nowadays, we have a decent understanding of mental health and many who need help can find it in psychiatric hospitals.

That was not always the case, though. In the past, people with mental issues were sent to lunatic asylums; not to get treatment, but to keep them out of the way of the general population. Many historical figures finished their days in such an institution, long forgotten by the world around them.

10. The Savior of Mothers

Nowadays, Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis is remembered as the “savior of mothers” for his efforts to get maternity doctors to wash their hands to limit the spread of childbed fever. And the reward for his work was getting locked up in an asylum where he was abused and beaten by the guards, dying a short while later from an untreated gangrenous wound.

Semmelweis began his medical career in 1846 as an obstetrical assistant at the Vienna General Hospital. The institution had two maternity wards for underprivileged women, and Semmelweis noticed that the one where he worked had a much higher maternal mortality rate caused by childbed fever – almost five times higher, in fact. 

What was the source of this huge discrepancy? Semmelweis eliminated each possible motive one by one until he concluded. His ward was staffed by doctors, the other by midwives. What did they do differently? The midwives washed their hands, that’s what. Semmelweis told his students to start washing their hands before working with patients and he saw the mortality rate plummet. He then published his findings, hoping to start a medical revolution.

The medical world, however, was not ready to listen because Semmelweis’s ideas went against established opinion. Instead, he was ridiculed and criticized by his colleagues and spent the next two decades screaming into the void uselessly. Semmelweis became a pariah. He took to drinking and openly bashing his critics with vitriol and desperation. 

Eventually, Semmelweis had a mental breakdown and was committed to an asylum in 1865. He died of sepsis just a few weeks later and his passing was barely acknowledged by the medical community.

9. The Woman Who Joined the Army

Hannah Snell was an 18th-century British woman who became rather notorious for disguising herself as a man and joining the military. 

Snell’s unusual career path started in 1745 when she decided to assume the identity of her brother-in-law, James Gray, and head out into the world alone to find her husband who had left her a few years earlier. After discovering that he was dead, she enlisted in the army as James Gray. She kept her secret for a while but deserted after spotting an old neighbor and fearing that he might recognize her. Instead of going home, though, Hannah simply traded the army for the Royal Marines, thus likely becoming the first woman to join this fighting arm of the British military. 

She served for several years, sailing first to Lisbon and then to India where she took a bullet to the groin in battle and enlisted the help of a local woman to remove the bullet to maintain her secret identity. Snell finished her tour of duty in 1750 and returned home to her sister. According to legend, she revealed her deception in a pub full of soldiers. Hannah later sold her story to a London publisher and even received a lifetime pension for her service. She lived a long life, but her mental condition deteriorated towards the end, and she was committed to the infamous Bedlam asylum where she died in 1792.

8. The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet

Described as England’s finest rural poet, John Clare had an unrivaled knack for writing poetry that vividly depicted the natural beauty of the English countryside. 

Born in 1793 in the East Midlands, Clare’s working-class credentials were unimpeachable – he was the son of a farm laborer, who had to work the fields himself from a young age to help support his family. He published his first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Live and Scenery in 1820, but despite his writing receiving lots of praise, he struggled financially all his life and had to keep working manual labor jobs to make ends meet.

This took a toll on Clare, both physically and mentally, and in 1836 his doctor recommended he stay at High Beech asylum in Essex to recuperate. He spent five years there before simply walking out one day and making the 80-mile journey home on foot. However, his respite was brief, and five months later, he was back inside, this time at the Northampton Lunatic Asylum where Clare lived out the last 23 years of his life. He described the place as “the purgatorial hell and French bastille of English liberty, where harmless people are trapped and tortured until they die.”

7. The Man Who Drew Cats

From an English poet, we move on to an English painter – specifically, Louis Wain, a 19th-century London outsider artist who became best known for his pictures of cats. It’s a shame he didn’t live in the Internet age, he would be the most famous artist in the world. Instead, he ended up penniless in a pauper’s asylum.

Unfortunately, his career had a tragic start. Married at 23, Wain’s wife was soon diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. To cheer her up, Wain would draw caricatures of their family cat, Peter. These were meant to be private, but an editor for the Illustrated London News saw them and liked them and commissioned Wain to draw more for his newspaper. Before you knew it, all of London knew Wain as “the man who drew cats.”

Compared to other entries, Louis Wain ended up in an asylum at an advanced age. He was always a bit on the eccentric side, but in his later years, his eccentricity turned to abuse and violence towards his sisters who lived with him. Therefore, in 1924, the 64-year-old Wain was committed to Springfield Hospital in Tooting. He was later moved to nicer accommodations in Bethlem Hospital following a public campaign backed by the Prime Minister at the time, Ramsay MacDonald, and he was allowed to quietly work on his art for the rest of his life. 

6. The Murderous Mathematician

In the mathematical world, André Bloch is remembered for his work in complex analysis, and for having a theorem and a constant named after him. However, his achievements sit under a dark cloud, as Bloch did all his work inside a mental asylum, where he spent most of his adult life after killing three people.

Born in 1893 in Besançon, France, André and his brother Georges were drafted into the army during World War I and both were injured during service. Georges, after losing an eye, was released from service. André, meanwhile, although he was allowed to return home to recuperate, was expected back. This never happened, though, because while on leave, André Bloch murdered his brother, his aunt, and his uncle. 

Afterward, Bloch was committed to the Charenton asylum in the suburbs of Paris, where he spent the next 31 years of his life. The motive behind his crimes remains unclear, but Bloch described it to his psychiatrist as a simple matter of eugenics. He said that mental illness ran in his family on his mother’s side, so he wanted to wipe out that entire branch and only lamented that he didn’t get to finish the job. When his doctor told him that this was a terrifying approach to life, Bloch simply responded:

“You are using emotional language. Above all there is mathematics and its laws.”

5. The Minister of Murder

Born in England in 1880, Thomas Ley moved to Australia in 1886 where he later served as the Minister of Justice for New South Wales and then a Member of Parliament. His career, however, was fraught with controversies and accusations, the most serious of which was the fact that several of his opponents and detractors ended up dead under mysterious circumstances. 

Eventually, the dark clouds surrounding Ley cost him his political career, so he moved back to England with his mistress, Maggie Brook, where he continued his dubious shenanigans. These included some shady real estate deals, promoting a bogus sweepstakes, and acting as a black market dealer during World War II. 

Thomas Ley reached the end of the line in 1947 when he was accused, charged, and convicted in a sensational crime dubbed by the British press as the “Chalkpit murder.” He arranged the death of a man named John McBain Mudie whom he believed was having an affair with Brook. He was due to hang but had his sentence commuted to life in prison at the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Ultimately, it didn’t matter, since Ley had a cerebral hemorrhage and died soon after being imprisoned.

4. The Mad Archer

Despite what the title might suggest, this story is not about a deranged hunter, but rather a man named Archer – specifically, a 19th-century Scottish actor named Richard Archer Prince. Born near Dundee in 1858, Prince began working in theater from an early age and around 1875 moved to London to make it big.

He didn’t. He mostly had bit parts and always struggled financially, sometimes having to rely on a charity known as the Actor’s Benevolent Fund for assistance. He began drinking heavily and exhibiting odd behavior, which earned him the moniker of “the Mad Archer” from his fellow thespians.

At the exact opposite end of the spectrum sat William Terriss. He was one of the most popular actors of his day. He knew Prince and occasionally tried to find him work, but this did not stop the latter from resenting him due to his success. Eventually, Prince was denied assistance from the Actor’s Benevolent Fund and he, somehow, got it into his head that this was Terriss’s doing. He got his revenge one night by waiting for Terriss outside the Adelphi Theater and stabbing him to death when he arrived.

Prince showed no remorse for his crime. He was obviously found guilty, but judged insane and was sent to Broadmoor. He spent the next 40 years of his life there and became involved with the local entertainment, finally finding a captive audience.

3. America’s First Supermodel

That is just one of the monikers of New York beauty Audrey Munson. She was also dubbed the “American Venus,” “Miss Manhattan,” and many others. She was the model for the Walking Liberty Half Dollar and statues of her still stand proudly at American landmarks such as the Manhattan Bridge, the Pulitzer Fountain, and the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. And yet, she died forgotten in an insane asylum and was buried in an unmarked grave. 

Her troubles began in 1919. The man who owned the boarding house Audrey lived in with her mother, a doctor named Walter Wilkins, had become dangerously obsessed with her to the point that he murdered his wife so the two of them could be together. Although Audrey had no role in the killing, the scandal torpedoed her career and, unable to find any more work, she moved to Syracuse with her mother. Despite her fame, she never earned that much as a model, and what she did earn she spent, so the pair was broke and Audrey’s mother had to sell kitchen utensils door-to-door to make ends meet.

This drastic lifestyle change caused Munson to attempt suicide in 1922. In the years that followed, she became more unstable, so on her 40th birthday, her mother had her committed to the St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane. She was briefly moved to a nursing home, but Audrey kept running away from there, so she was moved back to the mental institution. She died in 1996, at the age of 104.

2. The Marquis de Sade

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade might be the most notorious French author in history, although everyone knows him better under the name of the Marquis de Sade. His novels outraged 18th-century France due to their depictions of sex, violence, blasphemy, and sadism, a word which, you guessed it, is named after him. 

