Abandoned Hospital

The doctor will see you now.

"ALL DEAD HERE"

— The Stand (1994), spray-painted hospital sign

The creepy abandoned hospital/mental institution is a common setting in horror. Dirty tiles, broken cabinets, corpses in bloodstained lab coats/nurse uniforms, and rusted metal bed frames are all common sights. Other themes include grisly medical experiments and deformed, inhuman monsters shambling about, as well as using medical equipment as torture devices.

Even without all these things, hospitals are pretty creepy to begin with. One reason is because hospitals are associated with illness and death, as well as being places that really should be clean. Other reasons why hospitals scare many people include: diseases, the stale, blaring white atmosphere; doctors poking and prodding you with weird and often painful instruments like needles and syringes, and the thousands of dollars you have to pay after treatment. There is also the fact that, despite every attempt to prevent it by the staff, a good amount of death inevitably happens at a hospital, which doesn't help to assuage any creepiness. On top of all that, a hospital should be one of the last places to be abandoned in a crisis, since you would need to treat the wounded and sick even more during an emergency. If even the hospitals have been abandoned, things may have really gone south.

Many older, real-life 'abandoned hospitals' in the U.S were properly called "sanitariums," and have probably contributed to the trope imagery. Their abandonment was sometimes related to loss of funding or new prohibitively expensive fixing due to new government regulations. Often the places were created to treat specific diseases at the time that were eventually locally eradicated (TB clinics in particular) without any later re-purposing of the structures. In popular fiction, sanatoriums also tend to get mixed up with sanitariums, which can lead to conflation of physical and mental illnesses. As for the mental sanitariums, the enduring image of the ominous, Arkham-esque Gothic building sprawled out on a hill was in large part due to Dr. Thomas Kirkbride (1809-1883), who spearheaded a revolution in ethical treatment of mental patients. He insisted that mental institutions should be restful places, with large and rambling rooms and corridors, airy high ceilings and windows, and large outside grounds for the patients to roam and get their exercise (he probably did not insist on Gothic architecture, but that was how most buildings were built back then). Unfortunately, most of the Kirkbride buildings turned out to be much too expensive to maintain and renovate to be compatible with new medical technology, which resulted in a lot of them being abandoned.

It would make sense for the owners of the abandoned hospital to sell off everything of value, and maybe dismantle part of what's left for scrap metal and glass. Or some poor petty thieves will scavenge anything recyclable that's left. So logically, an abandoned hospital should look more like an abandoned and crumbling block of flats... which, again, rather leads one to wonder just what could have happened to cause this particular hospital to have its equipment and furnishings forgotten about.

See also Abandoned Warehouse and Never Recycle a Building. When a character wakes up in a newly-abandoned hospital, that's an Abandoned Hospital Awakening.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The 6th episode of Bleach was set in an abandoned hospital. Having Don Kanonji involved removed all the scary, however.
• In Death Note, it looks like Mello's mafia hideout is set up in one of these. The room where he has the confrontation with Soichiro looks like it was once an operating room, complete with tiles and a surgical lamp.
• Most of Doubt takes place in an abandoned psychiatric hospital.
• Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu has an episode set in an abandoned hospital — considering the non-effect it had on Sōsuke (who kept scanning the corners for snipers and suspecting mines in telephones while ignoring the ghosts and blood-curdling shrieks), however, the scene was mostly played for laughs.
• Ghost Hound features an abandoned hospital that was where Tarou and Mizuka were found when they were kidnapped. It is also the place Hideo and the others investigated in their youth and later became cursed from. It scores extra points for having been submerged underwater since the area was dammed decades before.
• One appears in My Dress-Up Darling, which has since been relisted as a photo studio location. Gojo and Marin scope it out with Sajuna Inui and her sister, which incidentally matches up with the anime they're preparing a cosplay for had a scene set in one. Ironically enough, Sajuna is the only one who's evidently scared by the place, and to make it even worse it starts raining leaving them trapped inside for a bit.
• In Summer Time Rendering, the old abandoned clinic owned by Sou's dad is a suspicious, run down building where several plot important events take place. Hizuru first met Haine here 14 years ago, Ushio and her shadow encountered a stray shadow here two days before her death, and Shinpei, Sou, and Shadow Ushio discover an entrance to a locked secret passageway behind a creepy headless statue in the operating room.
• Played with at large in YuYu Hakusho. The fight with the deranged Doctor in the Chapter Black Arc took place in an active neighborhood hospital, and due to his psychic doctor powers put to evil, immediately turned the place into a nightmarish pit of agonizing misery with having sent hordes of his own personal bug apparitions to infect the majority of the patients and staff with a super virus that would kill off anyone within a good several minutes. It also didn't help that his Territory powers also put out all of the lights and that he was essentially a deranged psycho who was contributing in a plan to eradicate the human race, amping up an atmosphere of horror and desolateness amongst conflict and tension. Though he is soundly defeated by the end, it is something to have witnessed how an abandoned hospital is potentially made in the process.

Comic Books

• In the Batman: Heart of Hush followup to Batman: Hush Dr. Elliot sets up shop in the derelict Sacred Heart Convalescent Home, where he performed surgery on an unwilling Catwoman and where Batman eventually tracked him to.
• Scooby Apocalypse: The gang comes across one in Issue 8 which may or may not be alive.
• The remains of the Weapon X bunker and the Facility can evoke this, with their partially empty and destroyed labs.

Fan Works

• Asylum of Doom: In the present day, Burke Lunatic Asylum is an abandoned ruin, having been left that way ever since a riot by the tortured patients in 1945 led to it partially burning down.
• The Second Try: Shinji and Asuka find and explore an abandoned hospital as they are scavenging the ruins of post-Apocalypse Tokyo-3 in the second chapter. Later on, they make use of its facilities to deliver their daughter.
• Persona 3 Momento Umbrae: The Inoto Hospital Research Facility was originally a site operated by a branch of the Kirijo Group, where they conducted experiments on children (one of them being Hamuko) as a means of ‘awakening’ their natural Persona potential. Though it’s been closed for more than ten years, it’s soon discovered by SEES that the place is teeming with Shadows.
• At the Edge of Lasg'len: A few years after a plague wipes out 90 percent of humanity, Thranduil, Lorna, and the crew of the Cruiser Aurora sail around the Irish coast, raiding whatever viable medical supplies can be found in the dead hospitals. They pick up a few survivors along the way.
• Techno, Cooper and Travis visit an abandoned hospital early on in Mirai SMP while hunting supplies.

Films — Animated

• Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker: Arkham Asylum has become this in the future.
• Gustav and Francis' house in Felidae. Specifically, it used to be a veterinary hospital, with the head doctor performing illegal experiments on cats in order to develop a liquid bandage.

Films — Live-Action

In general:

• Though barely recognizable as such, the Abandoned Smallpox Hospital on New York City's Roosevelt Island has appeared several times in movies. It was the site of Spider-Man and Green Goblin's final showdown in Spider-Man, and "Snow Storm", a level from Grand Theft Auto IV.

