Abandoned Insane Asylums

What secrets are buried within the crumbling walls of old asylums for the insane? Readers will get a glimpse of what these nightmare facilities were like before the dawn of the modern era. From the wretched overcrowding of London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital (which inspired the English word bedlam), where citizens could pay a penny for the pleasure of poking “lunatics” through the hospital’s bars with sticks, to Christian Church Hospital in Kansas City where Dr. Robert Patterson beat and chained patients and performed ice-pick lobotomies.

This scary book will rivet young readers while also giving them an understanding of how far mental health care has come. Eleven asylums are explored, with tales of not only what they were like but of the spirits said to still haunt them.