St. Albans Sanatorium: A Personal Experience With a Dark Energy [DEAD Time]

Welcome back to DEAD Time, where I share personal paranormal experiences, interviews with experts on the unexplained, and stories about supernatural encounters. I hope you left a light on for me. In a previous installment of DEAD Time, I shared paranormal experiences that followed my family when I was growing up, all of which seemed to be attached to my mother. I don’t consider myself a paranormal expert; I don’t claim to have proof that ghosts exist; I’m not a medium; but for some reason, I’ve been surrounded by unexplained phenomena for most of my life.

I’ve been writing about horror movies since 2016. Prior to that I was heavily involved in the paranormal community and worked alongside my husband in haunted attractions, one of which is actually haunted. My involvement with the location I’m referring to led to my family experiencing a lot of unexplained activity in our home and ultimately a paranormal encounter which was so terrifying, it caused me to sever ties with the paranormal community a decade ago.

I find it interesting that I experienced frequent unexplained activity while growing up, but I’ve lived alone and I’ve had roommates, and never experienced anything unusual—until my husband and I relocated to a small town in Virginia. Oddly enough, we moved to the same small town he was happy to leave a few years earlier when he moved to North Carolina, where we met. In retrospect, there were obvious synchronicities I didn’t notice at the time.

We were excited about moving into the small apartment in Radford, Virginia. It had a clear view of the abandoned St. Albans Sanatorium and we had plans to get involved with the paranormal groups there, as well as the haunted house they had each Halloween. We were so anxious to be able to pursue our mutual interest in the supernatural, and the view of the old sanatorium sitting above the river was so spectacular, that we didn’t think anything of the busy funeral home and crematorium beneath our balcony. We now realize the proximity of the sanatorium, the New River, and the funeral home might have been a trifecta for paranormal activity; and our apartment was perfectly in the middle.

There are stories about bloody competition between Native Americans and European settlers for the land St. Albans sits on before it was constructed in 1892 as a Lutheran boys’ school, as well as accounts of bullying and violence at the school. In 1916, it became a hospital for people who were mentally ill or considered insane. There were reportedly horrific procedures performed on the patients who were unfortunate enough to end up there. The entire complex became known as a torture chamber, and in particular, the room used for hydrotherapy treatments has an especially dark history. The doctors used insulin-induced comas, lobotomies, and electroconvulsive therapy to try and cure various forms of mental illness. There is a bathroom known as the suicide bathroom which was allegedly the site of multiple patient suicides while the hospital was functioning.

St. Albans Sanatorium finally shut down in 2003 and a previous patient bought the property, with the hopes of turning it into a research center. The massive property quickly became known as a hotbed of paranormal activity and was a popular destination for ghost hunters and paranormal investigators, and eventually also began hosting a haunted house every October.

My husband and I vividly remember our first visit to St. Albans Sanatorium. When you enter the building, there is a tangible heaviness and feeling of dread in the air as you’re surrounded by walls with peeling paint and graffiti and a general sense of decay. During our initial tour, unseen forces tossed a dirty couch cushion out into a hallway we had just walked through, much to our delight. We quickly became immersed in the local paranormal community surrounding the old asylum, conducted and hosted paranormal investigations and tours, and worked on the annual haunted house. We spent all our free time at the sanatorium and became fascinated by the gloomy energy that permeated the buildings. We thought our involvement was harmless and a source of research and entertainment.

We participated in many paranormal investigations at St. Albans, during which we used digital recorders to capture EVPs or Electronic Voice Phenomena, which contained unexplained voices. We listened to the recordings at home using special software and attempted to decipher what the voices were saying and spent a lot of time trying to debunk photographs we had taken during the investigations. We never managed to successfully get a picture of a “ghost”, but we do still have a few EVPs that contain messages from disembodied voices we can’t explain. Despite the fact we don’t have documentation of it, we did experience several seemingly supernatural occurrences. There were a few rooms in the sanatorium that made me uncomfortable to the point I had to leave; the hydrotherapy room was particularly unnerving for me, and the rumored suicide bathroom filled me with such a feeling of unease, that I could not remain in the room. There were a few times during investigations, or even when I was just walking through the buildings, when I was sure I wasn’t alone.

The annual haunted house also became a source of unexplained activity for us. Keep in mind, this was a decade ago, so I can’t speak to what goes on there now, but during our time at St. Albans there were people working for the haunt who enjoyed trying to provoke the tortured souls that may reside there. Obviously, I can’t prove it, but I believe a lot of the unexplained events we witnessed could have been caused by this provocation. During one incident, a haunt actor who was a close friend of ours was rehearsing and was scratched on the back right in front of us, by something that seemed angry. There is a very dark, depressing energy that hangs over St. Albans Sanatorium and it’s generally not a good idea to rile up whatever is there.

Eventually, the dark energy invaded our personal lives. A few people warned us about things that might become attached to us and follow us home and advised us to do things like converse with the spirits each night as we left. We didn’t take this seriously until we started experiencing strange things in our apartment and began to have that same feeling of not being alone. We weren’t afraid at first and that might have been a mistake because one night something happened that I wish I could forget.

I wasn’t feeling well and went to bed early. As my eyes adjusted to the darkened room, I could make out what appeared to be a black mass on the ceiling across the room from me. Slowly, the mass began to crawl across the ceiling toward the bed. Sensing that I was in danger I became frightened, and I called out for my husband. When he began to enter the room, a nearby light bulb blew out. He could sense there was something in the room with us and it was malevolent. We decided to perform a cleansing ritual and afterward believed we had contained the entity that was there, but there was still a palpable negative energy in our home. Ultimately, we had so many adverse experiences in that apartment, and at St. Albans, that we made the difficult decision to no longer be involved with the sanatorium or the local paranormal community. The unhealthy gloom that seemed to be hanging over our family finally resolved when we moved away; it felt like a veil was lifted.

That was nearly a decade ago and we haven’t experienced anything unusual in any of the places we’ve lived since we lived in that apartment across from the sanatorium. I had planned to listen to the EVPs we captured back then, which I still have on my computer, but just the simple act of finally writing this down and sharing it publicly for the first time has been so uncomfortable for me, that I haven’t been able to. You’ll just have to take my word that we captured unexplained voices in a haunted, abandoned asylum, attempting to communicate with us.

All these years later, I believe that the haunted house, at least the one we were involved with, was exploitative. Knowing that the souls of people who were suffering from mental illness, and were probably tortured, might be trapped in a location, and then attempting to provoke and mock those poor souls, is at the very least, unkind in my opinion.

I’m not going to tell you what I think happened that night in our apartment, but you’re welcome to draw your own conclusions from my story. Were we being haunted? Did a demonic entity attach itself to us and follow us home? We’ll never know. What I do know is that St. Albans Sanitorium is a place haunted by sadness and darkness and whatever still resides in those halls is better left alone.

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