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Specific films:

• 28 Days Later: Protagonist Jim wakes from a four-week coma to discover he's the only living person in the hospital, and one of only a few still alive and sane outside it.
• The main characters in Accepted turn one of these into a college when they are rejected from the schools they applied to and decide to start their own.
• Alien:
  • The climax of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem takes place in an abandoned hospital. Abandoned except a bunch of xenomorphs.
  • Aliens plays most of the trope straight (but in The Future!) with the abandoned Med Lab.
• Alone in the Dark (2005) had a secret underground lab in an abandoned gold mine which has a hospital vibe, the hospital itself has been abandoned for 20 years.
• Black Angel Vol. 1: After capturing Ikko, Nogi holds her prisoner and tortures her in a hospital that is undergoing refurbishment.
• The movie Boo!. Long story short, a psycho burned it down years ago, killing lots of people, some rather stupid teenagers sneak in to do whatever it is stupid horror movie teenagers do, and lots of them end up possessed and dead.
• Cain Hill is set in the titular mental institution, which was closed down over a decade ago by the time the film takes place. The main cast have come to shoot a documentary about the place, only to end up victims of Chester Lockhart.
• In Creep (2004) the heroine finds an abandoned lab/maternity ward/surgical theatre deep underground, which appears to be where the creature comes from.
• In the horror-documentary Cropsey, the search for information about the child killer leads to the abandoned Willowbrook Mental Institution. The footage of abuse in the institution is one of the most disturbing aspects of the film.
• The Finnish movie Dark Floors. A wheelchair-bound autistic girl is being treated at a hospital, gets her father and some other people trapped in a parallel-universe abandoned hospital somehow, then defeats some kind of demon. It's not wholly clear what was going on, but it looked cool. Since the movie is essentially a long advertisement for the monster-metal band Lordi, and the monsters of the film are the members of the band...
• In the 2008 film Deadgirl the two main characters find the title character in an abandoned insane asylum they visit while skipping school.
• The mental hospital in The Dead Pit has all but one wing being completely abandoned.
• Death Tunnel, which was based on the Real Life example of Waverly Hills Sanatorium. A group of young women must escape a haunted hospital.
• Diary of the Dead. The protagonists take a fatally-wounded friend to a hospital, only to find it deserted. It's only then that it really begins to sink in that the wild stories they're hearing on the radio are true.
• Eloise takes place in an abandoned hospital, where the protagonist and three other characters invade an abandoned part (thanks to a fire) of a psychiatric hospital. Later everyone begins to be affected by the ghosts of doctors and hospital patients.
• The climax of The Frighteners takes place in an abandoned hospital. Said hospital was also the scene of a brutal series of murders some years previously. Scenes from this rampage appear to the hero in visions while he's trying to avoid being similarly slaughtered by one of the original perpetrators and her dead boyfriend.
• Although the asylum in Glass (2019) was not abandoned in the story, some of the asylum scenes have the look, with long dark corridors and empty space. The scenes were filmed in the actual abandoned (and since demolished) Allentown State Hospital, a former mental hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
• Grave Encounters is about a reality TV film crew locked in an abandoned insane asylum. The asylum was described by a caretaker (in-movie) that apparently was less about mental health and more a dumping ground for unwanted or embarrassing family members with lobotomies liberally performed in the hundreds by the head doctor of the facility. When the crew get locked in at night, the building's layout is impossible, ghosts appear everywhere, and they are trapped in nonstop darkness since it seems like they're locked in a totally different dimension. The sequel also is set in the same hospital and the building may be in on the horror after all.
• The Sanitorium in Hold Your Breath makes a brief appearance as the place where Klaus was executed.
• The Polish movie The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973), takes place in a crumbling, cobweb-filled yet beautifully ornate sanatorium where only a nurse and a doctor work.
• House on Haunted Hill (1999) is set in an abandoned mental institution. (The original merely took place in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed haunted house.)
• A part of the movie Jacob's Ladder happens in what is supposed to be a hospital which isn't closed; the hero is dragged to the surgeons through dark and dirty rooms full of mad people, blood, and severed organs.
• In Mirrors, Mayflower was this before it became a department store. Complete with rooms sealed in the basement where disturbing psychiatric experiments were carried out, and a massacre of the inmates which led to its closing.
• In A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, it was revealed that Freddy was conceived in a mental hospital when a nun was mistakenly locked in there, enabling the inmates to have their way with her. Said hospital, having been abandoned for several decades by the time of the movie, is also the location of a Plot Coupon that provides the key to Freddy's defeat in The Dream Child.
• One Missed Call features one towards the end, populated by only one green corpse in a wooden crate.
• In Pathology, the residents use an abandoned basement level of the hospital to conduct autopsies on the corpses of the others' victims to try and determine how they were killed. They then use the incinerator in the basement to get rid of the bodies.
• Redwood Massacre Annihilation: The group discover that the underground base they've tracked the killer to was used by the government as an experimental hospital. In it, they performed research on beings like the Redwood killer.
• In Scare Campaign, the team takes their next prank to an abandoned psychiatric hospital, where they intend to prank a new groundskeeper, Rohan. And then it all goes horribly wrong.
• Session 9 takes place entirely in a haunted, abandoned mental hospital being stripped of asbestos. The eponymous Sessions are audio recordings of the memory retrieval therapy of a former patient of the hospital who suffers from Split Personality disorder. In each session, the psychiatrist speaks to two characters, both of whom refer in terrified tones to the 3rd personality, a demonic entity named Simon, whose presence is revealed in the ninth therapy session (as is her repressed memory). The movie eventually reveals that the main character — who has memory repression and dissociative identity problems similar to the woman on the tapes — killed the rest of the demolition crew and his family (including his wife, newborn child, and even his dog) in brutal ways. The movie ends with an aerial shot of the months-later condemned hospital as the final session tape plays.
  • The movie was filmed in and around the notorious real-life abandoned State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers in Massachusetts — the one H. P. Lovecraft used as a model for Arkham Sanitarium (which, in turn, inspired Arkham Asylum). In a truly bizarre postscript, nine years after the movie was filmed, the crumbling remains of the hospital were renovated into a luxury apartment complex.
  • Just in case things weren't creepy enough — you know what else happened in Danvers when it had another name?
• 1940 documentary short Siege, about the siege of Warsaw in World War II, includes a scene where the reporter/narrator enters a hospital that was hurriedly abandoned when German bombs started falling in the area. Debris, blasted windows, and damaged medical equipment are all visible.
• In Snuff Movie, Arkadin's mansion was used as a hospital during WWII, and the west wing has remained untouched since then, and is still equipped with operating theaters. Arkardin and his three murder groupies hold the four actors hostage there and torment them.
• In When the Bough Breaks (1994), Macleah visits the hospital where Jordan was born, which has been closed for a decade, so she can read his records.
• Main setting of Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings is an abandoned sanatorium, which houses the cannibalistic Terrible Trio.
• The X-Files: I Want to Believe has several motifs of this trope (rust, dirt, old things, dirtied plastic dividers).