It seems that the Marquis enjoyed at least some of the topics he wrote about in his own life, which led to his arrest and imprisonment on multiple occasions. Usually, he was let off with a fine or his family used its influence to secure his release following a brief stay in custody. 

This worked until it didn’t. Specifically, until the French Revolution which ended the monarchy and brought Napoleon to power. He absolutely loathed de Sade’s work, calling it “abominable” and the writings of “a depraved imagination.” Napoleon had the Marquis arrested again in 1801 and, this time, there was no reprieve. De Sade was diagnosed with “libertine dementia” and committed to an insane asylum for the last 11 years of his life. He spent that time writing and putting on plays. At least, until 1809 when he was sent to solitary confinement, had all pens and paper confiscated, and was denied any more visitors. 

1. The Great Composer

As one of the greatest German composers of the Romantic era, Robert Schumann needs no introduction. Born in 1810 in the Kingdom of Saxony, Schuman began studying music at age seven and, not long after, was working on his own compositions. Despite dying at the age of 46, Schumann composed almost 150 works. 

He might have been even more prolific if he hadn’t struggled with mental illness throughout his life. In 1854, his delusions became strong enough that he feared he might harm his family. After attempting suicide by jumping off the Rhine Bridge, Schumann requested that he be committed to an insane asylum where he spent another two years before his death.

What exactly was the cause of his psychosis has been hotly debated ever since and there is still no concrete answer. His doctor at the asylum claimed Schumann’s condition was brought on by overwork and exhaustion. Others believe that the composer suffered from schizophrenia or manic-depressive disorder, and even studied his works to see if any symptoms were reflected in his music. It’s possible it ran in the family, since Robert’s mother had bouts of depression, his father once suffered a nervous breakdown, and his sister committed suicide. 

Even the Nazis tried their hand at diagnosing Schumann, although they quickly concluded that he suffered from vascular dementia – a physiological condition. After all, to them, Robert Schumann was a hero of German music, and they couldn’t promote anyone with psychiatric problems like that.

If you suddenly woke up inside a mental hospital, do you think you could convince everyone that you’re not crazy and to let you go home? Convincing the world you’re sane may not be as easy as you think. It is shockingly easy in the United States and around the world to be wrongfully and involuntarily committed to an insane asylum.

10 Banking Conspiracy Theorist

Gustl Mollath was an ordinary German man who made a living by restoring vintage cars. But then he stumbled upon a banking conspiracy so grand that the world thought he was crazy enough that he was institutionalized for seven years.

While Mollath made a humble living working on cars, his wife worked at one of Germany’s largest banks, HypoVereinsbank. It was through his wife and her work that Mollath discovered a massive tax evasion scheme undertaken by the German bank. Mollath’s discovery quickly caused conflict in the marriage. After allegations of domestic violence between the couple, the marriage was heading for divorce. Mollath took what he knew about the bank’s tax evasion scheme to the German public. He then filed a large criminal complaint against HypoVereinsbank and its employees—including his wife. He claimed that HypoVereinsbank was making illicit money transfers to Switzerland that would soon be labeled money laundering.

At first, the German media ignored Mollath’s claims, but the German authorities did not. Mollath’s wife went forward with the divorce and told the authorities that he had slashed her tires. She also claimed that he was abusive following his discovery of the banking conspiracy. German prosecutors charged Mollath and used his criminal complaint against HypoVereinsbank as “evidence that he suffered from paranoid delusions.” They successfully had him involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.

Though Mollath remained locked away in an insane asylum, not everyone thought he was crazy. Bloggers, activists, and conspiracy theorists began to investigate Mollath’s claims against HypoVereinsbank and found them to be correct.

Many years later, an internal report by HypoVereinsbank that proved the tax evasion and money laundering scheme was leaked to the public by a German newspaper. Mollath’s claims were found to be true and led to HypoVereinsbank being raided by German police on suspicion of tax fraud. Mollath was released from the mental hospital by a court.

9 NYPD Whistle-Blower

Adrian Schoolcraft was a New York Police Department (NYPD) cop. That is, until he decided he had to take a stand against corruption in the NYPD.

Officer Schoolcraft first started his effort to expose wrongdoings by his fellow NYPD officers in 2008. He secretly taped conversations among the NYPD from 2008 to 2009. The tapes contained evidence of widespread corruption that included the use of illegal arrest quotas that led to many wrongful arrests in New York City.

As Schoolcraft began compiling his tapes and voicing his dissent, he began experiencing harassment from other officers in the NYPD. When Officer Schoolcraft took his concerns to his superiors, they dismissed his claims and suggested that Schoolcraft was losing his mind. They recommended that he be given psychological treatment. When Officer Schoolcraft did meet with an NYPD psychologist, the psychologist made him surrender his weapons and Schoolcraft was reassigned to a menial desk job.

Schoolcraft persevered with his allegations of corruption and got his claims to the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau. The NYPD responded by putting Schoolcraft under “forced monitoring.” Soon after, an NYPD lieutenant confiscated the notes Schoolcraft had compiled as evidence of the corruption. Schoolcraft then received a call from his father, a former policeman himself, warning him about actions the NYPD may take against him. Mere hours later, members of the NYPD invaded Schoolcraft’s apartment after obtaining the key by telling Schoolcraft’s landlord that he was suicidal.

Just before the NYPD officers raided Schoolcraft’s apartment, he turned on two tape recorders to record the incident. After the NYPD officers broke into Schoolcraft’s apartment, they interrogated him before handcuffing him, taking him away, and involuntarily committing him to psychiatric ward in the nearby Jamaica Hospital Medical Center.

Schoolcraft was held in the psychiatric ward against his will. He was handcuffed to his bed and prevented from using the telephone to call for help at the orders of the NYPD.

After six days, Schoolcraft was able to leave the mental hospital and promptly filed a lawsuit against the NYPD and the mental hospital that held him against his will at the nefarious orders of the police. After his release, Schoolcraft was indefinitely suspended without pay from the NYPD. NYPD officers continued monitoring Schoolcraft and visiting him at his apartment for multiple weeks. Schoolcraft’s allegations of corruption, arrest quotas, and underreporting among the NYPD were later vindicated by the Village Voice.

8 The USSR’s Critics

The Soviet Union had a problem with its treatment of its dissidents and with its psychiatric practices that resulted in widespread abuse of the mental health system. During the 1960s and ’70s, the USSR systematically diagnosed its critics with mental illnesses in order to discredit them and move them from the general population to insane asylums.

The USSR even invented psychological conditions including “delusion of reformism,” and “sluggish schizophrenia.” The condition of sluggish schizophrenia was invented so that people could be diagnosed with schizophrenia even if no signs or symptoms were evident. One Soviet dissident, Valery Tarsis, was wrongfully diagnosed and forcefully committed to an insane asylum after he smuggled his novel The Bluebottle—which was critical of the USSR government—out of the Soviet Union to have it published.

Tarsis spent eight months locked away in a Soviet mental hospital. During his time there, he wrote one of the first literary works to address the USSR’s nefarious use of psychiatry, an autobiographical novel entitled Ward 7.

Soviet poet Jospeh Brodsky was also committed against his will in the same year as Tarsis, 1963. Brodsky was accused by Soviet officials of pursuing a “parasitic way of life.” He was diagnosed insane and forcibly institutionalized. Brodsky endured a horrendous treatment, being forcibly injected with tranquilizers and woken in the middle of the night by being immersed in cold water. He spent a total of 18 months in the insane asylum.

7 Pain Medication Side Effects

Back in 1993, a Nebraska man named John Montin took some pain medication to try to manage his chronic back pain. This action inadvertently got him committed to an insane asylum.

According to the psychiatrist who evaluated Montin, the pain medication he took induced a temporary psychosis. This dazed state caused Montin to go knock on the door of a rural Nebraska home and try to “take ownership of it” by claiming it belonged to his ancestors.

Accounts of what happened next differ drastically. Nebraska police initially claimed that Montin engaged in an 11-hour shoot-out with the cops that resulted in no injuries to either party. However, at Montin’s trial, the owners of the home were alleged to have pulled shotguns on a dazed Montin, which prompted Montin to hide in a nearby ditch overnight.

Most of the charges levied against Montin were dropped by prosecutors. Jurors presiding over the trial acquitted Montin of the remaining attempted murder and weapons charges. The jurors also cleared Montin of the charge of false imprisonment and use of a weapon “by reason of insanity.” Based upon police reports of Montin’s behavior during the incident, Montin was then involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.

When the affects of his back pain medication wore off hours after the incident, Montin was no longer insane. But when Montin was involuntarily committed to the psychiatric ward in Lincoln Regional Center Hospital, his psychiatrists never bothered to evaluate him to determine if he was still insane and worthy of being involuntarily and indefinitely committed to their psych ward. Instead, they relied upon the police reports of his behavior during the incident.

Montin remained involuntarily committed in that psychiatric ward for 20 years until he was finally able to convince a doctor in the hospital to reevaluate him. After examining him and hearing his story, Montin was found to be sane after all and released. Montin subsequently sued that Nebraska mental hospital for $33 million. The case has not yet been settled.

