05/06/2024
This popped up in my memories on my personal Facebook today. What a coincidence! Original post by The Greater Adirondack Ghost Company.
Welcome to the "Dannemora State Hospital for the Criminally Insane." Few realize today that there was once a massive insane asylum, a true 19th Century "mad house," located just 16 miles from Plattsburgh. The gothic, castle-like asylum, seen here as it appeared around 1900, was built during the administration of Governor Theodore Roosevelt in the small village of Dannemora, New York, a site chosen for its remoteness and isolation. Stone by stone the imposing buildings rose using convict labor, chain gangs from nearby Clinton Prison, until its completion in 1899. Locals quickly began referring to the institution as "the bug house," and within its walls, horrors abounded. The Plattsburgh papers frequently reported ghastly accounts of suicides, murders, and attacks on guards and orderlies. An inmate uprising and escape attempt in 1907, "planned with the cunning of the insane," ended only when one of the perpetrators was shot and killed. Ten years later, Doctor Charles North, the hospital Superintendent, was stabbed to death by a patient with a three-foot chisel. The aging State Hospital was finally shuttered in the early 1970s and merged with its neighbor, Clinton Correctional Facility, but the old buildings still remain in use. Now known as "The Annex," employees who work here continue to report strange and unsettling experiences in the former asylum buildings to this very day.