Literature

• Asylum. A partial instance in this book. Daniel Crawford enrolls in a boarding school that used to be a mental asylum. He and his new friends explore some undiscovered corners of the building where they find some mementos had been left behind from the building's days as an asylum.
• The Blackstone Chronicles, a series of short horror stories by John Saul, revolve around an abandoned insane asylum whose patients and former staff end up connected to a series of murders. It was later made into a computer game.
• Hannibal. FBI agent Clarice Starling returns to the mental institution, now closed down, where Hannibal Lecter was imprisoned to dig up some old files. Most chilling of all is the fact that one of the inmates (who'd cut off his mother's head) is now living there as a homeless outpatient, though nothing happens between them.
• In the novella Magic City, Nelson S. Bond's Meg the Priestess enters one of these, the Place of Stlukes, well known to the locals as a temple of HIM (Death).
• Matthew Swift: In the first two books, Matthew goes to an officially abandoned hospital that's occupied by a nurse who specializes in magical injuries.
• In Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere, Villains Croup and Vandemar use the lower levels of an abandoned hospital as their hideout.
• In Bruno Schulz's story, "The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass", the narrator travels to such an institution, where time has been “set back” and his dead father is, more or less, alive again.
• Sanctuary has Pittlow Asylum, a haunted mental institution that was purchased by a company that wants to give haunted asylum tours. Most complaints are from disability rights activists who don't want a place where mentally ill people were imprisoned and tortured to be turned into a spooky tourist attraction, but Morgan objects because they don't want the ghosts' privacy to be invaded by people who see them as freaks. Eventually someone else opens their home to the asylum ghosts so they can get away from the tourists.
• In The Stand by Stephen King, The Stovington Plague Center in Vermont turns into this After the End.
• Wolves of the Calla by the same writer features a hospital where doctors extract something from twin children that feed the psychic abilities of others. The children end up as overgrown idiots. It also turns into the abandoned version of this a little later in The Dark Tower story.
• In The Daevabad Trilogy, Nahri finds a ruined hospital that was once run by her now-deposed family and decides to rebuild it as a charity hospital. She's shocked to encounter local resistance from the part-human shafit, because her family used their healing powers to conduct hideous experiments on them. Ali has to step in and be the savvy one for a change, as he has a greater understanding both of the shafit community and of all the logistics involved in a huge building project. They find some of the gruesome evidence of her family's activities in the process.

Live-Action TV

• The majority of the action in American Horror Story: Asylum takes place at Briarcliff mental institution in the 1960s. It's creepy enough while it's still open but in the present-day Briarcliff has long since been abandoned and is explored by horror junkies curious about the legend of serial killer Bloodyface.
• Ash vs. Evil Dead: Baal kidnaps Ash and takes him to an abandoned mental hospital to brainwash him and lure his friends there so he can destroy the Necronomicon they're carrying. Lampshaded by Kelly when she sarcastically comments that the place looks "totally not scary at all".
• Battlestar Galactica: Kara Thrace spends a really spooky episode in one haunted by CYLONS!
• In a few episodes of Being Human (UK), an abandoned part of the hospital where Mitchell and George worked was used to allow George to transform without harming anyone.
• CSI: NY: In "Where There's Smoke," arsonist-turned-killer Leonard Brooks takes one of his victims to the now abandoned hospital where his mother, who worked in the burn unit, used to take him with her when she couldn't find a sitter.
• Happens in the first season of Dexter, where the title character finds Tony Tucci. Initially a suspect in the case, Tony had been kidnapped by the Ice Truck Killer and was near death.
• Doctor Who
  • In "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances", Albion Hospital isn't technically abandoned, but has that feel because all of its patients and staff have been converted into gas-mask zombies by The Virus.
  • In "Praxeus", Ryan and Gabriela go to the hospital in Peru where Gabriele's friend was dropped off, only to find this trope. Turns out the place was abandoned in a hasty quarantine after her friend turned out to have an alien infection.
• In one episode of Face/Off, the contestants are called to an abandoned hospital to start off the spotlight challenge. They had to sit in a dark room alone with a flashlight and come up with the concept of a monster that represents a phobia.
• The Ghost Adventures have gone to quite a few abandoned hospitals, to look for spirits.
• T.A.P.S., of Ghost Hunters fame, have visited a couple of these.
  • So have the guys on Ghost Adventures. As a rule, if great numbers of people have died there (somewhat inevitable with a hospital), there's gonna be some kind of haunting and paranormal investigators will come to check the place out.
  • So has the PRS at Paranormal State.
• The Haunting Hour episode "Lights Out" takes place in an abandoned mental hospital. This being a horror anthology series, it also turns out to be haunted by every single patient and a Mad Doctor who is still performing his experiments even after death. By the end of the episode, he's operated on one of the living protagonists.
• An episode of Highlander involved an abandoned sanitarium, and flashbacks to when it was in use, along with one of the more tragic characters in the series.
• In Kamen Rider Gaim Ryouma takes Mai to an abandoned hospital. Justified, because Invess had taken over the world at that point, and Zawame had been abandoned.
• The example appearing on Kamen Rider Ex-Aid is close to normal hospital and becomes one again at the end of the story. This is largely because it's the office of resident Backalley Doctor Taiga Hanaya and his de facto assistant Nico Saiba. It's not haunted. If it was he would have never settled down there.
• Kingdom Hospital pulls this off even while still open and busy with patients. There's some kind of otherworld hospital, possibly under it...
• The History Channel series Life After People goes into an abandoned hospital from the 1970s to show how the building has been taken over by nature in only 30 years.
• The Staff Station on Lost. That this was the site of Claire's captivity adds to the creepiness, as does her spotty memory of the incident.
• One of the Messiah series of Serial Killer dramas did this with a largely abandoned hospital.
• Midsomer Murders: Much of the action of "The Silent Land" centers around a supposedly haunted abandoned TB hospital.
• An episode of Millennium (1996) featured one of these when Frank and Lara went to investigate a killer nurse. The nurse would get his supplies from an abandoned hospital to avoid detection. To make things worse, the morgue actually contained a body that was forgotten and was used by the killer to test his skills and sate his morbid curiosity about death.
• The Originals: One episode in Season one takes place in an abandoned hospital when Genevive kidnaps both Klaus and Rebeka and tells Klaus how Rebeka and Marcel betrayed him back in the '20s when they plotted to bring back Mikael, with the intention of getting Klaus to kill his sister.
• Rizzoli & Isles: Maura is held prisoner in an abandoned mental hospital in "Hide and Seek".
• Scream: The TV Series has Lakewood General, which features in the fourth episode of the first season. Back in the day, when it was open, it was where the late Serial Killer Brandon James was treated for his deformities. Now, it's where the current killer has set up their lair... or rather, a mock-up of one they intend for the main characters to find as part of the overall game they're playing.
• Technically, Scrubs was shot in one of these in Los Angeles. The cast and crew said they weren't bothered by this; in fact, Zach Braff would often duck into an empty room to catch a nap during long filming sessions.
  • Played for laughs in one episode. Budget cuts forced the hospital administrators to close a wing of Sacred Heart until they had the funds to open it up again. Turk and J.D. go surfing on gurneys in the emptied section of the hospital.
  • At least once, people seeking medical treatment have entered the hospital which serves as the set.
• Stargate SG-1: Carter was once kidnapped and held in a recently-closed hospital by a millionaire suffering from a terminal disease who wanted to take a look at her because she'd once been host to a Tok'ra symbiote.
• Supernatural: Starting in Season 10, Crowley starts using an abandoned mental hospital as his palace on Earth.
• Featured in the Torchwood episode "To the Last Man". It was the location of a time shift meaning people from the past appeared momentarily in the hospital corridors, giving a very spooky 'haunted' feel to the place. Meanwhile, the Torchwood team were also appearing to people from the past, scaring them.
• Van Helsing (2016):
  • The first portion of the first season is set in the hospital Vanessa's comatose "dead" body was taken to just prior to the Rising, which Axel's squad fortified over the following months. The group is eventually forced to abandon it when Dimitri's Elite Mooks come for Vanessa and overrun the defenses and Axel blows it up to kill them all.
  • The episode "Super Unknown" features Renfield House, an abandoned mental hospital now being used as a vampire nest. The Season 3 finale reveals that it's built above the labyrinth where the Dark One was sealed away.