6 Anti-Segregation Activist

As a history professor at Alcorn State University, Clennon Washington King Jr. had an inside view of the racially segregated school system in 1950s Mississippi. Professor King began to attract attention from the public in 1957 when he wrote letters to the editors of local newspapers advocating for the end of racial segregation in schools, prompting some pro-segregation Mississippians to threaten to boycott Alcorn University.

Professor King was unfazed and continued to fight segregation. In 1958, he tried to enroll one of his own children in an all-white elementary school. His attempts were unsuccessful, and his wife and children ended up fleeing for fear of retaliation in the racially charged South.

Later that year, King, the well-qualified academic, tried to enroll himself into the University of Mississippi. The only problem was that in 1958, the University of Mississippi didn’t allow African Americans like King into their college. Not only was he rejected, but university officials literally thought he was crazy for trying to enroll at a university that barred black men. King was committed to an insane asylum as a result. Fortunately, his brother was able to free him after a 12-day stint in the mental institution.

Two years later, James Meredith succeeded where Professor King could not and became the first black student to enroll in the University of Mississippi.

King would later run as a presidential candidate in the 1960 presidential campaign for the Independent Afro-American Party. He received 1,485 votes in Alabama, making him the first black presidential candidate in the United States to run as a party nominee.

5 The Surveiled Honors Student

Sophia Chinemerem Eze emigrated from Nigeria to New York City to attend Brooklyn College as an international honors student, but her American dream turned into a waking nightmare.

The trouble for Eze began in her off-campus apartment, where she was suspicious that her former landlords and roommates were engaging in “potentially criminal activity” and defaming her on the Internet. Most startlingly of all, she thought that her landlord had installed a hidden camera in her bedroom.

Eze took her concerns to her college’s security and psychiatrist, but they didn’t believe her and offered her no help, even after she purportedly discovered a hidden camera inside her bedroom. Despite the fact that Ms. Eze had no history of mental illness, she was forced into an ambulance by school personnel against her will and taken to the psychiatric ward of a Kings County Hospital without her consent. She was then involuntarily committed and held for two weeks in that psychiatric ward.

When she was eventually released from the psychiatric ward, staff at Brooklyn College allegedly did not allow Eze to complete her final examinations. Eze has since transferred out of Brooklyn College.

Ms. Eze filed a lawsuit against the company that owned the mental facility that wrongly committed her for two weeks and won $110,000. She has also filed a lawsuit against Brooklyn College.

4 China’s Dissidents

Similarly to the USSR, The People’s Republic of China has also made a habit out of labeling its dissidents insane and forcibly committing them into mental institutions. One such critic was Xu Lindong, a 50-year-old farmer with a fourth grade education who spent his whole life working on his farm.

Lindong tried to help his illiterate neighbor claim ownership of a small piece of land next to her home and filed on her behalf to obtain the small plot. After the claim was rejected in a Chinese court, Lindong sent petitions to government officials to try to find someone who would help his neighbor.

The Chinese government took notice of his grievances but didn’t exactly address them. Instead, they decided that he and his grievances were insane and had him involuntarily committed to a mental hospital—despite the fact that he showed no signs or history of mental illness.

While Lindong was locked away in that mental hospital, he was given 54 brutal electro-shock treatments. He was also forcibly restrained and given medications against his will. He felt so hopeless that he tried to commit suicide three times. Xu Lindong ended up spending 6.5 years in two different mental hospitals until he was released after his brother was able to get a journalist to publish his story in the local press.

Lindong’s case isn’t out of the ordinary in China. Other cases include Xu Wu, a former security guard who petitioned the government in a wage dispute and was involuntarily committed for four years. Wu also faced electro-shock treatment and considered suicide.

3 Homosexuality As A Mental Illness

Psychiatry before the 20th century was considerably less scientific than it is now. The bizarre reasons one could be committed to an insane asylum included “laziness,” “bad whiskey,” “imaginary female trouble,” and “parents were cousins.” It was also common for gay and lesbian individuals to be committed for their attraction to members of the same sex and for young women to be committed for promiscuity if it was deemed that their sexual appetites were inappropriately voracious.

The practice had a longstanding influence. Until 1973, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a mental disorder. One shockingly recent case of a lesbian being wrongly committed is that of an American named Lyn Duff, now a journalist. In 1991, at age 14, she came out publicly as a lesbian. Her mother did not take the news well. She took Duff from their California home to Rivendell Psychiatric Center in Utah and put the teen in treatment.

Once at the Utah mental hospital, Duff was visited by Mormon missionaries who considered her homosexuality a mental illness. Hospital staff tried to use conversion therapy on Duff. One of the most bizarre treatments Duff was subjected to was being forced to watch lesbian pornography while smelling ammonia in a Pavlovian attempt to make her straight. She was given psychotropic drugs, put under hypnosis, and sent into solitary confinement.

Duff spent a total of 168 days involuntarily committed in the mental hospital. She eventually escaped in May 1992 and fled to San Francisco. Soon after, she successfully had her mother’s parental rights terminated by a California court and was adopted by a lesbian couple in San Francisco.

2 Ex-Muslim Nigerian

Being an atheist is hard in Nigeria, an ardently Muslim country where 51 persent of Muslims believe that all those who leave the religion of Islam should be put to death. Mubarak Bala was one of those former Muslims, but instead of being put to death, he was deemed insane.

Bala first went public with his non-belief in Islam when he told his family that he had renounced the religion. After his family heard that Bala had left the religion of Islam, they took him to a doctor, thinking he could be mentally ill. The first doctor they saw found no signs of mental illness in Bala, but the family was able to convince a second doctor that Bala’s atheism was a form of mental illness and a “side effect of a personality change.” Bala was involuntarily committed into a psychiatric institution and forcibly drugged by the hospital staff.

Bala began using Twitter and email to call for help from the world while he was locked away in the mental institution. Eventually, a humanist charity was able to help get him freed, and Bala was released after being held for 18 days. Unfortunately, things didn’t get much better after he was released. He claimed to receive death threats and went into hiding.

1 The First Hand-Washing Doctor

Back in the 19th century, medicine was a far dirtier practice than it is today. Doctors wouldn’t wash their hands—even before delivering babies. When one lone doctor suggested that medical professionals should more rigorously wash their hands, the medical community thought he was crazy.

While practicing medicine in a German hospital, Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis raised an eyebrow when he saw his fellow doctors walk from the bedsides of dead or dying patients directly into the hospital’s maternity ward to deliver babies. Pretty soon, Dr. Semmelweis suggested that the doctors wash their hands before handling newborn babies to reduce rates of infant mortality. The medical community was outraged at the accusation that doctors were inadvertently causing some of their patients horrid deaths with their dirty hands. One of his many detractors was Doctor Carl Levy, who published a paper rebutting Semmelweis’s claims: “He is concerned only with general infection from corpses without respect to the disease that led to death. In this respect his opinion seems improbable.”

Ever persistent, Semmelweis argued with influential doctors—and was eventually dismissed from his position at Vienna General Hospital. Left ostracized from the medical community and without a job, Dr. Semmelweis became impoverished, his mental state deteriorating as he fell into a state of depression as a result of his abjuration.

Dr. Semmelweis was eventually committed to an insane asylum in 1865. He tragically died in that mental asylum of a blood infection after a violent beating by workers in the asylum when he demanded to be released. Dr. Semmelweis died at the age of 47, long before the medical community realized his zeal for hand washing wasn’t mad at all.

Twenty years after Semmelweis’s death, his theory received widespread acceptance after French microbiologist Louis Pasteur penned the theoretical framework for the germ theory of disease. Soon after, doctors began to heed Semmelweis’s advice and washed their hands before delivering babies. Unsurprisingly, the hand-washing practice has dramatically reduced infant mortality rates during childbirth.

As a lesson to us all, the term “Semmelweis reflex” was coined in response to Semmelweis’s tragic story. It refers to the reactionary reflex to reject new ideas or practices when they oppose established norms, theories, or beliefs.

Nathan is a freelance journalist and screenwriter.

The history of “lunatic asylums” and their more modern replacements, psychiatric hospitals, is long, dark, and bloody. The institutions began as essentially prisons for people with mental disorders; the buildings were often just collections of empty cement cells to house those deemed abnormal.

In the 1800s, when the mentally unwell finally began to be classified as patients, conditions worsened in many ways. Many common “treatments” for people with mental health conditions were ignorant of both science and medicine and were often vicious and violent. This, coupled with routine abuse of patients by staff, made asylums hell on Earth until they were shut down or repurposed during the “deinstitutionalization” waves of the 1950s and 60s.

Since then, many former asylums have sat empty. Or seemingly empty, as paranormal encounters at these locations are common. It seems centuries of cruelty and torture left many spirits with unfinished business in the facilities. If ghosts are indeed real, then abandoned asylums are perhaps the best place to find them. Here are ten asylums reported to be haunted, and some have the evidence to back it up.

10 St. Augustine’s Asylum

Known also as Kent County Lunatic Asylum, St. Augustine’s Asylum is located in Chartham, Kent, England. It was open from 1876 to 1993, and in those 117 years, the building was home to an immense amount of human suffering. In the 1970s, a nurse at the asylum teamed up with a local university researcher to create a lengthy report on all the inhumane injustices they witnessed within St. Augustine’s walls. Most notably, they detailed excessive use of electroshock therapy on patients, whether the ‘treatment’ was warranted or not.

