The Ridges, Athens: Inside Ohio's Most Haunted Asylum

The Ridges is the name Ohio University gives to the grounds of the former Athens Lunatic Asylum, later the Athens State Hospital, on a ridge across the Hocking River from the town of Athens in southeast Ohio. Its long red brick main building, with towers and staggered wings, is one of the best-known asylum buildings in the Midwest, and it regularly appears on lists of the most haunted places in America.

It is also a real place with a real and often painful history. Thousands of people lived and died here, many of them buried under numbered stones. This guide tells that history, explains the true story behind the famous stain, separates the documented from the rumored, and shows you what you can visit today without trespassing.

History of the Athens Lunatic Asylum

After the Civil War, Ohio needed more room for people with mental illness, including veterans suffering from what would now be called post-traumatic stress. The state chose a farm of more than 1,000 acres outside Athens, broke ground on November 5, 1868, and opened the Athens Lunatic Asylum on January 9, 1874. Cleveland architect Levi T. Scofield, who later designed the Ohio State Reformatory, drew the main building, and Herman Haerlin of Cincinnati laid out the grounds.

The hospital followed the Kirkbride plan, the idea of Philadelphia physician Thomas Story Kirkbride that the building itself could heal. A central administration block was flanked by staggered bat-wing wards, men on one side and women on the other, so every room had light and air. The main building alone held hundreds of patients.

Over time the hospital became overcrowded, and its records document the treatments of the age: hydrotherapy, electroshock, lobotomy and, from the 1950s, early psychotropic drugs. Patients carved messages into the woodwork, including one that reads “I was never crazy.” As drugs replaced long-term care, numbers fell. The original hospital closed in 1993, and the state’s mental health services moved to a newer facility nearby.

In 1993 the Department of Mental Health deeded the property to Ohio University in a land swap. The university renamed it The Ridges and turned the main building into Lin Hall, home of the Kennedy Museum of Art, with offices, classrooms and storage elsewhere. The site joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Large parts of the old wards still stand empty.

Three cemeteries on the hillsides hold 1,930 people who died at the hospital. For decades most were marked only with numbers on small stones. In 1943 the state began adding names, birth dates and death dates to the markers.

The ghosts of The Ridges

Margaret Schilling and the stain

This is the one story at The Ridges with a full record behind it. Margaret Schilling, a patient, went missing from her ward on December 1, 1978. Staff searched the grounds and could not find her. On January 12, 1979, a maintenance worker found her body in the closed, unheated Ward N 20 on an upper floor. She had folded her clothes in a corner and lain down on the concrete floor, and the official finding was heart failure.

Her body left a dark outline on the floor that scrubbing could not remove, probably the result of decomposition combined with the winter sunlight from the window. Tom O’Grady, director of the Southeast Ohio History Center, has seen it. As he told WOUB, he has never seen a ghost there, but he has seen the stain, and he reminds people that Margaret was a person with a family who loved her.

Figures, music and the woman in yellow

Students, staff and urban explorers have collected stories for decades: shadows darting along empty corridors, faces in windows, figures glimpsed in mirrors, a woman in a yellow dress and music drifting from a stairwell. The Ohio Exploration Society reports recording what it believes are voices, including a scream near a padded room. O’Grady notes that most of the ghost talk is recent, growing over the last few decades.

The cemeteries

Many visitors find the cemeteries the most moving part of The Ridges. Rows of small stones bear only numbers, and walkers describe a heavy, watched feeling there at dusk. Whatever you believe, it is a place to visit with respect.

Part of a haunted town

Ghost books often call Athens one of the most haunted college towns in America, and The Ridges sits at its center. Older stories add the claim that the town is ringed by cemeteries in the shape of a pentagram, a legend with no basis beyond a glance at a map.

Where to look

• The main building: now Lin Hall and the Kennedy Museum of Art; the museum galleries are open to the public.
• Ward N 20: the closed upper ward where Margaret Schilling was found. It is not open to visitors.
• The cemeteries: three burial grounds on the hillsides, open to respectful visitors in daylight.
• The grounds and trails: paths around the hill and the old lakes, popular with walkers.

Visiting The Ridges

The Ridges is part of Ohio University, a working campus. You can visit the Kennedy Museum of Art in the main building during its opening hours, walk the grounds, and pay your respects at the cemeteries in daylight. Check the university’s website for museum hours before you go.

The empty wards are closed to the public, and entering them is trespassing. There are no public ghost tours or investigations inside, so please do not try to get in. If you want to spend a night inside an old Ohio institution, book a ghost hunt at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, which was designed by the same architect, or join a Haunted Rooms ghost hunt at Mortuary Manor in Toledo.

Athens itself is a lively small college town, and the Moonville Tunnel, one of Ohio’s best-known haunted spots, is less than an hour’s drive west in Vinton County. Many visitors combine the two in a day.

• Visiting Grounds and the Kennedy Museum of Art are open; the old wards are closed
• Ghost hunting No: the closed wards are off-limits to the public

Tips for your visit

• Visit the Kennedy Museum of Art, the only legal way inside the main building.
• Walk up to the cemeteries before dusk and read the numbered stones.
• Look up Margaret Schilling’s story before you go, and remember she was a real person.
• Pair The Ridges with the Moonville Tunnel, less than an hour’s drive west.
• Never enter the closed wards: it is trespassing.

More haunted places nearby

• The Ohio State Reformatory: Levi T. Scofield’s other famous building, with ghost hunts you can book
• The Lafayette Hotel: a haunted riverfront hotel in Marietta, about an hour east
• The Hackett Hotel: a small haunted hotel in Marietta
• Haunted places in Ohio

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the official website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as staff, visitors and investigators tell them, and we say where records contradict a story.

• Wikipedia: Athens Lunatic Asylum
• WOUB: The legends behind the ghosts of Athens (2019)
• Ohio Exploration Society: The Ridges
• Atlas Obscura: Athens Lunatic Asylum
• Haunted Rooms: our earlier Ohio haunted places guide