Music

• The video for "Stricken" by Disturbed took place in one of these for no reason.
  • The reason's right there in the band name.
  • The building's boiler room was apparently used to shoot a scene from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984); they included it in the video, again for no reason.
• The video for "Vengeance Is Mine" by Alice Cooper is also set here.
• Nox Arcana's album Blackthorn Asylum. The titular hospital was formerly owned by a twisted surgeon determined to unravel the secrets of human illness and deformity - in the cruelest way possible. The point of the attached puzzle is for the listener to figure out what happened at the hospital that caused it to be abandoned.
• Savatage's album Poets and Madmen is a Concept Album that takes place in an abandoned mental hospital, where a famous photographer suffered from Post-Historical Trauma.

Pinball

• This is one of the locations for America's Most Haunted

Podcasts

• The Magnus Archives: The episode "Skintight" takes place in a Real Life one, the Cambridge Military Hospital, where a team of ghost-hunters go to investigate an alleged haunting (whose rumors are indeed old and well documented in Real Life) but find...something else.

Role-Playing Games

• Dino Attack RPG has Mercy Hospital, a Shout-Out to Left 4 Dead. Not only is Mercy Hospital abandoned, but it's full of mutant dinosaurs.

Theme Parks

• The 2010 Halloween Horror Nights event at Universal Studios Orlando featured Psychoscareapy: Echoes of Shadybrook; the house was a 15-years-later finisher to the popular asylum house series, replacing the zany and loud antics of the inmates with somber, psychotic ghosts in an abandoned building.
• In Fuji-Q Highland, Japan, there is a massive haunted attraction based on this trope.