Visitors to Augustine’s remaining structures report feeling watched, hearing footsteps behind them, seeing glowing lights, seeing orbs, and sudden feelings of dread and depression. And even if there is nothing supernatural about the place, any video of the rotting, gloomy interior is sure to unsettle you on its own.

9 Ararat Lunatic Asylum

Ararat Lunatic Asylum, later renamed Aradale, was the single largest asylum in Australia when it opened in Ararat, Victoria, in 1867. Authorities didn’t fully shut the facility down until 1997. It had housed tens of thousands of patients over its lifetime, including thousands of violent criminals whose mental conditions prevented them from being held in traditional prisons.

Ararat was frequently cited as one of the most haunted places in Australia until being repurposed as a university. Owed in part to the over 13,000 patients who died within its walls, Ararat was said to be home to numerous specters, trapped in afterlives of suffering. This has made it one of the most popular ghost tour locations in the country.

8 Taunton State Hospital

Taunton State Hospital opened in 1854 in Taunton, Massachusetts, and over its lifetime, it housed thousands of people with mental health conditions. Most notable among them was Honora Kelley, nicknamed ‘Jolly Jane.’ Jane confessed to having committed 31 murders and said her goal was “to have killed more people-helpless people-than any other man or woman who has ever lived.” It’s said that her work isn’t finished, so she haunts what is left of the asylum to this day.

Other rumors about the location persist, including the belief that a Satanic cult ran it. Allegedly the cult would use patients as sacrifices in dark rituals in the hospital basement. Most ghost encounters have taken place in the basement as well, including a shadowy figure that crawls along the walls, watching, and an invisible force that prevents some visitors from getting past the bottom step of the basement stairs.

7 Beechworth Lunatic Asylum

Beechworth Asylum, also known as Mayday Lunatic Asylum, operated from 1867 to 1995 in Beechworth, Victoria, Australia. Over those 128 years, over 9,000 patients died within its walls, and some remain still.

One ghost is said to be a woman who was thrown from an upper-floor window just for being Jewish, and the Rabbi called to move her to medical treatment couldn’t arrive in time to save her from a slow death out on Beechworth’s lawn. Another is a little boy James who talks to visiting children. There are ghost doctors, nurses, patients, and a whole cast of ghosts beside them, each with their own sad or creepy backstory.

6 Athens Lunatic Asylum

In 1874, Athens Lunatic Asylum opened in Athens, Ohio, taking in both those with mental disorders and the criminally insane. The asylum quickly became overcrowded, underfunded, and notorious for patient abuse. Electroshock therapy and other cruel practices were common, but worst of all is the staff’s frequent use of ice-pick lobotomies.

Across the facility’s grounds are thousands of graves containing unidentified patients. The gravesites lack names but are marked with numbers, though whatever number system they represent has since been lost. Ghosts are almost impossible to miss when visiting the gravesites. Inside, there is supposedly an outline left from the dead body of a patient, unable to be removed by repeated cleaning.

5 Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

Paranormal activity or not, Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia is an impressive structure. It is the second-largest asylum globally and the second-largest hand-cut stone masonry building (after the Kremlin). It is as intimidating as it is massive. Despite its size, it was only meant to house 240 patients. By the 1950s, it housed ten times that number. Including, for a brief while, Charles Manson.

In addition to overcrowding, abuse and neglect were par for the course at the location. Visitors report feeling an overwhelming sense of suffering in the place, as well as seeing apparitions. One ghostly resident is named Ruth; she is known for attacking visitors. Screams are often heard from the electroshock chambers. One building manager reporting seeing 40 doors to patient quarters slam shut simultaneously. The current owners have embraced the estate’s reputation and host regular ghost tours and other paranormal-themed events.

4 Danvers Lunatic Asylum

Danvers Lunatic Asylum is a special one. It was built in Danvers, Massachusetts, or as it was originally named: Salem Village. Yes, that Salem Village, site of the famous witch trials of 1692. The building was designed in a dark, gothic style and became the inspiration for H. P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Sanitarium, which later inspired Arkham Asylum of Batman fame.

Patient care in Danvers was so bad that the experience has been called a modern concentration camp. Severe overcrowding meant that patients were routinely forgotten, often leading to accidental days in isolation or multiple days without food. The place has come to have the nickname “the birthplace of the prefrontal lobotomy,” which says quite a lot. Unsurprisingly, before its almost total demolition, the abandoned asylum was famous for its apparitions, ghostly lights, and unexplained sounds.

3 Pennhurst Asylum

Pennhurst Asylum began as a school for the mentally and physically disabled in 1908 and quickly became something else. For example, a former patient filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the asylum. Halderman v. Pennhurst State School & Hospital showed that Pennhurst had violated its patients’ Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment rights and led to the landmark ruling that the disabled in state care have “a constitutional right to appropriate care and education.”

Some of Pennhurst’s alleged abuses include chaining patients to its walls, strapping adult patients into children’s cribs for days on end, and even blatant murder of problematic patients. Many high-profile paranormal investigations have taken place at Pennhurst, and almost everyone has left with at least one chilling experience. 

2 Rolling Hills Asylum

The tiny town of East Bethany, New York, is known almost entirely for being home to Rolling Hills Asylum. Alongside the mentally disabled, the facility also housed the physically disabled, criminals, the homeless, orphans, and even widowed women; all of them, regardless of why they were there, were known as inmates. Approximately 2,000 patients officially died in the asylum, and many more are thought to have been quietly buried in unmarked graves throughout the property.

The site is known for its unusually high amount of paranormal activity. One example is the famous Shadow Hallway, a hallway with allegedly the most shadowy apparitions of any location in the world. Another of Rolling Hills’s famous ghosts is Roy Crouse, a 7’5” giant who lived and died on the property. He still haunts the building, although at least he is a benevolent specter.

1 Waverly Hills Sanatorium

Waverly Hills Sanatorium began as a school, which was then converted into a tuberculosis ward designed to house 40 patients. After a brutal tuberculosis epidemic, the facility ballooned to over 400 patients. The overcrowding was coupled with patient mistreatment and even rumors of illegal medical experimentation. It is commonly alleged that an astounding 20,000 to 63,000+ patients died within its walls.

Perhaps the most famous feature of Waverly is the so-called “body chute” or “death tunnel,” an underground tunnel designed to remove dead bodies away from the eyes of patients. The tunnel is a typical hotspot for paranormal activity, but in truth, the entire complex is. Waverly has been called “the most spiritually active place in the world,” and for good reason.

While many movies have been set within asylums, most have not gone so far as to use real-life ones during the shooting of the film. This list comprises some examples of productions that decided to opt for authenticity in their locations, if not necessarily in their depictions of life and treatment at such institutions.

The following well-known and lesser-known movies all spend significant amounts of their run-time within real asylums, either during or after their closure, using the asylum setting as a key element to the stories they tell.

Related: Top 10 Mental Disorders Hollywood Gets Totally Wrong

10 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Milos Forman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel sets the benchmark for more realistic depictions of asylum life. Filmed at Oregon’s Salem State Hospital (opened in 1883), it turns its setting into a power struggle between the autonomy and rights of the individual and the order and restrictions of the state. The free-spirited individual is personified by Jack Nicholson’s new patient McMurphy, while Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched represents the coldly oppressive state and its unbreakable assurance that it always knows what’s best.

Produced by Michael Douglas, his father Kirk had bought the rights to the book and played the role of McMurphy in an earlier stage version. He intended to play McMurphy again in the movie but was too old by the time the much-delayed production began. The actors playing patients all slept in the ward used for filming, and real patients played extras seen around the asylum, as well as working as assistants during the shoot.

Shot on a tight budget, Nicholson took a percentage of profits for a reduced fee—a shrewd move as it became the fifth highest-grossing movie ever (at the time), with Nicholson and Fletcher winning Best Actor and Actress Oscars. It also won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.^[1]

9 Doom Asylum (1987)

Richard Friedman’s horror takes us to the opposite end of the quality scale, one of many movies to treat the asylum setting as little more than a background to increase the creepiness of its lurid premise.

A former coroner is disfigured in a car accident and taken to an asylum where he lives in the basement after its closure, reappearing to stalk and kill the hapless teenagers who hang out in the abandoned building. The movie leans hard into its teen slasher vibe, presenting the stereotypical selection of geeky, goofy, sexy, and nerdy teens so beloved to rental horror fodder of the ’80s. One character wanders around the asylum in only a bikini, and a gang of faux punk rockers ensures it feels absolutely a product of its unique era.

The effects are gory and inventive in places, if never particularly convincing. Although many areas of the asylum (Essex Mountain Sanatorium in Verona, NJ, opened in 1907) used are bare and unremarkable, others are quite atmospheric, decayed, and littered with rusty old medical equipment. Ultimately, Doom Asylum succeeds in passing its own low bar of exceedingly silly, “popcorn” entertainment due to not taking itself remotely seriously. ^[2]

8 Session 9 (2001)

Brad Anderson’s movie casts the asylum itself as both a key part of the story and as one of its core characters. In a perfect location coup, the production secured Massachusetts’s Danvers State Hospital (opened in 1878), felt by many to be among the most iconic asylums in the U.S. It closed in 1992 (the movie states 1985), and the immense Gothic building is shown looming beautiful and grandiose, imposing and malevolent, right from the opening scene.

