DeJarnette Sanitarium

Joseph Spencer DeJarnette, born 1866, became superintendent of Staunton's Western State Hospital — formerly the Western Lunatic Asylum — in 1906, where he built a reformer's reputation: restraints banned, wards unlocked, buildings expanded. In 1932 he opened a self-supporting, semi-private sanitarium next door for "middle-income" patients the era classified as mental defectives and drug abusers. The General Assembly renamed it the DeJarnette State Sanatorium in 1934.

DeJarnette was also a central figure of Virginia's eugenics program — the same man who unlocked wards lobbied for the 1924 compulsory sterilization law, championed the cause that produced Buck v. Bell in 1927, and publicly admired the Nazi sterilization apparatus, remarking in substance that the Germans were beating America at its own game. Virginia sterilized roughly 8,000 people between 1927 and 1979; he claimed the national figure at his urging exceeded 27,000 by 1938. He was forced out in the early 1940s and retired in 1943.

The building's later life complicates the legend. Renamed the DeJarnette Center for Human Development in 1975, it operated as a state-run children's psychiatric facility until 1996, when services moved to a newer site and the old complex was abandoned in place — papers, wheelchairs and all, as the explorer footage reliably shows.

Former patients of that second institution have written about returning to it in memory. Their accounts describe an imposing presence rather than a paranormal one — flashbacks converging with a decaying building, which is its own kind of haunting and requires no equipment to document. One former patient describes the structure's columns seeming to glow in the dark, and notes that the ghost-hunt genre has already done the building to formula: someone insists they saw a shadow move, someone else reports a cold draft.

The paranormal claims follow the abandoned-asylum template with unusual fidelity: shadow figures in the halls, cold drafts, voices, doors that respond to attention. It is reliably listed as the most haunted asylum in Virginia, which the archive files under listicle rather than incident.

The architecture does the marketing. The white-columned facade faces Interstate traffic, rows of boarded windows flank the entrance, and the interior supplies the rest — a ruin visible to every driver on the valley's main road, which is exactly where a public haunting needs to be.

The complex still stands at Staunton, periodically surveyed, periodically slated for redevelopment, and continuously trespassed. Virginia issued a formal statement of regret for its sterilization program in 2002 — the first state to do so — and in 2015 approved compensation of up to $25,000 for living survivors.

The dossier closes on a register note: a building can be haunted by its paperwork. DeJarnette's is — 8,000 documented cases — and the ghost hunters in the dark halls are, whatever else is true, in the right building.