Video Games

• 96: Niles and Elise visit the empty hospital in town in hopes of finding notes on the disease that turned most of the townsfolk into zombies.
• Alan Wake II: The Valhalla Nursing Home's Wellness Center, which is a small private practice for the residents of the main manor of the estate. It is ominous, quiet, and other than the raving Tor, completely abandoned of staff and patients by the time Saga arrives. On top of this, the first of the Taken Divers lurk the building.
• In Alien: Isolation, the San Cristobal Medical Faculty is where the game truly picks up, as it's the first time the alien begins actively hunting Amanda. It's also where the woman who had the first chest-burster in her come out, causing the events of the game to happen.
• American McGee's Alice has many levels designed to play on Alice's awareness that she is locked in a mental institution, especially the Mad Hatter's asylum where he carries out experiments on his patients.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum has a few abandoned hospital wards, but by the time of Batman: Arkham Knight, Arkham as a whole became this.
• BioShock has the Medical Pavilion, which isn't quite abandoned.
• The Blackstone Chronicles computer game was set a few years after the stories and has the main character, Oliver, hunting through the abandoned mental institution his father used to run in order to find his son.
• In Bloodborne, Iosefka's Clinic in Central Yharnam and the Research Hall in the Hunter's Nightmare definitely count as this.
• Brothers in Arms has one of these as the setting of the level "The Rabbit Hole". After being separated from the rest of his squad, Baker must fight his way through the hospital in order to find an AWOL Frankie.
• The first Map Pack of Call of Duty: World at War contains a Call of Duty: Zombies map called Verrückt, which takes place in the abandoned Wittenau Sanatorium. In the game proper, a sanatorium located in the outskirts of Berlin is the setting of part of "Ring of Steel", which Reznov, Dimitri, Chernov, and Commissar Mharkov have to fight through in order to advance. Another sanatorium is the setting for the multiplayer map "Asylum".
• Calmere Nightmare: Well, it's an asylum, but it's abandoned nonetheless.
• City of Heroes has a late-level mission set in a dilapidated hospital... filled to the brim with people who've been driven insane by Mother Mayhem. The various Facemakers shops in City of Villains look exactly like this, down to a corpse in a body bag on the front porch, but the chain is an active and very busy concern. One wonders why more villains don't suffer post-operative complications.
• Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within for the PlayStation had a scenario set in a mostly abandoned hospital. The only people left were you and a few others. Oh, and the occasional zombie.
• Condemned 2: Bloodshot: After receiving a brick to the head from a gravel-voiced hobo with glowing eyes, protagonist Ethan Thomas enters a spooky evil world. As you proceed through this other world, you find yourself entering a decayed asylum, which slowly turns into a black sludge nightmare complete with black slime monsters popping out of the ceiling and walls to come and get you.
• The sequel to Corpse Party, Corpse Party 2: Dead Patient, is set in one these.
• In The Council of Hanwell, one level of the game takes place in Hanwell General Hospital. While much of the town has slightly out of date buildings, most locations like the hospital are relatively modern.
• The sequel to the flash game Darkness takes place in an abandoned hospital, with the protagonist still haunted/chased by the ghost from the first game.
• Chapter 8 of darkSector takes place in one.
• Deadly Premonition has a normal functioning hospital. However, in the "red world", it looks very abandoned, but it's still inhabited by the shadows.
• Dead Nation has Marrow Hospital as a level. You only get to see a brief glimpse inside of the hospital (as in, one room in a comic book style cutscene), but it is definitely abandoned (well, except for the zombies), and the parking lots/roof are definitely swarming in crazed barely-human monsters consumed by bloodlust and bioweapons that came as a result of government genetic experiments.
• Dead Space has you visit the Ishimura's Medical Deck. Twice. It's grisly the first time, and even more sinister in the second thanks to the Unitologist motif.
• DECA is set in the DECA mental asylum, abandoned and filled with dead bodies, and you spend the whole game investigating how you ended up alone in said building.
• Die2Nite often has a few of these scattered around the map. They are a great place to find bandages and medicine.
• Doom³ has plenty of this, even outside of the actual infirmaries and medical installations. There are several instances of 'medical specimens' in vats of liquid held up in the Delta Labs, and a portion of the place has an office wing converted to hold people that gradually became zombified, as explained in PDA logs; the feel of the location owes nothing to a bad sanitarium.
• .flow seems to have a theme based around these.
• Endless Nightmare: Hospital is set in one, like what the name implies. It begins with your Abandoned Hospital Awakening (Strapped to an Operating Table, no less) and when you regain control of your character, you find out the place is devoid of life.
• The Evil Within begins in Beacon Mental Hospital, after an incident that has left the majority of patients and staff dead. The Asylum (where you can save your progress and purchase upgrades) looks like the nursing station at Beacon but is blurry and monochromatic.
• Fallout 3 has one called Our Lady of Hope Hospital located in Downtown DC. The place is swarming with Super Mutants, Centaurs and skeletons. Plenty of other hospitals, both permanent and temporary, abandoned and manned, can be found throughout the series. Many hold records/offer glimpses of the horrors of the period just before and immediately after the war.
• Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is entirely set in an abandoned hospital. Some of the player characters are former patients of it.
• First Encounter Assault Recon has two of these, one of which apparently used to be a mental asylum. Like the rest of the game, you find that most of the residents died suddenly and violently, leaving only battle damage and blood. It also turns out that the very first area you explore in the game was one of these, and was the place where the Point Man was born. In the second game, the hospital isn't so much abandoned as it is very recently evacuated, with the recently-slain corpses of a lot of the staff and many patients lying around the halls, and the ones who killed them are still roaming the halls and looking for survivors.
• Gears of War: The New Hope facility and the multiplayer level "Blood Drive".
• Going into the Unknown have you explore one near the end of the game, though it's not as abandoned as it appears given the amount of zombies in it.
• The Godfather has an abandoned hospital...because of bribery. The only people left inside are Don Corleone, a wounded mafia soldier and your love interest. And the window in the next room has just shattered...
• Half-Life 2: Episode 1 features an abandoned hospital. Though it isn't really used for horror, it's pretty creepy, especially once the headcrab zombies turn up. Valve have said that the hospital was based partly on Chernobyl.
• The Hanged Man takes place in an asylum-turned-homeless-shelter, which was abandoned after a murderous incident.
• The House of the Dead: OVERKILL's second chapter, "Ballistic Trauma", is set in a mutant-infested hospital. It actually manages to be a little creepy, considering the boss of the level is a cross between Alma Wade and the Witch who shows up repeatedly across the level.
• I See You: The entire game takes place inside a hospital(or perhaps a mental asylum). The player never encounters another person throughout the game.
• Episode 2 of Ju On: The Grudge Haunted House Simulator uses the trope name, although it would be more aptly called a deserted hospital. Still, some scares courtesy of Kayako and Toshio are on-hand.
• In The Last of Us Part II, Lakehill Seattle Hospital is by far the most cordyceps-infected place of that post-apocalypse game series (being Ground Zero for the city's infection), with plenty of fungus, infected and bloaters, and even a monstruosity that grew in its bowels that serves as a Boss Battle for Abby Anderson.
• The first mission in Left 4 Dead involves the players seeking out a hospital with a helipad on the roof in order to get a lift out of the city. The only people left in the hospital are the Infected. Played with in that it's a very modern hospital that was only recently abandoned.
• Legacy: The Realm of Terror features an insane asylum on the 3rd floor. Unfortunately, while abandoned by any semblance of normal people (if insane people can really be called normal), it is now happily inhabited by zombies and other mutant freaks.
• Madman (2022): The game is set in an unnamed abandoned hospital where you're being pursued by a madman dressed as a doctor who wants you dead.
• In Mass Effect 2, Mordin's loyalty mission takes place in an abandoned krogan hospital. Complete with a Mad Scientist who is Playing with Syringes in order to try and cure the genophage. The krogan being a warrior race with a built-in berserker mode, it's built more like an especially sturdy bomb shelter, but the effect is there.
• Chapter 2 of Super Meat Boy takes place in one.
• Nightfall Mysteries: Asylum Conspiracy is set at, you guessed it, an abandoned insane asylum. Well, mostly abandoned.
• Nightmare House 2 occurs entirely in Never Lose Hope Hospital.
• Not Dying Today have a stage in a zombie-infested hospital. The zombified nurses can attack you with syringes filled with sedatives that inflicts an Interface Screw on you.
• The entire story of The Dark Meadow takes place in one of these. Notorious for lobotomies and sub-standard treatment, the hospital was abandoned long before the main character arrives there. And when the player gets there, he has to fight off hordes of demonic monsters led by the White Witch.
• Outbreak is set in an abandoned hospital in the middle of a zombie outbreak.
• Outlast is set in the Mount Massive Asylum for the Criminally Insane, a hospital that was shut down and abandoned in the seventies, then reopened in present day, then all the patients went nuts and killed the staff and each other. It's not really abandoned per see, but you'll wish it was, as there are dozens of dangerous patients still alive and prowling the place.
• Painkiller featured a level that took place in an abandoned asylum. The enemies consisted of guys wrapped in straitjackets constantly being electrocuted and undead amputees who you could also find waiting for you on the ceiling. This level is even more tense if the player opts to play it with the optional level condition — that is, only being able to use the game's melee weapon, the eponymous Painkiller. Fun fact: Part of the exterior facade of the Asylum level is based on an actual asylum, the Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts as mentioned in the Real Life folder on this page.
• "Pixel Gun 3D": The hospital is worn down; with blood stains and the corpses of patients everywhere. The building is filled with zombies, venom spitting nurses, demons, blood slimes, and a double-headed doctor zombie with a chainsaw.
• Psychonauts has the last leg of the game played in a fairly creepy abandoned mental hospital, which grew so big because the nearby Green Rocks emitted radiation that drove everyone in the nearby town of Shaky Claim insane until more than half the town's population lived in the mental hospital.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis has the Raccoon City hospital, that served as a front for Umbrella research and BOW development; the first Hunters Gamma are encountered there when Carlos is developing a vaccine for Jill. In the end, the building is demolished by Nikolai to cover up evidence of Umbrella's misdeeds.
  • Resident Evil: Outbreak features a level in another part of the same Raccoon City hospital, filled with leeches. Resident Evil: Outbreak 2 has a different abandoned hospital, overrun by mutated plants and plant-zombies.
• The PC game Sacra Terra Angelic Night takes place in a massive complex that is part hospital, part cathedral, part mansion. The player character was a patient at the hospital, the specialty of which seems to have been extracting the Seven Deadly Sins from patients, but he has no memory of being admitted and he's the only living thing left in the compound. There are plenty of evil spirits, though...
• Sanitarium begins in a creepy almost-empty asylum where some of the few inmates left are banging their head on the wall.
• Saw, the video game based on the eponymous horror film series, takes place entirely within Whitehurst Asylum, an abandoned insane asylum.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne starts out in one of these, but it's weird because you have two friends with you and there's lots of sunlight coming through the windows. Perhaps the creepy factor is increased by the fact that the hospital is home to an apocalyptic cult who sort of destroy the world within the first 5 minutes, that the hospital is empty except for you and your friends, who wait in the lobby and make you investigate the basement for them, and that after the pseudo-end of the world it turns into a flipped-around blue-tinted ghost-and-demon-filled alternate version of itself. Oh, and later on you have to return. Not so scary anymore, is it? Till you meet the resident boss.
  • Persona 2: Eternal Punishment's hospital is a tea party by comparison, but still unsettling. Following a lead on a serial killer, the party journeys to a mental hospital only to find the inmate they sought to question has escaped, leaving hacked & slashed bodies in his wake. The blood trail ends at the killer's cell, which has been turned into a Room Full of Crazy.
  • The second half of Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth's third dungeon takes place in a haunted hospital.
• Silent Hill:
  • In the classic trilogy, there are Alchemilla Hospital in the first game and Brookhaven in the second. In Silent Hill 3, you visit Brookhaven for a while, and in the church basement at the end of the game, things take a turn for the surreal, with parts of it being transformed into Alchemilla's interiors, due to Heather's memories as Alessa returning. Alchemilla is a regular hospital, while Brookhaven is a mental unit.
  • The fourth game involves a bizarre abstraction of a hospital seen through the lens of a terrified child. The rooms on the second floor are random in each playthrough.
  • Silent Hill: Origins takes this a step further and makes a massive abandoned mental asylum, Cedar Grove Sanitarium, into the second "dungeon". If the rotting motif or floating harnesses didn't creep you out, then the pill puzzle did. And if it wasn't the pill puzzle, it was the final boss.
  • The Tutorial Level of Silent Hill: Homecoming is finding your way out of Alchemilla Hospital once more, and this time serves as Foreshadowing that will go completely over your head until The Reveal that Alex was never in the army but is merely a delusional escaped mental patient.
• Siren: Blood Curse has a very frightening segment where you play a defenseless little girl in the Saiga Hospital where everyone else is a Shibito.
• The Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion DLC Karamari Hospital (later integrated into the HD Updated Re-release) is set in one of these. It's got quite a few humanoid and not-so-humanoid monsters roaming the empty halls.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat has one in the third and final map which takes place appropriately in Pripyat, Ukraine. The first mission of the map requires you to take out a Monolith squad setting camp over there. During the mission, originally you and your squad were to set up an ambush on the faction only to later discover that the fanatics outwit you with their own strategy and you and your four-man squad are forced into a defensive battle against their platoon-sized army. As if that weren't enough, the leader of the fanatics emerges from the roof of the hospital and starts giving out a sermon to demoralize your squad while he starts slaughtering your allies one by one until you're left. The leader himself possesses a Gauss Rifle, and killing him first is your top priority. Once he's shot dead, he plummets to the second level and his rifle is up for your grabs, though you must finish off the remnants of his squad in order to advance.
• The Suffering features one of these levels as part of its nearly exhaustive tour of Horror Tropes.
• Thief: Deadly Shadows has a positively terrifying level set in the "Shalebridge Cradle," an abandoned insane asylum (as the name suggests, it was formerly an orphanage, and for a short while, it was both). The treatment methods, described by expository letters, included lobotomies (often by untrained surgeons), the "water cure" (immobilization with wet bandages?), or branding with a hot iron.
• TimeSplitters 2 had a multiplayer map in some kind of Hospital/Chapel hybrid. Naturally, the default bot set was made of zombies.
• Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness has two levels inside a sanitarium filled with genetically modified mutants in straight jackets.
• Tormented Souls: Protagonist Caroline Walker finds herself in one, built in a converted mansion.
• The Town of Light is an Environmental Narrative Game that explores an asylum almost forty years after it was closed down in 1978. The decay is beautifully captured.
• Twin Caliber have a run-down hospital in the stage "Out of Patience!", overrun with zombies and monsters. Expectedly, the level leads you to the morgue just as the dead are coming to life.
• Melt Downs in Two Point Hospital is exactly this, or at least when you first start playing it. The place is an absolute mess, with all sorts of debris and wrecked machinery being littered everywhere. Considering its placement right next to a power plant, it was probably inevitable that something would go horribly wrong, despite all of the previous owner's claims saying everything was fine. After a research experiment backfired, they just left and abandoned it altogether, and you are the one to take over its remains and redesign it into a fully functioning hospital.
• The horror-themed game Ugetsu Kitan takes place in one of these. Specifically, you wake up in an empty, long-abandoned hospital without any of your memories, suddenly develops the urge to throw yourself off the roof, and as soon as you make your way to the rooftop you suddenly encounter a ghost girl telling you to follow her.
• Undertale has the True Lab. Though it's an ad-hoc research facility rather than an established hospital, it still remains as the abandoned site of medical experiments Gone Horribly Wrong.
• In Until Dawn, the Blackwood Pines Sanitarium, a former mental hospital which has been abandoned for decades, is clearly no longer in service, although the wendigos call it home.
• Urban Dead is full of abandoned hospitals which survivors try to hold onto for the first aid kits and the zombies try to raid for the brains.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has one of its most terrifying sections take place in an abandoned hospital — the player follows a reality TV crew inside and watches them get torn to bits offscreen by what turns out to be a member of a very rare vampire bloodline that has to eat all of the humans, not just drink its blood. You have to return to her several times as part of a series of quests. It's a refreshing subversion when you get to pal around with the monster for once.
• In White Day: A Labyrinth Named School, Seong-Ah, one of the only students you'll encounter in the game, tells you that the school was originally an abandoned hospital from an older wartime.
• Wolfenstein features a mission set in a hospital that, while not quite abandoned, fits the look quite well. See, it's been commandeered by the Nazis, and by the time you get there, the place has been ransacked, and most of the patients and staff have been either abducted to serve as test subjects for their sick medical experiments or eviscerated by the invisible, Ax-Crazy assassins that prowl the hallways.
• Nocturne Hospital in Yo-kai Watch is a four-story abandoned hospital where many Youkai reside, including the big boss of the hospital, Dr. Maddiman.
• One of the locations in Zork Nemesis is an abandoned insane asylum, which manages to place rusty brown and creepy right next to clinical white and creepy. Being a Zork game, it has its moments of hilarity, but with Nemesis being the Darker and Edgier installment of the series, it also has plenty of nightmare-inducing qualities as well.

