I’ve been inside some really creepy places over the years, but abandoned asylums truly are amongst the most chilling of these abandoned spaces. Maybe it has to do with the fact that these places remind me of how my country used to deal with the mentally ill or lack thereof. History has taught us that many of these older asylums used to have deployable living conditions at best, while others were simply design to let someone die slowly and painfully.

This is the abandoned Brownsville Asylum just south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that opened in 1922 and over the years was repurposed as a general hospital until it officially closed it’s doors in the early 1980’s. Almost 40 years later the asylum eerily crumbles in its original state and has become a shell of its former self. As you walk through you can see hand written documents about patients scattered along the floors, old hospital beds tangled in weeds that grow through the wooded floors and even some clothes left in closets of some of the rooms. Everywhere you look there is a reminder of all the people who used to live there and its very chilling.

The asylum is incredible unsafe and has had entire floors that have collapsed over the years leaving rooms to appear as though they simply plummeted to the depths of hell.

There are several wheel chairs scattered through out the abandoned asylum and even medical tables in some of the rooms. The old metal medical lights still stand by most of the hospital beds and even some with light bulbs intact. As I walk into the last room a gust of wind came through the broken window moving the tattered drapes about creating a frightening visual that was nightmarish.

Abandoned Asylums are for the macabre obsessed not the faint-hearted, but these images can serve as a reminder of how far society has come in their conceptual view of treating the mentally ill in America and a sobering reminder of how far long we still have to go.