Gordon (a compelling central performance by Peter Mullan) leads a small team pitching for the contract to remove asbestos from the old asylum, promising to get the job done on an unrealistically tight two-week schedule. They encounter strange occurrences before one of the team goes missing, sowing seeds of suspicion and leading to increased pressure on Gordon, who appears to be gradually losing his grip on reality.

One team member finds a stash of old tape interviews with a patient who appears to be either mad or perhaps even possessed. These numbered “sessions” gradually lead up to a final, more malevolent persona being revealed in tape session no.9, hinting at a possible influence on the characters’ actions. Session 9 is a slow-burning, cerebral work that only rarely relies on shock value to achieve its chills. The genuine abandoned asylum provides a rich, evocative setting, with its genuine history deftly woven in among the fiction, perhaps more effectively than in any other asylum-set movie.^[3]

7 Girl, Interrupted (1999)

Winona Ryder bought the rights to Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir, recruiting director James Mangold to film the 1960s-set story in which she would star as a young woman diagnosed with personality disorder and committed to an asylum.

Reimagined as Claymoore Hospital, the movie was actually shot at Harrisburg State Hospital in Pennsylvania, which opened in 1851 and closed in 2006. Great use is made of the authentic setting, dressed to look much as it would have during the era depicted.

While individual characters conveniently fit into some of the stereotypes associated with asylum patients, the film’s setting and autobiographical origins lend it extra authenticity. It stands as a rare attempt to humanize rather than exaggerate and exploit the behavior and illnesses of its patients.^[4]

6 Grave Encounters (2011)

A team of fake paranormal investigators spends the night in an abandoned asylum for a supernatural TV show in Colin and Stuart Ortiz’s debut. While “found-footage” horrors are ten-a-penny and ones set in asylums plentiful, Grave Encounters succeeds in providing uncomplicated shocks with a tight story, creepy visuals, and contemptible characters who gradually become more sympathetic as the terror of their situation sinks in.

We are shown the usual trickery of such shows, such as the cast arriving and immediately bribing a groundskeeper to pretend to have seen a ghost, wiring up doors to slam shut, and pretending to scream and jump at conveniently unseen apparitions. The premise for their show is that they will be locked inside the asylum overnight, and eventually, of course, increasingly strange things start to happen for real. While it doesn’t have anything to say about mental health, and the usual cliches are present, it does create an increasingly nightmarish scenario. Even the building itself appears to conspire against the team’s escape.

The asylum is referred to as Collingwood in Maryland, USA, but filming took place at Riverview Asylum in Coquitlam, Canada, which opened in 1913. Filming took place in disused areas, but it had not been empty long, hence the rather bland, modernized look, with little of the usual decay or damage. The found-footage approach and darkened hallways still conspire to create a creepy and claustrophobic atmosphere despite the lackluster setting.^[5]

5 Shutter Island (2010)

Martin Scorcese’s movie was adapted from the 2003 novel by Dennis Lehane and sits somewhere between horror, psychological thriller, and police procedural. Two U.S. Marshals head out to Shutter Island (an anagram of “truths and lies”), dominated by the high-security Ashecliffe psychiatric hospital, to track down a murderous escaped patient but find they have unexpected personal links to the mysterious institution.

In reality, no asylum ever existed within the grounds of a war fortification. Still, the areas of the asylum itself are depicted accurately both inside and out, including details such as the grounds and solariums. Many external shots were composed at Medfield State Hospital in Massachusetts, which opened in 1896, and were composited with other locations and CGI to create the fictional asylum.^[6]

4 The Dead Pit (1989)

An exploitative horror shocker by Brett Leonard (who later directed The Lawnmower Man), this sees a stereotypical “mad doctor” psychiatrist who experiments on his patients in the asylum’s basement killed by another doctor who then seals him and his remaining patients in the basement. Twenty years later, a new patient suffering from amnesia is admitted and inexplicably triggers an earthquake that cracks open the old basement, allowing the now-revived mad doctor and his slavering, zombie-like patients to run riot across the facility.

While many external scenes were filmed elsewhere, the idiosyncratic clock tower and many internal scenes were shot at the former high-security wing of Agnew State Hospital in Milpitas, CA (opened in 1906), lending the movie its only elements of credibility. Its representation of asylum routine largely consists of the typical aggressive dosing-up and fetishized hosing-down of eccentrically depicted patients.

The day room where several scenes are shot was the same one used for Green Day’s 1994 “Basket Case” video.^[7]

3 Asylum (2005)

The author Patrick McGrath grew up in the long shadow of Broadmoor Criminal Asylum in Berkshire, UK, where his father was the Medical Superintendent, and mental illness is often worked into his books in some way. This is an adaptation of his 1996 novel of the same name.

The asylum featured is High Royds, at Menston, West Yorkshire, which opened in 1888 and only fully closed just two years before filming began. However, having been gradually disused over many years, the grounds and interiors were already somewhat overgrown and shabby. Filming during the fall, plants were spray-painted green to make it look more like the intended summer setting. High Royds was among the most spectacular and imposing of all British asylums. However, the interiors were modified slightly to appear more like an asylum for criminals (which it was not), including adding a barred iron gate to one of the corridors.

The movie stars Natasha Richardson, Marton Csokas, and Ian McKellen and addresses mental health, jealousy, adultery, and passion, albeit in a somewhat melodramatic and old-fashioned manner.^[8]

2 The Professor and the Madman (2019)

Sean Penn stars as William Minor, who was committed to Broadmoor Criminal Asylum in Berkshire, UK, in 1872 after shooting dead a man that his mental health problems had caused him to believe was stalking him. While in the asylum, Minor contributed more than any other single author to providing definitions for what would become the first Oxford English Dictionary.

While Farhad Safinia’s movie uses two buildings to double as Broadmoor, St. Ita’s Asylum in Ireland is used for the majority of the interior and exterior shots. The huge building spans a staggering 1,630 feet (497 meters) and was the largest building project of any type built in Ireland while under British jurisdiction. It opened as the Dublin District Asylum in 1903 and closed to patients in 2017.^[9]

1 Titicut Follies (1967)

Of all the films on this list, Frederick Wiseman’s documentary on Massachusetts’s Bridgewater State Prison for the Criminally Insane may be the most horrifying and upsetting of all, as it is all entirely real. His camera wanders the cells, corridors, surgeries, and grounds and often simply observes, occasionally allowing for interviews. It is an enthralling and appalling deep dive into both the minds, illnesses, and acts of the people incarcerated there and those of the staff, institutions, and wider society who felt this environment was a suitable place for human beings.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had the film banned outright, and it could only be legally shown to audiences composed of students and medical or legal practitioners until as late as 1992. The reason given was an “invasion of privacy” to those being filmed. However, many believed that the appalling scenes depicted and their reflection on the state’s provision were the primary motive.

Screened to the cast before filming began on several movies on this list, Wiseman’s passive camera and interviews allow patients and staff to speak largely unguided, staff often unwittingly damning themselves by their own uninterested attitudes to their work. Little vignettes tell sad or upsetting stories, such as the doctor who can’t be bothered to put his cigarette out even when force-feeding a patient on camera, dropping his ash down the tube. These images provide unvarnished insight into a broken and dysfunctional system from which meaningful rehabilitation seems almost impossible.^[10]

The 1845 County Asylums Act made it mandatory for every county in England and Wales to build at least one asylum large enough to contain its “pauper lunatics”—the official term used for those too poor to afford private care.

Soon after, over 130 immense buildings appeared across Britain, housing between 350 and 3,500 patients each. As their gothic towers loomed from secluded hilltops, the terrifying notion of the lunatic asylum lodged itself in the public imagination forever.

While they deserve their reputation for the very real horrors inflicted on tens of thousands of patients, either through direct abuse or the many horrific and ultimately discredited “cures” used in asylums at one time or another , this list attempts to show that not everything about them was negative. It will also reveal how rumor, imagination, and popular fiction still stoke misconceptions that make their legend appear even darker.

10 Committal

While many believe that an “inconvenient” family member or spurned lover could be locked up in an asylum almost on a whim, this was not the case, by Victorian times at least.

The County Asylums Act saw standardized regulations applied to all buildings housing patients. All were regularly inspected by the Lunacy Commissioners to check adherence to the legislation and minimum standards of food, exercise, entertainment, etc. However, inspections were made without notice and not considered complete until they had seen or accounted for every single patient in the case files.

The asylums were always overcrowded, and those who ran the building understood overcrowding was bad for the “recovery rates” they would have to publicize each year. As a result, those who paid for the asylums and those inspecting them were not keen to allow people to be taken in and be clothed, fed, and managed purely because some family member had dumped them at their door, claiming they were insane.^[1]

9 Padded Cells

Little evokes the horror of the asylum quite like the padded cell. Popular fiction and film, in particular, present them as the ultimate embodiment of a human life discarded and left to suffer in terrifyingly absolute isolation. However, they were created as a solution to a far worse problem.

