Leesburg, Virginia. 1872.

In terms of history, the house is built in an area which has experienced plenty of supernatural activity and warfare. Leesburg’s earliest occupants include the Algonquian Indians, who believed in the afterlife and practiced shamanic rituals. 

Perhaps their efforts to reconnect with the deceased are what have left portals to the hereafter still open. Two other tribes, the Catawba and the Lenape, frequently butted heads, and had a particularly bloody battle right by Leesburg. You can imagine that the spirits of these warring warriors have been unhappily disturbed by the influx of present day tourists.

The Castle Hotel

 

       

       

       

On March 2, 1948, a Douglas DC-3 registered OO-AWH,Dakota from Belgian Airlines flying from Brussels to London crashed while on approach to Runway 28 Right Heathrow when it hit terrible fog on its approach. The plane crashed at 21:14 local time on approach to London Heathrow Airport killing The 19 passengers and three crew members on a flight from Brussels to London lost their lives on board. Allegedly, as people on the ground searched the body strewn wreck and fog cloaked tarmac for survivors, a dazed looking lone man wearing a dress suit and hat materialized out of the surrounding mist and politely asked if anyone had seen his briefcase before wandering back off into the night. It was later learned that the man they had seen was among the dead found at the site.

     

       

Opening in 1874, the Athens Lunatic Asylum was one of Ohio’s largest facilities for dealing with the mentally ill. Locals called it “The Ridges,” and for years, it was the home of countless Civil War veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. As people began to drop off the teenagers they couldn’t control and the elderly they didn’t want, the facility became grossly overcrowded.

The staff was overwhelmed, patients were gradually put to work on the property, and the quality of care spiraled downward. When the hospital closed in 1993, locals began to tell stories about the ghosts of abused residents who had died tragic deaths and were still haunting the hospital

On December 1, 1978, a female patient named Margaret Schilling disappeared from one of the active wards. On January 12, 1979, they found her body in the abandoned top floor of ward N. 20. This ward had been used for sick, infectious patients, and had been closed down for years. They had searched the hospital for the woman when they realized she was missing but apparently hadn't looked in ward N. 20. When a maintenance man discovered her body lying on the floor in front of a window, she had been dead for several weeks. 

The official cause of death was heart failure--probably due to her exposure to the December cold in an unheated section of the hospital. She apparently locked herself in the ward as a game, hiding from hospital employees. Before she died she took off her clothes and folded them neatly nearby. 

One has to wonder why she didn't call for help. Part of the legend that has not been confirmed is that she was a deaf mute. Another bit of Ridges apocrypha is the story that she was locked in accidentally as the final patients were moved out and the hospital was closed down; because she was a deaf mute she couldn't call for attention, and spent her final days wandering the halls alone. 

Some say that Margaret Schilling wanders the building at night. They say that other patients, especially those who died at the hospital, wander the building at night. Rumors about patients chained in the basement dungeons add fuel to this kind of thing; I once spoke to someone who knew a guy who knew a guy who saw the shackles in the basement and, next to them, a message scrawled on the wall: "I was never crazy." Maintenance workers told us that several of the windowsills do have drawings and carvings left behind by patients, but medieval cellar chainings are probably just stories.