Norwich State Hospital (Connecticut, USA)

The story

Norwich State Hospital took in its first 95 patients in October 1904, on a level terrace above the Thames River where the towns of Norwich and Preston meet in New London County, Connecticut. The nomination says the site was purchased in 1903 and gives both 1903 and 1905 for the start of construction, to plans by Cudworth and Woodworth, a local Norwich firm. The institution was first called the Norwich State Hospital for the Insane; it became Norwich State Hospital in 1926 and simply Norwich Hospital in 1961.

From a single building on about 100 acres, the campus spread to more than 30 buildings and roughly 900 acres at its height. The layout followed the thinking of the period: widely spaced brick wards set along curving, tree-lined drives, with broad lawns between them, reflecting the period's belief that the mentally ill should be cared for in special, therapeutic settings. At the center stood the three-and-a-half-story Administration Building of 1908, decorated with French Gothic details such as drip moldings and pinnacled dormers, and fitted inside with a grand staircase, a tiled fireplace and wood paneling painted to imitate marble. The earliest wards (1905 to 1908) echoed that Gothic look; most later wards switched to a Colonial Revival style with hip roofs and porticos. Many wards carried the names of figures from the history of American psychiatry, among them Kirkbride, Brigham and Earle.

The hospital was a small town of its own, with a laundry, bakery, greenhouse, fire station, laboratory, shops and staff cottages. A system of concrete tunnels, begun in 1908, linked the buildings underground. It carried utilities, and patients were also moved through it.

The patient population was broad. Besides people with psychiatric illness, Norwich housed elderly patients, people with alcohol and drug dependency, people found not guilty of crimes by reason of insanity and, between 1931 and 1939, tuberculosis patients. The Salmon Building of 1905 served as the maximum-security ward for men. In 1939 a state commission looked into conditions at the hospital. The population peaked at 3,184 patients in 1955.

As treatment moved away from large institutions, the census fell. By 1987, when the hospital was nominated to the National Register of Historic Places, many of the older wards stood empty, and the remaining patients lived in 1950s buildings to the south. A 70-acre historic district with 40 contributing buildings was listed in 1988. The hospital closed for good on October 10, 1996, and its last patients were transferred elsewhere.

The legend

No named ghost is attached to Norwich State Hospital, and no reliable source gives a date for the first ghost story. The reputation seems to have taken hold once the hospital shut in 1996 and its vacant wards and tunnels started attracting urban explorers and trespassers, and with them the stock imagery of the abandoned asylum: shadows moving in corridors, faces at windows, screams and moans, and apparitions of children. Maintenance workers in the Earle Building were said to have heard odd noises and seen tools fall, though that claim comes only from the Syfy episode recap.

The best-documented episode is television. Ghost Hunters, the Syfy series built around the TAPS team, devoted season 6, episode 10, "Norwich State," aired May 5, 2010, to the site, and the show presented it as the first investigation the state had officially allowed there. Jason Hawes, Grant Wilson, Britt Griffith, K.J. McCormick, Amy Bruni and Kris Williams reported, according to a community blog post, a figure about three to four feet tall in patient rooms; a dark shape passing down a corridor and a dim glow on the stairs of the research center; howls, moans and the sound of something being dragged inside the Salmon Building; voices heard underground in the tunnels; and a door that appeared on camera to swing open by itself near Bruni and Williams. The team's verdict was that the place was haunted.

VH1's Celebrity Paranormal Project also filmed at the hospital in episodes two and four of its first season, but called it "Warson Asylum for the Criminally Insane" on screen. The History Channel's Life After People used the site too, in a January 2010 episode, though that program is about decay, not ghosts.

Local paranormal groups add orbs, mists, footsteps and the sound of children playing, and a 2012 community blog post repeats claims of lobotomies in the research center and of many suicides and killings on the grounds. None of those claims is backed by records in our sources, and they should be read as rumor. What the record does show is quieter and sadder: generations of vulnerable people passed through these wards over more than nine decades, and a 1939 inquiry into their care. The ghost stories are best understood as the shadow that history casts, not as evidence of anything.

What remains today

Very little of the campus survives. In 2009 the State of Connecticut transferred 393 acres of the former hospital grounds to Preston for a token $1, and the town took on the environmental cleanup the land needed. Demolition began in spring 2011, and the Salmon Building, the setting of some of the Ghost Hunters footage, came down around that time. In May 2016 Preston agreed with the Mohegan Tribe to redevelop the property as the Preston Riverwalk, which the tribe describes as a "non-gaming destination" with attractions, a hotel, shops, restaurants, housing, a marina and an RV park.

The 1908 Administration Building is the main survivor. It has been weatherized, and the Mohegan Tribe has said it plans to keep and restore it as part of the project. Photographs from 2024 show it standing empty. Anyone expecting a sprawling ruin of the kind seen on television will find a cleared, fenced site instead.

Visiting

The grounds are closed to the public, fenced and patrolled, and going in without permission is trespassing. The site is also an active cleanup and demolition zone, so do not try to get in, and avoid the old tunnels, which became a favorite route for trespassers in the 2000s.

Legal ways to explore the story do exist. Preston's redevelopment agency has, from time to time, organized official bus trips so the public could see the cleanup inside the fence, so check local news or the town of Preston for any announcements. The full National Register nomination (reference 87002424), with its building-by-building inventory and historic photographs, can be read online through the National Park Service, and the Ghost Hunters episode is the easiest way to see the interiors as they were in 2010. If the Preston Riverwalk opens as planned, the restored Administration Building may one day offer a lawful look at the last piece of the hospital.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #87002424 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #87002424) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Norwich State Hospital — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Uncasville, CT 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for New London, CT 1892 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1892 · Public domain (USGS)
6. Administration Building, Norwich State Hospital (1908) — Historic Buildings of Connecticut — Historic Buildings of Connecticut
7. Episode Recap: Norwich State (Ghost Hunters S6) — Syfy — Syfy
8. Norwich State Hospital series recordings (Corey Sipe, community blog, 10 May 2012) — Patch — Patch
9. Public has chance to see progress of cleanup at former Norwich Hospital property — The Day (not read directly) — The Day (seen in search results only
10. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.