“Mechanical restraints” have been used to prevent patients from harming themselves or others since the earliest days of the asylums. Manacles held hands and feet together, and brutal strait jackets, leather harnesses, or chains bound patients to chairs or beds. Eventually, pioneering superintendents such as Dr. Robert Gardiner-Hill and Dr. John Connolly rejected the medical thinking of their day and began reducing their use, having padded cells fitted instead.

Although open to abuse or misuse, they served the same function but with far less risk to patients and staff—both often injured as patients were wrestled into awkward mechanical restraints in the past. The padded cells were introduced because they were believed to be safer, more dignified, and generally more humane than what preceded them.^[2]

8 Alcohol

Alcohol may not seem an obvious substance to introduce into a lunatic asylum, but all would have kept “medicinal” spirits such as brandy in locked cupboards. And up until the 1880s, many even had their own breweries. For example, at Bedlam, the corridors contained pipes with taps on them, and each attendant working there had a special key so they could pour themselves a glass whenever they wished.

Beer was viewed differently in the past and seen as a food supplement and a way of providing something safe to drink when clean water was harder to come by. Generally speaking, it would be a weak ale at only 2-3% alcohol and served with meals, so it wasn’t intended to get anyone tipsy. Male patients who worked on the asylums’ farms were often given a pint of beer with their evening meal. It was phased out in the 1880s as asylums began increasingly treating mental health problems believed to have been caused or exacerbated by alcohol.^[3]

7 Pregnancy

Perhaps the most commonly-repeated story regarding committal to an asylum is that of the young girl or unmarried woman who finds herself there due to pregnancy. As noted in the first entry, by the 1840s, all asylums were subject to scrutiny by the Lunacy Commissioners, and reasons for admittance had to be documented and justifiable.

Pregnancy outside marriage was certainly a taboo topic in Victorian society. Still, the workhouses, orphanages, and the Poor Law schools were set up to cater to people in such a position. Birth outside wedlock was not a category for certification as a lunatic. Doing so would have required the collusion of a doctor, a judge, the committee, and the staff at the asylum.

However, pregnancy was listed as a potential cause of madness, so in combination with the thinking of the time (and based on many unconfirmed testimonies), prejudiced doctors may have assumed that any girl or woman must surely be mad to have become pregnant before marriage. Those with money may indeed have been able to pull a few strings and grease a few palms to have a “shameful” family secret quietly disposed of in a private asylum.^[4]

6 Secret Tunnels

Many county asylums are said to have had “secret” tunnels running underneath them, built to provide a hidden entrance away from public view. At London’s Colney Hatch Asylum, for example, a tunnel ran between the railway station and the asylum, rumored to have been used to bring in members of the royal family, politicians, or other VIPs in secret if they had some sort of mental breakdown.

In truth, all would have been built for more disappointingly mundane reasons, such as bringing in or moving around supplies that needed to be kept dry. Also, county asylums were designed for paupers, and anyone well-off enough to need to be hidden from the public would have sought more discreet private treatment elsewhere.^[5]

5 Broadmoor

Broadmoor is often referred to as a “prison” due to the horrific acts committed by many who have resided there over the decades. However, although it has gone by various names over the years, it has always been a high-security psychiatric institution and never a prison.

Opening in 1863 as “Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum,” it took all of the criminal lunatic patients formerly housed at Bedlam in central London. The M’Naghten trial of 1843 eventually led to laws that essentially meant a person could be either a criminal (responsible for their actions) or a lunatic (unable at the time of the offense to fully understand or control their actions) but not both at once. So the “criminal” component of the name was later dropped. Strangely, Britain’s second such institution opened as “Rampton Criminal Lunatic Asylum” decades later in 1912, giving more insight into how unclear legislation relating to crime and insanity has traditionally been.

Broadmoor has housed many of Britain’s most notorious law-breakers, including the “Moors murderer” Ian Brady, the “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe, and two patients incidentally both portrayed on film by the actor Tom Hardy. These include London gangster Ronnie Kray in Legend (2015), and Charles Bronson, dubbed “the most violent prisoner in Britain,” in Bronson (2008).^[6]

4 Labor

The county asylums were planned to be as self-sufficient as possible, producing most of their own food, completing their own laundry, providing most of their own services and amenities, and making or repairing the buildings themselves and the clothing patients wore. It is often assumed this was “forced labor,” tantamount to slavery, but although it was certainly strongly encouraged, forcing the patients to work was not legal.

Men tended to be allocated to work on the grounds and landscaping, farms, and occupations such as woodworking, boot and shoe-making, painting and decorating, etc. In keeping with the notions of the time, women were usually given domestic roles such as needlework and hair-picking (for mattresses), along with work in the laundries and kitchens.

While some patients saw it as a chore, rewards of extra food, alcohol, tobacco, or even money were usually offered as incentives, and some patients enjoyed their roles. Patients even participated in building parts of the asylum, including some beautiful chapels constructed with completely willing patient labor.

While their massive in-situ workforce conveniently kept running costs down, it was also genuinely seen as beneficial to the patients, as idleness was viewed as being detrimental to both their recovery and general well-being.^[7]

3 Cells

Film and other media favor images of patients perpetually locked up in dark, dank cells unless being dragged off for some arcane medical experiment or torturous therapy.

By Victorian times, most patients slept in dormitories with as many as fifty other patients. Some were given individual cells, usually because they could not be trusted during the night. But in the daytime, all patients were moved into the day-rooms, verandahs, courtyards or gardens, or out to work.

It was not permitted to keep patients locked in cells for extended periods without documenting exactly how long they had been kept there and for what reasons. Since an attendant or nurse had to be constantly posted outside any cell where a patient was kept during the day, it was not something the asylum’s management wanted to do any more than they (rightly or wrongly) believed they had to.^[8]

2 Clock Towers

The clocktower is another pervading and often chilling image of the Victorian lunatic asylum. These ornate but austere Gothic constructions, some as tall as 140 feet (42 meters), appear to survey the surrounding landscape, inevitably stoking speculation about exactly what unseen horrors might exist beneath them.

Most were actually water towers, with the clock added as a convenient secondary function. Water towers drew from deep wells, and some had filtration to provide cleaner water, but the main reason they were introduced to most asylums from the 1860s onward was to fight fires. In the days before motorized fire engines, and bearing in mind most asylums were located some distance from towns and cities, the tower had to be tall enough so that an attached hose would offer enough pressure to project a jet of water up to the highest floors of the building.^[9]

1 Patients

Even without considering what any given patient may have suffered due to their particular mental illness, it is almost universally accepted that no patient would ever want to be locked in an asylum. Who would?

However, there are many reports spread throughout history (going back as far as Bedlam in the 17th century) of patients who begged not to be discharged or to be allowed to return. While institutionalization sometimes played a role here (the person had been in some institution so long, it becomes unthinkable to live outside it), the appalling conditions for the poor outside the asylum from Medieval times until even as late as the 1970s in some cases are also telling.

For all its restrictions and regimens, the asylum offered three square meals a day, a clean bed and clothing, and many luxuries we would now take for granted, such as indoor toilets, bathing facilities, lighting, and central heating. Some patients even left the asylums cured and went on to lead happy and fulfilling lives because of or despite their time there.

Two other things many former patients also expressed their appreciation for were the beautiful grounds in which they could escape the trappings and pressures of daily life. And perhaps above all else, a community of people who understood them and were therefore far less judgemental than many of those outside, something often so lacking to those suffering from mental health problems today.^[10]

What kind of people ended up in a lunatic asylum? Melancholy teenagers? Violent criminals? Unmarried mothers?

Most of the hundreds of thousands of patients in the dark days of the “madhouses” were unknown paupers and not remembered. Occasionally though, throughout history, certain patients have been rather more well-known.

Here are ten examples of the somewhat famous, very famous, and downright infamous locked away in an asylum.

10 King George III

England’s King George III reigned from 1760 until his death in 1820 and suffered severe mental health problems at times. Although causing occasional mockery, the idea that even a king could suffer from madness also generated increased sympathy toward other sufferers.

He became prone to ranting, convulsions, erratic behavior, and depression and was taken to the private Greatford House Asylum in Lincolnshire. His treatment there would have been typical of its time—painful and completely ineffectual—including bleeding, induced vomiting, and blistering of the skin with hot glass vials.

While historians often suggest his condition may have been a genetic blood disorder called porphyria rather than madness, recent studies by London’s St. George’s University suggest it was most likely a mental health problem, possibly bipolar disorder, which afflicted the king.^[1]

9 Ronnie Kray

Ronald “Ronnie” Kray was one-half of the notorious “Kray Twins,” born in East London in 1933. With his brother Reginald “Reggie” Kray, the identical twins ruled London’s gangland during the 1950s and 60s, glamorizing it with their penchant for stylish suits, celebrity parties, and brutal violence.

Imprisoned in 1956 and separated from his beloved brother, Ronnie’s already ailing mental health deteriorated further. In 1957, he was committed to one of the secure wards at Long Grove Asylum in Surrey, where he was so unwell he formed a relationship with a radiator and believed another patient to be a dog.

