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News
The Weston Democrat
By John Clise
A St. Albans man with family ties to Weston has used the old Weston State Hospital as the backdrop for an upcoming book
titled The Hospital: Rude Awakenings.
Sean McCracken first came to Weston to visit his wife Cora’s family. Her grandmother, Abigail Murphy, lives here.
He first saw the hospital in 1999.
He was inspired to write the book by an experience he had last year while visiting here. An early morning walk brought
him to the hospital grounds and found them shrouded in a misty white haze.
According to McCracken, it lends itself to a spooky ghost story.
The main character, Emily Flesher, wants to stay in
Weston and becomes a psychiatric nurse at the hospital and undergoes what McCracken calls a "baptism of fire" with her first
patient.
McCracken isn’t giving up many more details about her first experience than that. He doesn’t want
to spoil it for the reader.
I read the first two chapters of the book and it is quite intriguing. I look forward to getting
my hands on a copy of the book so that I can finish it.
Sean did quite a bit of research on the hospital and it seemed to show when I interviewed him with WHAW’s Steve Peters,
as part of a recent press junket through central West Virginia.
I think it is a great thing that someone has used the hospital
as a key location in a book. The history of the building is intertwined with our community.
We should all buy a copy of the book and use it to promote our town as a place to be. Surely, once the book begins to sell,
it will bring curious readers to Weston in search of the hospital.
The book’s website is at www.thehospitalrudeawakenings.com.
He
will be appearing at the upcoming Eat’n, Sing’n and History Festival on May 21 at the Hacker’s Creek Pioneer
Descendants' Library in Horner.
Anyone interested in speaking with McCracken about his book and buying a copy should plan to attend the event.
The night watchman rounded the back of the hospital near the kitchen and glanced upward toward the window above
the raised hallway leading from the kitchen into the facility. The eerie feeling was back; the feeling that someone was watching
him. He moved closer to the kitchen staring at the window and suddenly eyes peering back at him. A greyish figure was in the
window. The face of a woman. Then she was gone.
That is but one of many ghost stories told to Sean McCracken as he
researched the history of the Weston State Hospital for his books.
“I ain’t ’fraid of no ghosts!”
I began repeating this phrase as I pulled into the parking lot of the old Weston Hospital — the one that housed the
criminally insane and mentally distraught for more years than West Virginia’s been a state. I was meeting McCracken
to learn more about one of West Virginia’s more infamous ghost harbors.
The facility has long been closed and
has fallen into disrepair. But today it stands before me as a challenge to conquer. Are there really ghosts inside? Did this
hospital once experiment on patients’ brains? Did doctors perform some of the nation’s first lobotomies here?
I want to walk these halls and see for myself if anything is still stiring about.
I’m hoping McCracken will guide
me in finding out the answers to these and many more questions left behind when the state closed the hospital in 1994. McCracken
heard many ghost stories from Weston residence over the years during his research; maybe, I figured, we could experience one
for ourselves.
The institution’s amazing history begins in 1858 when the state of Virginia wanted to house its
lunatics in an asylum. By 1864 the doors opened to patients and prisoners needing a cure for their mental illnesses.
I
can only image what type of illnesses, instrumentation and “cures” were being used in these archaic times. According
to McCracken, who spent hours perusing documents in the state archives, not only were mentally ill criminals sent to Weston,
but also mentally challenged individuals who didn’t have other places to live. He recalled a patient being sent to the
mental ward for masturbating for more than 30 days at a time. I didn’t ask what the treatment was or if they found a
cure. I thought maybe it was time to move on to seeing if we could get closer to the buildings and find some paranormal activity.
The tours of earlier years are no longer available and the place is locked tight, but I started immediately for the
front door and McCracken hesitated. He had been asked to leave the property before. I guess vandalism over the years led the
state, which is trying to sell the property, to hire a guard.
McCracken insisted on keeping watch for the guard as
I went to the front double doors of solid oak. I found a broken window to peer into and as I was readying to take a photo
through the broken glass a siren went off in the distance and I jumped, before finally laughing. I was more afraid of ghosts
than I thought.
