Haunted History of The Blackburn Inn Formerly the Western State Lunatic Asylum

In the heart of the Shenandoah Valley, nestled between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains, sits the town of Staunton, Virginia. And right near the middle of it all is the Blackburn Inn, a place that has worn quite a few hats over the past 200 years.

Today, it's a beautiful boutique hotel with manicured grounds, historic architecture and rooms that look nothing like what you would expect from a former psychiatric hospital. But that's exactly what this property was originally built to be.

Over the years, it has served as an asylum, a state hospital and a prison before eventually becoming the hotel and residential community that occupy the property today. That's a lot of people passing through the same buildings, and not all of them were there under pleasant circumstances.

So it's probably not surprising that the Blackburn Inn has accumulated its share of ghost stories.

To understand those stories, though, you really have to start with what this place was originally supposed to be, because the hospital that opened here in the 1800s was very different from what it eventually became.

When an Asylum Was Supposed to Be Beautiful

The story starts in the early 1800s, when attitudes toward mental health care were beginning to change. Virginia was looking to establish a new asylum, and Staunton made sense because of its location along the Valley Turnpike and the relative ease with which patients could be transported there.

There was also a broader belief developing at the time that a person's surroundings could play a role in their mental health. Instead of simply locking people away, reformers promoted the idea that beautiful grounds, fresh air, architecture, gardens and peaceful surroundings could actually help patients recover.

With that philosophy in mind, about 80 acres were selected for what became the Western State Lunatic Asylum.

Architect William Small created the initial design, but as the hospital's needs grew, Dr. Francis T. Stribling, who served as superintendent, decided the facility needed to expand. Stribling was an advocate of what was considered more compassionate treatment at the time, and he brought in architect Thomas R. Blackburn, a former student of Thomas Jefferson, to redesign and expand the hospital in the 1830s.

And Blackburn definitely left his mark on the place.

He incorporated the Jeffersonian architectural elements that are still one of the most recognizable things about the property today: large wings, landscaped grounds and the gorgeous cupola crowning the main building.

By 1836, this wasn't just a functional hospital. The architecture and grounds themselves were part of the treatment philosophy.

It's hard to reconcile that with some of what would happen there later.

When Western State Changed

As the hospital grew, its history became much more complicated, and not always for the better.

One of the most controversial figures associated with Western State was Dr. Joseph Spencer DeJarnette, who served at the hospital from 1905 until 1943 and eventually became its superintendent.

DeJarnette was a passionate supporter of eugenics and compulsory sterilization. He believed that people he considered "unfit" should be prevented from having children, a group that included psychiatric patients and people with a wide variety of illnesses and disabilities.

Those ideas weren't confined to Western State. Eugenics had become a powerful movement in Virginia and elsewhere in the United States, and Virginia passed its Eugenical Sterilization Act in 1924. The state's compulsory sterilization law was subsequently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the infamous 1927 case Buck v. Bell.

Patients at Western State were among the people forcibly sterilized under these policies.

It's one of the darkest parts of the hospital's history, particularly when you consider how different it was from the original philosophy behind the property. This was supposed to be a place where beautiful surroundings, gardens and thoughtful architecture would help people heal. Over time, overcrowding and changing medical practices transformed it into something very different.

As the patient population grew, the idyllic environment became harder to maintain. Restraints, physical coercion, straitjackets, electroshock therapy and lobotomies eventually became part of psychiatric treatment during different periods of the hospital's operation.

Patients also died here.

Some were buried in a cemetery on the property, including people whose graves were not individually marked in a way that would make them easily identifiable today.

When you're standing on the beautifully landscaped grounds now, knowing what happened during some periods of the property's history makes the place feel very different.

And then there's the story of the doctor.

The Doctor in the House

There's a rumor that during the hospital years, one of the doctors living on the property died by suicide inside his home.

I've never found enough documentation to tell you confidently exactly who this doctor was or what happened, so I don't want to turn that story into established history simply because it has been repeated.

But it has become part of the lore surrounding the property.

Maybe his death had something to do with what he witnessed or participated in at Western State. Maybe it was completely unrelated. Or maybe the story itself has changed over the years.

That's one of the difficulties with researching places like this. You can usually establish the big pieces of history fairly easily, but the smaller stories often live somewhere between local memory, rumor and folklore.

And Western State had plenty of time for those stories to develop.

By the 1970s, overcrowding had become such a problem that a newer and larger Western State Hospital was built elsewhere in Staunton.

The old buildings weren't torn down.

Instead, they became a prison.