Visual Novels

• In the second chapter of The Devil on G-String, Maou hides in an abandoned hospital, along with the kidnapped Hiroaki. Haru and Kyousuke manage to locate the hospital, but not before Hiroaki is safely returned to Tsubaki's family.
• The visual novel Night At The Hospital, in which the protagonist goes to save his friend (a ghost hunter) from an abandoned hospital. One of the endings reveals the reason why the hospital was abandoned: many of the patients died as a result of illegal medical experiments, and Luka murdered everyone involved in his death.
• Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors features a hospital room puzzle, and a large portion of the ship was converted into one during its stint in WWI in the British Royal Navy.
• In Sweet Fuse: At Your Side, one of the attractions at the video game themed amusement park is the Bloodstained Hospital, a haunted house attraction based on a survival horror game. The characters are forced to go through it on the third day, and Saki and Meoshi revisit a copy of it during Meoshi's route.

Webcomics

• Subverted in Awful Hospital: the Hospital in question appears to be abandoned at first due to how dirty and disused everything looks, but once Dr. Phage shows up it's clear that the hospital does have a working staff.
• Ruby Quest is set in one of these and plays with how abandoned the "abandoned" really is. Sure, no one's using it as a hospital right this exact second, but it's implied that Ruby is doing-slash-discovering some of these things for the second or third time, raising the question, "How, exactly, does she end up back at the start with no memory of doing this stuff if the hospital isn't operating on some rudimentary level?"
• Stand Still, Stay Silent:
  • Many small impromptu monster-ridden infirmaries have been encountered during the exploration of the silent world, including one emergency ward full of corpses and a letter from the nursing and medical staff for the former patients saying they are just going to get supplies and will return...written ninety years ago.
  • The information gathering raid in Odense leads to a hospital that was once the last Danish hold out against the disease that ended the world and left it infested with monsters. As well as the usual creepy decay, barbed wire and "keep out of this room" signs also heavily feature.