McCracken found while reading 130 years of documentation that the hospital used frontal lobotomies,
electro-shock therapy and water closets as “cures.” The deaths at the facility, which number in the thousands,
are documented, with many buried in cemeteries located on the back acreage.
For Weston, the hospital was a place of
employment and conversation. Almost everyone has a hospital story, including the Perkey family which first came into contact
with the facility around 1915. Hayward Perkey, 85, a retired Episcopal priest, recalls his parents met while working in the
hospital in 1915 and later married. Perkey was at one time the facility’s barber.
“It was such an enormous
place. It wasn’t a horrible place, but it was always overcrowded and full of everyone from the insane to those who just
needed a place to live,” he says. “It really wasn’t until the 1950s when patients who needed real medical
attention, psychiatric help, began receiving needed care. Before that it was more of a type of warehouse for the mentally
disturbed.
I never made it inside. The guard, Joe Ables, was kind enough to let us walk around the outside parameter.
Ables has never encountered anything other than pesky reporters and writers wanting to get inside. He believed that over the
years a few stories and tales about the place were as fabricated as ghosts. But as long as we did
I took a peek into
a couple of other ward sections and didn’t find much of anything but fallen plaster and paint. I didn’t even get
vibes while walking around.
I guess the two-foot thick sandstone walls are keeping the mystery inside. Or, could it
be that it was daylight. Maybe I should return when it’s dark.
Contact Connie at cdale@graffitiwv.com
***NEW***
NATIONAL PRESS RELEASE
These Walls Can Talk: West Virginia Author Spins Ghost Story About Historic, Former Weston State Hospital
(WESTON, W.Va.--) Author Sean McCracken is hoping he can scare West Virginia government officials into saving
the stately Victorian building that once housed Weston State Hospital. McCracken is the author of "The Hospital: Rude Awakenings"
a thriller about the ghosts that haunt the building's now hollow hallways available at www.thehospitalrudeawakenings.com.
And while McCracken wants to tingle the spines of those who read "The Hospital: Rude Awakenings," he hopes
the buzz created by the book will provide a kick in the pants to officials who have the power to preserve the great old building
on the banks of the Monongahalia River.
"Everybody loves a good ghost story, but not everyone appreciates the history that we carelessly let crumble
all around this. I think my book delivers on both counts," McCracken said. "Since the hospital closed in 1994, the state of
West Virginia has seen fit to close the buildings to everyone and that ticks me off."
"The 140-year-old hospital is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and is the largest hand-cut
stone building in the Americas. People should be learning from this building, and the state shouldn't be afraid to let people
near it," McCracken said. "But since they are, I figured I'd emphasize that point by conjuring up a story that should scare
people off of the property."
"The Hospital: Rude Awakenings" is the first novel in a two-part series set at the former Weston State Hospital.
Using the hospital's history as an institution for the criminally insane, and others, it deals with the story of Weston native
Dr. Emily Fisher who realizes her life's dream of working at the hospital in 1992, two years before the state shuts it down.
But Emily's dream soon becomes a nightmare from which she cannot escape. After the work with her first patient takes a deadly
turn for the worse, Emily begins to learn about the hospitals' sinister secrets, secrets that will not just "go away" even
after the hospital closes in 1994 and loses her job in the process.
Emily manages to continue in medicine, becoming a licensed MD who appears to have left troubled Weston State
Hospital behind, until a potential buyer tours the hospital in 2002 and stirs the spirits that still inhabit the old building.
One by one, former hospital staff die for no reason and strange phenomena are reported on the hospital grounds. Emily becomes
award of the increasingly mysterious happenings at the former hospital when another former colleague comes to visit her ...
but does not live to tell about it.
The carnage attracts the attention of some paranormal investigators who decide to take Emily to Canada against
her will, so she'll be safe while they investigate the spooky goings on at Weston State Hospital. Emily is enlisted in the
groups' fight to rid the hospital of its restless and vengeful spirits, setting the stage for McCracken's second book, "On
the Inside" which is due for release April 16 at www.thehospitalrudeawakenings.com.
CONTACT: Sean McCracken is available for interviews with book reviewers, historians and others by emailing
Radar1979@charter.net. or by calling 304-541-6642.
|
| St. Albans Monthly June 2006 |
Will Rogers on the radio again
#410, May 21, 2006
HORNER, West Va.