From Psychiatric Hospital to Prison

Of all the possible second lives for a beautiful 19th-century psychiatric hospital, becoming a correctional center probably isn't the most cheerful one.

But that's what happened.

The Staunton Correctional Center for Men moved onto the former Western State property and operated there for decades.

There isn't nearly as much easily accessible information about the property's prison years as there is about its hospital history, but this is where some interesting firsthand stories begin appearing.

One former prison guard who worked there in the early 1990s reportedly remembered inmates talking about a ghost they saw outside on the grounds. They described the figure as a soldier.

Then the guard had an experience of his own.

One day, while he was alone in the kitchen, he heard someone very clearly whisper his name directly into his ear.

There was nobody there.

With so many buildings on the property, not all of them were needed to house inmates. Some employees and their families were apparently allowed to live in houses on the grounds.

A former resident shared a story with me about living in the white house at the front of the property from 1977 until 1990.

She never actually saw a ghost.

I think that's worth saying because when you're researching a supposedly haunted place, it's very easy to only repeat stories from people who say they saw something. Someone can live on the property for 13 years and never see a single apparition.

That doesn't mean she thought everything about the house was normal.

There were unexplained noises, and objects would occasionally disappear only to turn up somewhere strange later. More than anything, though, she remembered the basement.

Going down there made her feel anxious and nauseated. She described it as though something didn't want her there.

Could that have been a patient trying to warn her away from something? Could it have been some kind of emotional residue left behind by everything that happened on the property?

Or was it just an old basement in a former psychiatric hospital that happened to make her uncomfortable?

I don't know.

But I also don't think I would have volunteered to spend much time down there.

The Prison Closes

The Staunton Correctional Center finally closed in 2003, leaving this collection of beautiful old buildings without a purpose again.

For a property that had already survived nearly two centuries of changing ideas about medicine, institutional care and incarceration, that could easily have been the end of the story.

Instead, developers saw what was still there.

In 2006, Robin Miller and Dan Gecker began working to restore and redevelop the historic property while preserving as much of its original character as possible.

Original heart-pine floors, detailed molding and other architectural elements survived. So did the spiral staircase leading toward the cupola, one of the most distinctive features of the original Blackburn design.

But according to another story associated with the property, construction workers found something considerably less charming during the renovations.

A human skeleton.

The story says skeletal remains were discovered inside the walls of one of the former prison buildings. Who the person was, how long the remains had been there and how they ended up inside the wall aren't clear from the accounts I've found.

It's exactly the sort of story that sounds perfect for a haunted former asylum and prison, which is also why I would love to see better documentation before treating every detail of it as fact.

Still, the story became another piece of the property's growing lore.

Redevelopment continued. The Villages at Staunton opened in 2008 with residential units, portions of which continue today as the Lofts at the Villages of Staunton and Stribling Lane Apartments.

Then, in 2018, another section of the historic property reopened as something completely different.

The Blackburn Inn.

The Blackburn Inn Today

The Blackburn Inn opened as a boutique hotel and conference center with 49 rooms, combining the property's historic architecture with a much more comfortable reason to spend the night there than most of its previous residents had.

Today, the hotel is a member of Historic Hotels of America and takes its name from Thomas Blackburn, the architect responsible for so much of the property's distinctive appearance.

You can walk the landscaped grounds, see the original architectural details and climb the spiral staircase toward the cupola for views of Staunton and the Shenandoah Valley.

It's honestly a beautiful property.

If you arrived knowing nothing about its history, I'm not sure you would immediately look at it and think former lunatic asylum and prison.

But once you know, it's difficult to unknow it.

And since the Blackburn Inn opened, guests have added their own experiences to the stories that were already circulating about the property.

The Shower That Turned Itself On

During the summer of 2018, a group of friends reportedly checked into the Blackburn Inn expecting a relaxing stay.

At around 4:00 in the morning, they woke to the sound of running water.

When they went into the bathroom to see what was happening, they found that the shower had turned itself on.

Could there have been a plumbing issue? Absolutely. In a historic building, a shower behaving strangely doesn't immediately send me to ghosts.

At 4:00 in the morning in a former psychiatric hospital, though, I'm probably not going back to sleep quite as easily.

Another couple who stayed at the hotel in 2021 reported something much less dramatic but, in some ways, creepier.

They stayed in Room 402, which overlooks the grounds. Nothing moved. They didn't hear footsteps. Nobody appeared at the foot of the bed.

They just couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching them.