An audacious plan was hatched to break him out—Reggie and his entourage visited, with Reggie dressing as similarly as possible to Ronnie. Meeting in the bathroom, Ronnie handed his distinctive black-rimmed glasses to Reggie before the two returned. Ronnie walked out with the others as Reggie remained, staff, assuming Reggie was Ronnie while his brother made good his escape. Shortly, Reggie took off his brother’s glasses and signed out, leaving unchallenged to join the others back in London.

Both received life sentences for murder in 1969, with Ronnie being transferred to Broadmoor Asylum in 1979, where he would remain until his death in 1995.^[2]

8 Louis Wain

Born in 1860, Louis Wain drew for newspapers and magazines in the 1880s to support his mother and five sisters after his father’s death. His greatest success came when he began drawing stylized cartoons of cats engaged in human-like activities, bringing him modest fame and fortune.

When his wife and love Emily died of cancer three years into marriage, his mental state deteriorated, while his cats began to take increasingly bizarre form. He also made a series of incredible futurist pottery figures during this time.

Increasingly ill, his trusting nature saw him swindled out of most of his money and eventually admitted to Springfield Asylum in London as a pauper in 1924. Discovered there a year later, a fundraising campaign (endorsed by the likes of War of the Worlds author H.G. Wells) was organized. Wain was moved to the more comfortable Bethlem Royal in Kent and then Napsbury Asylum, where he continued to paint stunning, psychedelic images of cats until he died in 1939.^[3]

7 Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh admitted himself to the asylum of St. Paul de Mausole in Saint Remy, France, in 1889. He had two rooms there—one to sleep in and another to use as his studio. Although the regime was not deliberately harsh, he received only meager food and water, his “treatment” consisting only of bathing. Eventually, he was allowed to wander the picturesque gardens, then finally, the fields beyond. He would paint many images of the asylum and its surroundings while there.

His shift to darker colors during his time at the asylum led to Starry Night, one of his most famous and evocative works created there.^[4]

6 Margaret Nicholson

Margaret Nicholson lost several prestigious housekeeping jobs due to scandalous affairs with other employees, eventually struggling to eke out a living as a seamstress. She developed a fixation on the royal family, believing she should be queen. In 1776, she was injudiciously allowed to approach King George III when she whipped out a knife and lunged at him. The king was unharmed—she made her assassination attempt wielding only a blunt cake knife.

Nicholson then suffered the indignity of being strip-searched to confirm she was not, in fact, a man. After stating, “England would be drowned in blood for a thousand generations” if she wasn’t queen, she was declared mad, escaping almost certain execution and being sent to Bedlam asylum instead. King George wrote to say she should be given sympathetic treatment while there.

Nicholson received many well-to-do guests who brought her gifts and were keen to meet the “celebrity madwoman.” She remained in Bedlam until her death at age 83.^[5]

5 John Clare

Born in 1793, Clare lived in the small village of Helpston, UK, working as a “potboy” at The Blue Bell Inn. He sold poetry to stave off his parents’ eviction, meeting with quick success and early recognition.

When his last collection, The Rural Muse (1835), gained praise but poor sales, his existing mental problems and alcoholism intensified. After attacking an actor on stage, he was advised to attend High Beach Asylum in Essex and said to have believed he was Lord Byron and had two wives, one of whom was his first love Mary who died three years earlier. Missing his family, he left and walked the 80-mile (130-kilometer) journey back home alone.

In 1841, he was admitted to St. Andrew’s Asylum in Northampton as a pauper, where he was encouraged to continue writing and produced his most famous work, “I Am.” He would remain in the asylum until his death in 1864. In obscurity by that time, his work was reappraised over the following century, and he is now among Britain’s most highly-regarded poets.^[6]

4 Richard Dadd

Richard Dadd was a talented young painter recruited to accompany a grand tour of Europe and Asia, providing sketches and paintings of the trip as was fashionable among the wealthy of the time. In Egypt, he suffered intense headaches and sunstroke, believing he could hear the voice of the sun god Osiris. When the expedition reached Paris in 1843, his behavior had become so odd he was dismissed.

At London’s St. Luke’s Asylum, he was diagnosed insane, but his father was reluctant to commit him and took him home instead. Osiris urged him to battle the devil, and Dadd began to see Satan in everyone around him. He withdrew to his rooms, living only on ale and hard-boiled eggs.

Dadd’s father asked him to “unburden his mind,” taking him for a meal and walk on a local heath, where Richard stabbed his father to death. Tragically, he planned the attack believing his father was the devil in disguise. His rooms were searched, with police discovering drawings of friends and relatives with their throats cut. Dadd fled to Calais intent on killing the Emperor of Austria, but after attempting to kill a fellow passenger, he was arrested and committed to Clermont Asylum at Fontainebleau. Confessing to murder, he was then extradited to England.

Dadd was committed to Bedlam and then moved to Broadmoor Asylum, where he produced many of his most celebrated works, including The Fairy-Feller’s Masterstroke (1864). He would eventually die in 1886. His works, now worth millions, can be seen at The National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, among others.^[7]

3 James Tilley Matthews

Matthews was, by day, a mild-mannered London tea seller but had a remarkable alter-ego. In Revolutionary France, he worked brokering peace between England and the new Republican leadership. When those he supported failed to gain power, he was arrested, accused of being a spy, and imprisoned. Eventually liberated, he claimed the English government had abandoned him to the French and that the Home Secretary was at the heart of a series of conspiracies. His wild and often very public talk about having been a Scarlet Pimpernel-esque double-agent saw him committed to Bedlam asylum in 1798.

Two doctors certified Matthews sane, but Lord Liverpool stated he was “a dangerous lunatic who should be confined in perpetuity,” backed by Bedlam’s apothecary, John Haslam, who studied Matthews for his book Illustrations of Madness (1810). Many consider this to be the first case study of paranoid schizophrenia.

Matthews believed a criminal gang constantly interfered with his mind through “pneumatic chemistry,” using magnetic waves from their “air loom” device. This would inflict on him such pains as “lobster-cracking,” which made his circulation stop, and “apoplexy-working with the nutmeg-grater,” which tracked his thoughts and movements. Haslam’s book is still used to show the terrifying thoughts and conspiracies which can be typical of schizophrenia.

Subsequent research suggests Matthews had indeed been in France unofficially backed by the British government, keen to see the “correct” people end up in power. These “invisible forces” then denied all knowledge of Matthews upon capture and maintained a wall of silence upon his return, suggesting his illness may not have been the only factor ensuring he remained conveniently locked away in an asylum for good.^[8]

2 Nellie Bly

Elizabeth Seaman (1864-1922) was a journalist born in Pennsylvania, better known by her pen name Nellie Bly. She is most famous for two particular journalistic endeavors, the second of which was traveling around the world in just seventy-two days (a world record at that time) in emulation of the famous book by Jules Verne.

She first made waves in 1887 with an undercover exposé of life in a lunatic asylum. Taking up residence in a women’s boarding house, she tried to act as strangely as she could but found such behavior was so common there as to be barely noticed. Eventually escalating until she began to scare the other residents and the police were called, she was finally committed to New York’s Blackwell’s Island Asylum for women.

Once inside, her task was to appear as “normal” as she possibly could, to see how she would be treated knowing she was sane and exhibiting no unusual behavior. Her subsequent exposé, “Ten Days in a Madhouse,” hinged on how difficult she would then find it to be taken seriously or affect her release despite her obvious sanity and the appalling conditions experienced by the other women incarcerated there. She was unable to convince anyone, and the newspaper she worked for eventually had to contact the asylum to arrange for her release.^[9]

1 Jack the Ripper

While the true identity of the world’s first celebrity serial killer has never been proven, several suspects ended up in asylums. One Aaron Kosminski was even named as a prime suspect by two of the case’s key investigating police officers.

Some believe Kosminski may have been mixed up with another patient named Nathan Kaminsky, who had been arrested in Whitechapel in December 1888, at which time the murders abruptly stopped. This would explain why Kosminski did not at all fit the description of a killer when he was visited by the investigating officers and essentially suggests that the asylum brought them the wrong suspect to see.

On the other hand, Kaminsky was apprehended in a state of severe aggression less than a month after the final killing, after which he attacked anyone he could at the asylum and had to be kept in restraints. While it will likely remain only a theory, it is a fascinating potential explanation of the demise of the world’s most notorious serial killer—the killings stopped because he was locked up in London’s Colney Hatch Asylum.^[10]

The Victorian era saw hundreds of vast buildings spring up across the UK, Europe, and North America as governments sought to address the “epidemic” of madness that appeared to be growing in lockstep with the industrialization of the western world. The agreed solution was to build immense institutions run under strict regimes and isolated from the rest of the community.

Urban sprawl eventually surrounded many of the old asylums. By the 1960s, it was decided they would need to be wound down and closed, “releasing” their patients back into the community whether appropriate housing and care had been arranged for them or not.

While scant consideration was given to patients, alternate uses for the buildings themselves were rarely considered either. So hundreds of well-built, often astoundingly beautiful, historic structures were left to rot and face eventual demolition. Here is a handful of those that found other fates besides the wrecking ball.