I'm in West Virginia today for the Eatin', Singin' and History Festival.
This county is home to the old insane asylum, the Weston
State Hospital, a huge historic structure of hand cut stone. It's empty now, but a fellow wrote a new book kinda based on
it. He called it "The Hospital: Rude Awakenings". It's a scary ghost story, fiction of course, but it's got as much truth
in it as The Da Vinci Code.
|
| Metro Kanawha...Charleston Gazette, May 2006 |
By JOHN WICKLINE, Staff Writer
 |
|
WALKING THE HALLS OF AN INSANE ASYLUM — For
St. Albans author Sean McCracken, a visit to the town of Weston turned out to be quiet an experience. The vacant, towering
stone structure of the historic Weston State Hospital drew McCracken into his quest for a ghost story. His book, “The
Hospital, Part One: Rude Awakenings,” is a fictional story of a former nurse at the insane asylum. His second book,
“The Hospital, Part Two: On the Inside,” is due out in March or April and takes readers to the Lewis County community
of Weston and inside the walls of the old hospital. |
Rumors swirling around the ominous Weston
State Hospital, the stone structure that has dominated the city’s skyline, lifestyle and hopes for the future for nearly
two centuries, have run the gamut from the grotesque to ghosts to gambling.
For as long as there has been a Weston
State Hospital, there has been stories, and West Virginia writer Sean McCracken has extracted another one from the mysterious
insane asylum which he hopes will answer the questions he left hanging in his first novel “The Hospital, Part I: Rude
Awakenings.’’
Emily Flesher, the fictional character who left Weston for greener pastures after losing
her nurse’s job when the hospital closed, returns to delve into the mysteries of why so many people connected with the
old hospital started meeting their doom under questionable circumstances.
“All of the questions at the end of
Part I are answered relatively quickly,’’ McCracken said. “But it takes a couple of twists and turns, more
twists and turns than a bucketful of snakes. It becomes less of a mystery and a little more of a physical mission.’’
A
resident of St. Albans, McCracken became enamored with the grand old lady of Weston on his first visit to town with his wife,
who had relatives still living in town. He knew the former state hospital easily lent itself to something more than deterioration.
“The
fact that it was vacant drew me over to it,’’ he said. “It was deserving of something ... a book, a movie,
a documentary, something ... and I fell more and more in love with it.’’
The idea for a ghost story came
from the foggiest idea, so to speak. McCracken took an early morning walk around the facility one August morning following
a soaking rainstorm.
“The water had pooled and was rising up into a mist,’’ he recalled. “It
looked haunted. I thought, ‘What does this lend itself to? A ghost story would be perfect. I started that night, and
I finished Part I by Thanksgiving. I submitted it to two publishers, and five days later, it was picked up.’’
Doing
the historical research for both Part I and II proved to be quite an undertaking. There had been no formal history done on
the hospital and its workings, so McCracken had to dig the old-fashioned way.
“Everyone was very willing to chime
in with their stories,’’ he said. “They don’t have any idea how valuable they are.
“Right
from the start, I wanted to put the hospital in a good light, that it would be a couple of bad apples doing these questionable
things, trying a lot of experimental stuff. But a lot of the facts I learned were better than any fiction. A lot of events
in the books are based on incidents I know to have happened or were related to me by the people.’’
Part
II is expected on the bookshelves some time in March or April, McCracken said. Most of the book will take place in Weston,
and several events will occur inside the ways of the old hospital.
“There’s a lot more drama, and you learn
more about the supporting characters and their quest to uncover the secrets,’’ he said.
The second book
will bring to an end the story of the old Weston State Hospital, but not necessarily an end to the story line.
“There
will not be a Part III, but I definitely plan on keeping the characters within a 200-mile area,’’ McCracken said.
“I’ve fallen in love with these characters because they become a part of you. So let’s just say that when
the hospital woke up, it wasn’t the only thing to wake up.’’
Readers wanting a sneak peak at Part
II or wanting to learn more about the book can visit its Web site at www.thehospitalrudeawakenings.com.
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| Review by Gov. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia |
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| Gov. Manchin's take on Part 2 |
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