Web Original

• Everything2 has "The Blacke Asylum".
• William Strife ends up trawling through a few as part of his Fallout 3 playthrough, admitting that playing Silent Hill has given him a fear of hospitals.
• All six islands used in the six Survival of the Fittest seasons have had an abandoned clinic, usually small buildings. The location name on the forum is usually some variation of "Abandoned Hospital".
• An Abandoned Hospital is the focus of this flash game/photo essay: Stay a while... stay forever..
• An enormous abandoned hospital is one of the main settings in Marble Hornets. Not only is it one of the Operator's preferred haunts, it's also the place where Seth and Brian disappeared and Tim was attacked by Alex. Entry #66 reveals that it is indeed a burned down mental hospital, and as a child, Tim was a patient there.
• The Black Box TV episode Final Exit.
• Tall Tales has two story arcs set in abandoned hospitals, both connected to the same cult.
• Unwanted Houseguest: Litchfield Asylum seems to be purposefully made to look like one, since it's officially supposed to be closed, and Doctor Litchfield's medical license was revoked years ago. So, the experiments continue in secret.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time.
  • In "Heat Signature", the backdrop for a big part of the episode appears to be an abandoned and dilapidated old hospital building with a helicopter plate.
  • In "No One Can Hear You", Finn wakes up in the abandoned hospital wing of the Candy Kingdom, only to realize the only one in the whole area is Jake.
• The Danny Phantom episode "Doctor's Disorders" mostly takes place in the abandoned North Mercy Hospital, where the sign outside the building has weathered so that it now only says "No Mercy".
• Star Wars Rebels: "Always Two There Are" takes place in an abandoned Republic medical station from the Clone Wars, which Zeb, Sabine, Chopper and Ezra have been sent to in search of medical supplies. They wind up having a run-in with two Imperial Inquisitors.
• Steven Universe: Invoked in "Nightmare Hospital". Steven thinks the lack of staff and the lights not working means it must be one of these. Connie explains that they've just turned down the lights for nighttime patients, and a few doctors can be seen and heard, subverting the trope.