10 Royal Bethlem, London

The original Bethlehem Priory was founded in Bishopsgate in 1247 and used to house “mad” patients since as early as 1377. A brand new version of the institution (by then commonly known as “Bedlam” was built at Moorfields in 1676 and designed by the eminent scientist and architect (as well as great rival of Sir Isaac Newton) Robert Hooke (1635–1703).

The third version, known as “Royal Bethlem,” opened at Southwark in 1815 and was the largest of all, housing up to 425 patients at any one time. It also initially confined all of Britain’s “criminal lunatics.” Bedlam was notorious throughout its history as a place of cruelty and suffering, although by the 1860s, it had begun housing only fee-paying middle-class patients.

Today: Closing in 1930, the former “lunatic palace” is—with unavoidable irony—now the London home of the Imperial War Museum, documenting the history of warfare and conflict, which typifies mankind’s madness at its most extreme and destructive.^[1]

9 Claybury, Essex

Built as the Fourth London County Asylum at Woodford, Essex, Claybury was the largest of all British asylums in terms of its overall footprint. It housed around 2,740 patients at its peak.

It was designed by George T. Hine (1842–1916), who was responsible for the building of more asylums than any other architect; he exclusively created asylums for the whole of his career. Fifteen across the UK are attributed to him, with extensions or additions made to five more.

Today: This immense building, which was once secured and surrounded by railings to keep its pauper patients inside, closed in 1997 and is now a gated community. Its wards are now converted to housing, its chapel is now a swimming pool, and its lavish recreation hall is now a gym. It is among the most desirable locations on the outskirts of London and, besides the still rather exclusive gym, is closed off to the public, meaning that these days, the paupers are all locked outside its grounds instead.^[2]

8 Traverse City, Michigan

This third asylum for Michigan opened in 1885. It quickly became the city’s largest employer, growing to encompass over 1,400,000 square feet (130,064 square meters) of floor space with around 3,000 patients in residence by 1959.

Its first medical superintendent, Dr. James Munson (1848–1902), oversaw the asylum’s regime for its first 39 years (retiring at the age of 76). He believed that the patients being within beautiful surroundings with plenty to keep them occupied was the key to wellbeing and recovery. He also abolished the use of straitjackets and other forms of restraint.

Today: Frustratingly, the asylum’s beautiful Italiante central block—the most handsome part—was allowed to fall into disrepair and be demolished in 1963, while the remainder closed in 1989. A $60,000,000 redevelopment program began in 2000, with the remaining 1880s buildings and extensive grounds renovated to a mix of residential, shopping, catering, hotel, and conference facilities.^[3]

7 The Lawn, Lincoln

The Lincoln Lunatic Asylum, later the Lawn, was a charitable public asylum that opened in 1820 at the center of the ancient town, next to its huge castle and overlooked by its cathedral. When the church’s main tower was completed in 1311, it was the only structure in the world taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The Lawn took patients on a charitable basis, meaning most did not have to pay at all. It had a good reputation, inspired by its first visiting medical physician, Dr. Edward Parker Charlesworth (1783–1853). Charlesworth insisted that mechanical restraints (bindings, cuffs, straitjackets, etc.) were abolished and that violence and physical coercion should never be used upon the patients, which was then a controversial approach.

Today: The Lawn closed in 1982 and was later used by the local council. It is now a conference center and coffee shop, with its grounds open as a public park.^[4]

6 Mapperley, Nottingham

Nottingham was progressive during Georgian times when medicine for the poor was usually left to unqualified quacks and questionable herbal remedies. It built its general public hospital as early as 1781 and opened the very first of Britain’s “county asylums” at Sneinton in 1812.

As its first asylum became grossly overcrowded, middle-class patients were moved to new accommodations at The Coppice in 1859. However, as Nottingham continued to grow into a large industrial city, Sneinton again became overcrowded, with the much larger Mapperley Asylum eventually built in 1880. This, too, was full by the end of its first year and soon expanded.

During the 1950s, Mapperley’s superintendent, Dr. Duncan MacMillan, reclassified all the chronic (long-term) patients as “voluntary.” Instead of assuming rehabilitation for them was impossible, as was the case at most asylums, he encouraged confidence-building and their integration back into society. No new patients were allowed to be shut away in the dingy old chronic wards, and the doors to all wards were gradually kept unlocked.

Today: Closing in 1994, half of the old buildings are now converted to luxury housing, while the northern side is still in NHS use as the University of Nottingham Medical School. There is also a large medium-security forensic unit built within the grounds.^[5]

5 Matteawan State Hospital, Beacon, NY

Located in pleasant surroundings between the Hudson River and Fishkill Mountains, Matteawan opened in 1892 and catered for various classes of mental health problems. It also incorporated a significant quota of those then labeled as “criminally insane.”

Its most famous patient to fall under that category was George Metesky, aka the “Mad Bomber.” He terrorized New York with homemade explosives planted in public locations from the 1940s until his arrest in 1957. Perhaps surprisingly, he was released just sixteen years later, in 1973.

Today: The role of Matteawan evolved from the 1970s into what is now Fishkill Correctional Facility, which still uses the old asylum buildings to house a mix of high-security and medium-security psychiatric patients. It also operates a minimum security work-release program for those undergoing rehabilitation.^[6]

4 Royal Albert Idiot Asylum, Lancaster

The first “idiot asylum” was founded in Surrey by John Langdon Down (1828–1896), who first described the syndrome that now bears his name. It was then formally known as “idiocy.” Langdon Down created an asylum designed to house, educate, and support people with learning differences to live productive lives beyond its walls.

Similar institutions appeared in the west, east, and midlands of England, and Royal Albert was originally known as the Northern Counties Idiot Asylum, designed in an extravagant Flemish style in 1870. It would initially house 500 children between six and fifteen years of age for up to seven years each before they were “ready” to use their skills in the outside world.

These high ideals were gradually lost over time; by 1948, its population had swelled to over 800, 35% of whom were aged over thirty-five and considered long-stay cases.

Today: The building closed in 1996 and was converted to the Jamea Al Kauthar Islamic College, a private Islamic boarding school for girls aged eleven to eighteen.^[7]

3 Buffalo State Hospital, NY

Buffalo State hospital opened in 1880 and was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886), who went on to be widely regarded as the first American architect to achieve international renown. It was designed in the Kirkbride style, which saw staggered sets of ward blocks spreading out from the central administrative block rather like the wings of a bird in flight.

Buffalo was arguably the most impressive of all the American asylums, with its incredibly imposing gothic towers looming down from the enormous central block like something from a dark fairytale.

Today: Despite the addition to the State and National Registers of Historic Places in 1973 and designated an official National Historic Landmark in 1986 (one of only seven in Western New York), it sat empty and neglected for years. A lawsuit eventually forced state authorities into proactively pursuing its renovation. The Hotel Henry (named after its architect) occupied the central third of the complex but closed in 2021 but fortunately reopened as The Richardson Hotel. Tours are available of the remaining abandoned areas of the old asylum, with an expectation they will eventually become apartments and offices.^[8]

2 Glenside, Somerset

Glenside opened in 1861 as the Bristol City Lunatic Asylum, built to a corridor-pavilion layout typical of its time.

Its first departure from psychiatric use was during WWI when it became the Beaufort War Hospital. During the war, 29,434 wounded soldiers were treated there, while all its psychiatric patients were sent home or decanted into other asylums. When the patients returned in 1919, they included one Elsie Leach, mother of the actor Cary Grant.

Today: The buildings were modernized and converted into residence halls and training areas for the UWE Faculty of Health and Social Care, with its grand recreation hall, adapted into a cafeteria. It is a rare example of a former hospital building finding a genuinely fitting new use that makes the best of the existing buildings rather than lazy demolition and/or partial conversion to housing. The former chapel now hosts a museum packed with information and objects about Glenside’s long history as an asylum and war hospital.^[9]

1 Gheel, Belgium

Dymphna was born in Ireland to a wealthy family in the 7th century and sunk into depression after the death of her mother. Her father mourned, too, his advisers eventually suggesting he remarry to overcome his pain. He sent emissaries across Europe, who returned claiming they could find none so delightful and suitable as… his own daughter, Dymphna.

Unsurprisingly horrified, she fled to the continent, accompanied by a priest, the court jester, and his wife. They traveled to Antwerp in modern-day Belgium and settled in the small village of Gheel. Dymphna’s father pursued her and executed the priest when he tried to defend her, and when she continued to resist, he murdered Dymphna, his own fifteen-year-old daughter. She was martyred, becoming Saint Dymphna in around AD 650.

Miracles and cures were said to occur for those suffering from mental health problems who visited Gheel, and so St. Dymphna became the patron saint of the mad, with increasing numbers then brought to the village by friends and relatives. At first, patients were housed in a small asylum building attached to the church built in St Dymphna’s honor. But they were eventually accommodated in the homes of ordinary families living in Gheel.

Today: Remarkably, although the original buildings are gone, the system at Geel (formerly Gheel) remains very similar to this day. While most other western countries (including the rest of Belgium) adopted a similar model of placing patients in vast out-of-town institutions away from the general populace, Gheel families continue to provide similar care to patients with mental disorders. Some families have been doing so for many generations, and it has become as normal and accepted as any other practice handed down through a family line.^[10]