That's one of those experiences that's almost impossible to evaluate from the outside. There's nothing to measure and nothing really happened. But anyone who has ever suddenly felt like they weren't alone knows exactly the sensation they're describing.

When the Dog Started Growling

Then there's the dog story.

Dogs sense everything, don't they?

At least that's what we like to tell ourselves when they suddenly become fixated on something we can't see.

One guest reported that their normally relaxed dog suddenly began growling at a corner of the hotel room. The dog kept its eyes fixed on something that apparently wasn't visible to its owner.

At the same time, the bathroom lights began flickering and throwing strange shadows around the room.

Could the lights have simply been flickering while the dog heard something inside the wall?

Sure.

But that's probably not what you're thinking about while your dog is growling at an empty corner in a hotel built inside a former psychiatric hospital.

The Shadow at the Foot of the Bed

One of the more unsettling accounts comes from a guest named Chris, who reportedly stayed in a room near the elevator.

While sleeping, he woke to the sensation of something lifting his legs approximately three feet off the bed.

At the foot of the bed stood a black shadow.

That's a very different kind of experience from a strange noise or a shower turning itself on. If the account happened exactly as remembered, I imagine it's also the kind of thing you don't easily forget.

Sleep itself complicates stories like this, though. Experiences that happen while someone is falling asleep or waking up can be incredibly vivid, and things like sleep paralysis can create the sensation of a presence in the room or even visual figures.

That doesn't make the experience feel any less real to the person having it.

And I doubt knowing that would make me particularly calm if I woke up and saw a black figure standing at the foot of my hotel bed.

The Chair From Western State

One of the strangest stories connected to Western State doesn't actually take place at the Blackburn Inn at all.

A local resident told a story about shopping at an antique store in Lexington, Virginia, with his mother and brother when they came across an old chair.

According to the label, the chair had been purchased at an auction from Western State Hospital.

He estimated that it had been manufactured sometime around the 1920s. It wasn't an ordinary chair. It had restraints at the arms and ankles.

The moment he saw it, he said he felt something he'd never experienced before. To him, there was an overwhelming sense of pain and human suffering coming from the chair.

His mother reached out to touch it.

He grabbed her hand and stopped her.

He also remembered seeing what appeared to be dried material stuck to one of the arm restraints. He thought it looked like dried skin or tissue, although he couldn't actually say what it was.

He never forgot the chair or the feeling he had standing near it.

And he wished he'd never seen it.

Could knowing where the chair supposedly came from have influenced the way he reacted to it? Of course. If you tell someone they're looking at a restraint chair from a historic psychiatric hospital, they're already going to view it differently than they would an ordinary antique chair.

But I think that's part of what makes old objects like this so interesting.

Even if there's nothing supernatural attached to them, they can still carry a history that changes the way we feel when we're standing in front of them.

And if you do believe that places and objects can somehow hold onto what happened around them, a restraint chair from Western State Hospital would probably be about the last antique you'd want to bring home.

So, Is the Blackburn Inn Haunted?

I don't know that there's a way to answer that.

What we do know is that the property has been occupied for nearly 200 years. It began with an unusually compassionate idea for its time: that beautiful surroundings, thoughtful architecture and access to nature could help people suffering from mental illness.

Then the institution changed.

It became overcrowded. Patients were restrained and subjected to treatments we now look back on very differently. Virginia's eugenics program resulted in people being sterilized against their will. People lived here, worked here and died here.

Then the hospital moved out and prisoners moved in.

After the prison closed, the buildings changed again.

Today you can check into a beautifully restored room, walk the landscaped grounds and climb toward the same cupola that has looked over Staunton for generations.

Maybe some of the stories associated with the Blackburn Inn are ordinary experiences interpreted through the lens of the property's history. Old buildings make noises. Plumbing does strange things. Lights flicker. People experience sleep paralysis. Dogs hear things we don't.

And maybe some of the stories are harder to explain.

Either way, I think the Blackburn Inn is more interesting because its history isn't one-dimensional. It wasn't simply a "horrible haunted asylum," and I don't think reducing it to that does the place—or the people who lived there—justice.

It started with an idea that was surprisingly humane for the early 1800s. Some genuinely dark things happened there later. Then it became a prison. And now it's a hotel where people willingly pay to spend the night.

That's quite a life for one property.

Whether you're interested in history, architecture, ghost stories, or you're simply looking for somewhere unusual to stay in the Shenandoah Valley, the Blackburn Inn has a little bit of everything.

Beautiful architecture, complicated history and just enough unexplained stories to make you wonder what's still hanging around after the lights go out.