Real Life

• Australia:
  • The Sunbury Lunatic Asylum in Victoria, Australia. It was originally opened in 1864 as 'The Sunbury Industrial School' which was developed to educate and house destitute children. Orphans were sent there and boys were expected to learn a trade and girls were forced to do housework. In 1879, it became the Sunbury Lunatic Asylum, which stayed open until 1985. It was unoccupied until 1999 when it was purchased by Victoria University. The campus closed in 2011. Parts of the massive property are still used as a primary and specialist school, a radio station, and a theater company, but the rest of the former hospital remains abandoned.
  • Larundel Asylum is another abandoned hospital in Australia, in this case, Melbourne.
  • Kew Lunatic Asylum in Melbourne, Australia, was rumored to be haunted. Now it's an apartment building called Willsmere, Kew. Enormous Second Empire building (think arches and towers). Nice apartment building. And, yes, reportedly haunted.
• Singapore:
  • The old Alexandra Hospital was the site of a massacre of doctors and their patients by the Japanese during World War II and has a reputation for being haunted.
  • The abandoned Old Changi Hospital, another haunted hospital in the same city, has a torture chamber added by the Japanese secret police, with bloodstains still set into the floor.
• The Saint Louis City Hospital was built in 1845 and was shut down in July of 1985. It was not demolished, however. Parts were in 2002, but the remaining buildings are being retrofitted into Condos.
• If you've said the words "haunted" and "hospital" in the Philadelphia region over the last thirty years, then you've heard of Byberry Mental Hospital. Built in 1906 and finally demolished one hundred years later, it reads like a nonfiction checklist of haunted house cliches. Subterranean tunnels? It's got 'em. Total lack of electricity? Check. Some brilliant fluke of architecture that renders most of the building pitch black even during the day? All yours, daddy-o. This place would give Dr. Vannacutt nightmares.
• The Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents in Staunton, Virginia, commonly known by its former name as the DeJarnette State Sanitorium, has stood abandoned since 1996. The doors and windows were plastered over◊ some time in the late 2000s, which does not help its creepy factor. Also not helping is the fact that the DeJarnette State Sanitorium is named after Dr. Joseph DeJarnette, who was a major supporter of eugenics.
• The Waverly Hills Sanatorium: it's definitely got a reputation for being haunted.
• The Lima Tuberculosis Hospital in (oddly enough) Lima, Ohio. Pretty creepy. Enjoy a picture tour here courtesy of Forgotten Ohio.
• The Chicago State Hospital, now known as the Chicago-Read Mental Health Center in the community of Dunning on the Northwest Side. An insane asylum, sanitarium, and poor village were built there back in the 1860s and it eventually changed hands to the city. Many were taken there, to the point where it got horribly overcrowded in the 1910s. Eventually, sections got closed down, including a small school and one of the hospitals, a rather big facility. Both of them lay abandoned for years, but the big hospital was eventually torn down for condos a few years back.
• According to the rather eerie book Ghostly Ruins, which features photographs of various places around America which have fallen into disrepair, the Danvers State Mental Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts falls squarely into this category. Danvers was once named Salem (yes, that Salem), and changed its name due to the associated trauma, and the hospital itself was constructed on the site where one of the fanatical judges had lived. As the book puts it, "The Danvers State Hospital may have the worst bad karma of any abandoned site in the country." It was a model facility when constructed, but eventually succumbed to abuse, overcrowding, and disrepair; when it closed in 1990, it held 2000 inmates (and was meant to hold only 200). What makes things even more fun is, after the hospital was torn down in 2006 and an apartment complex was built, there was a mysterious fire that destroyed a large portion of the construction...one which is apparently still unexplained. Cue Scare Chord.
  • And to worsen the karma even more, it seems it was one of the first places in America where lobotomy as we know it was practised.
  • Danvers was also the filming location for the thriller Session 9 (see Film for details).
  • And was the inspiration for Lovecraft's Arkham Sanitorium (which, in turn, inspired the asylum of the same name in the Batman franchise).
• Another abandoned place in Pennsylvania- the Pennhurst State School and Hospital in Spring City. It used to be a hospital and school for the mentally retarded and mentally ill. The patients were abused mentally, physically, and sexually. Patients who were repeat biters had all teeth pulled. All teeth. The school housed more than 10,000 people in its 79-year life. About 5,000 of them never went back to their real homes. The place only closed in 1987. And it's still standing today.
  • Not only was it left abandoned, it seems that everything was just left behind. Based on various first-hand accounts (and experience), much if not most of the equipment (and patient records, particularly older ones) that's been removed was done so by urban explorers looting the place, and as of about 2003, the floors were still littered with equipment and paperwork.
  • There's an active movement to preserve Pennhurst, as it seems it may be torn down and the land developed in the near future.
• Many large hospitals in London have abandoned or little-used sections. You don't want to make a wrong turn late at night.
• The Hugh Gallen State Office Park in Concord, New Hampshire, is comprised of a variety of re-purposed old buildings that were originally collectively known as the New Hampshire Asylum until being renamed to the less threatening "New Hampshire Hospital." Some buildings on the campus - the Acute Psychiatric Services building (APS, 1989), the Anna Philbrook Center (1960), and a few others — continue to provide care and housing to New Hampshire's mentally ill adults and children, and halfway housing for rehabilitated patients transitioning back into society. The other buildings on the site — which date from 1842 to 1941 — have been converted into office space for state government workers. The oldest building in the complex — called the "Main Building" — was erected in 1842 as a medical facility specifically designed for the housing and treatment of the insane and was the 17th such hospital established in the United States.
  • Rumors have long persisted among locals that there are walled up portions of the Main Building's basement that contain the remains of tuberculosis patients who died during a time when TB ran rampant. "People say" that excavating these walled up rooms could end up infecting the workers in the building with tuberculosis, which could then spread to the greater population. This is a completely unfounded and illogical rumor, but if you've ever been in the Main Building's basement, you would be hard-pressed not to wonder what's in the walls.
  • Many of the older buildings in the state office park have been renovated but still retain a lot of their original structure, both internally and externally. Some sections of these buildings, particularly the Main Building, have not been renovated at all due to the cost of asbestos removal and other improvements that would need to be made to make those areas safe and usable. This has left portions of the interior of these buildings in a state of eerie desertion and decay. One unrenovated wing of the Main Building has been dubbed the "Stephen King Wing" by state employees who have had the opportunity to check it out (and yes, it really is that creepy).
• Thanks to the Community Care Act (1990) in the UK, there are still a number of old abandoned mental hospitals, in various states of decay. Unsurprisingly developers have been less than keen to move in.
• One which is far creepier in reality than any fictional Hospital is in the island of Guernsey, and yes it is in as in built underground. Constructed by Those Wacky Nazis in World War II during the island's occupation it was used as hospital, mortuary, ammunition store, and research center on Slavic Laborers. See a video of it here.
• An abandoned hospital figures in the Goiânia accident, one of the worst nuclear radiation leaks in history.
• Ironically, Danvers and many of these other places were originally supposed to be actual asylums; places of humane treatment according to the Kirkbride plan. The problems occurred with overcrowding due to warehousing. Not just the mentally ill, but drug addicts, immigrants with nowhere to go, the unemployed, the "friendless", homeless people. Danvers was supposed to only have about 600 clients; it ended up with well over two thousand.
• The Glenn Dale Hospital in Maryland was not a place that people visited to get better. As a sanitarium for tuberculosis, anyone who wound up here could only hope to die in the most dignified way possible. And yes, there is a children's compound. Features include the incinerator(used for waste products, not human remains), refrigerated morgues, the flooded underground hallways, and the elevator shaft that "breathed". The sad thing is that it really was a beautiful place in its prime, and probably could be again if any restoration were put into it. Budget shortfalls and copious amounts of lead paint make this unlikely, however.
• Due to a combination of budget cuts and a report about the absolutely deplorable conditions by Geraldo Rivera, The Willowbrook State School was closed in 1987 and the patients were turned out on their own. Shortly after this, it was discovered that several people were living in the tunnels under the facility. It was speculated that the residents might be former patients. Short after that, the body of a recently missing girl was found in a shallow grave on the property...
• A hospital in Khovrino district of Moscow was abandoned after five years of construction in 1985 and has never been finished. It is commonly called "Umbrella" by urban explorers because of its shape that closely resembles a Biohazard symbol when seen from above.
• The hospital portion of Ellis Island in New York was this until the entire site was revitalized into the tourist center it is today. Those who spearheaded the renovation spoke of finding various abandoned equipment and the like. Another abandoned hospital on the grounds of the island, and other quarantine wards, are fenced off from the main tourist sections and are off-limits to the public.
• Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, New Jersey's state mental hospital since 1876, has persistently been overcrowded and required new construction. Older buildings have not all been demolished, giving the entire campus something of a creepy atmosphere-especially considering some of the abuse scandals that took place in those buildings...
• Charity Hospital in New Orleans was somewhat rundown before Hurricane Katrina. Afterwards...
• The historic buildings on the western campus of Washington, D.C.'s St. Elizabeth's mental hospital, has been abandoned since 1987. It is expected to become the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
• Linda Vista Community Hospital Rundown for years, abandoned in 1991, this is THE go-to location for Hollywood when they need a creepy hospital or asylum. The owners do a large scale haunted house on property around Halloween, in addition to renting it out as a filming location. Not all of its spookiness is fictional either, it is rumored to be haunted, and the surrounding neighborhood is (as of 2012) a rundown high crime area. It was eventually converted into apartments for fixed-income senior citizens.
• Probably the least creepy abandoned hospital ever: the Granada Hills Surgical Center, a part of the demolished Granada Hills Community Hospital. The GHCH was once quite well-known in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles, but since it was community-funded, the hospital went bankrupt in 2003 and the property was bought by the Los Angeles School District. After waiting for a very long time, the District demolished the large main building and completed an unfinished expansion of the hospital (which had languished as a steel frame since the late 1990s) as the main classroom hall for a new high school, which was finished early in 2012. The Surgical Center, on the other hand, still stands at the inner corner of a strip mall, next to the former hospital parking structure, now used by students and teachers of the high school. However, despite the hospital's lack of a creepy factor, it's still quite mysterious-the original glass doors have been replaced with opaque solid steel doors that are locked tight and its multistory bulk, which is especially ominous at night, looms over the two-story-high strip mall. The building itself, although it has been almost a decade since its abandonment, is still intact, which arguably adds to its mystery. Who knows what goes on inside the building?
• North Brother Island, right in the middle of East River. Opened in 1885 as the new location of the Riverside Hospital, itself founded in the 1850s to treat smallpox and being expanded to other quarantinable diseases. In 1904, the steamship General Slocum ran aground and burned, resulting in the death of over 1,000 immigrants. It was also the hospital that held and released Typhoid Mary, then confined her until her death in 1938, then closed. It opened after World War II to house veterans attending local colleges, then switched to treating teenage drug addicts, which, at the time, was usually the 'hardcore' method of locking the addict in a room for a week, many of whom, as one wrote on the wall, felt they were held against their will. It was closed in the '60s after rampant corruption and recidivism and has since been turned into a bird sanctuary for the Black-crowned Night Heron, though all the birds left in 2011 for reasons unknown. Fortunately, though, aside from an episode of Life After People and a photographer given special permission, the entire island is closed to the public and patrolled by NYPD (although partly because of its proximity to Riker's Island Correctional Facility).
• The Terrence Building in Rochester was a large 16-story state-run mental hospital, built for the Rochester Psychiatric Center in the 1950s as part of a state-wide program to build bigger mental hospitals to replace older, smaller ones that were overcrowded. The Terrence Building operated until it was shut down in 1995 and was abandoned, and remaining patients at the time were sent to a newer and smaller facility on the campus. Today the tower is in a state of decay due to having little maintenance or protection from the elements and vandals and is a popular destination for urban explorers. However, the tower is still on the campus of an operating mental institution and there's still security guards that patrol near the building.
• Several buildings at Central State Hospital, in Milledgeville, Georgia are now closed. These are photos of the interior of the Walker Building, closed in 1973: [1]
• The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, WV was closed in 1994 and has been the subject of a number of ghost rumors.
• The North Wales Hospital (known locally as Denbigh Asylum, or Denbigh Mental) which is currently for sale for £2.25 million is a popular site for ghost hunts and urbex, which opened after 1848. It was closed in 1995 and has passed between many developers, none of which has been able to demolish it due to its status as a Grade II listed building. It has been subject to many arson attacks, the latest of which occurred in February 2017. It has a controversial history which is to be expected, considering mental health treatment during its time open. It has also been the subject of at least one Creepypasta, one featuring Jeff the Killer. After it failed to meet the minimum bid in 2016, it was eventually purchased by Denbighshire Council, with plans to demolish about half the original structures and build 300 houses.
• Episode 38 of Bright Sun Films YouTube series Abandoned looks at South Detroit Hospital.
• The Pripyat Hospital near Chernobyl took in the first radiation casualties after the accident. It was abandoned when the entire town was evacuated to get people away from the radiation and even today the basement where the first responders' uniforms were dumped is so radioactive that simply walking into it without proper protection will significantly increase your chances of developing cancer.

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