My Trip to the Asylum

For my twelfth anniversary this year, me and my love went to visit an old asylum (The Traverse City  Regional Psychiatric Hospital formally known as 'The Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane') 😍  and it was awesome!  Below are some of the pics I was able to capture :D  We took a two hour long tour of the main revamped building (now used as a mini mall type venue with housing in the top floors), a 'cabin' which is a fancy word for a separate dormer on the property for patients and one of the underground steam tunnels.

This is a small view of the revamped portion from the front of the main building.  Each separate window on the sides of the picture were one single room each when it functioned as an asylum.  The set of three close together windows in the middle were a 'day' room where all the patients in that wing gathered.

A little history:

The asylum construction was started in 1883 and finished (the main building anyway) in November of 1885.  The first Superintendent was James Decker Munson who served in this position until 1924.  In it's start up year, the asylum housed only several hundred patients.  Over the next several years multiple new buildings were constructed to house additional patients and a Nursing school was started in 1906 on the property.  As the housing requirements grew, so did the amount of acreage.  Initially there were only 350 acres bought - before the asylum closed indefinitely in 1989, it had an amazing 1,000 acres full of housing and farm land.  The most patients recorded in the asylums history peeked at 3,600 patients in 1966.  As far as the more macabre details of anything that went on during the years the asylum was running, our tour guide was insistent that nothing of note happened here.  If fact she stated that the use of restraints in this facility was strictly prohibited through out its long history and that only one death ever occurred (and that was a patient/patient issue that resulted in a death).   

Pictures of the Toured Areas:

These next few pictures are from one of the 'cabins'.  This first picture is a view of the main 'day' room for this particular dormer.  The restoration workers have been removing all the lead paint and asbestos ceilings and floor coverings slowly but surely.  On either side of this room are long hallways that held the patients rooms on either side of it, stairways (and an elevator!) that led both upstairs and downstairs and the shower rooms.  On the end of one of the hallways was a large dining room.

This second picture is of the part of the main day room that is cordoned off due to it caving in from the next story up.  It still has the original flooring in it!

Here is one side of the 'cabin'.  This is the main hallway off to what was my left side with this half of the patient rooms on either side of it.  The patient rooms were all identical with one window, one door and all sized about 8 X 6 foot total - just big enough to fit in a small cot to sleep in.  None of the rooms had closets.

The windows were all broken out and most of the 'bars' have already been removed but I found one that still had them attached in one of the patient rooms.

As I said earlier, this dormer had an elevator in it!!  Of course it doesn't work now but it was pretty awesome to see!

The original doorway for the elevator on the patients side that they have blocked off with wooden boards.  As you can see in the picture, the elevator had doors to get into it on two sides.

Here is a picture of the other side of the 'cabin'.  It has obviously been broken into a few times...  There was not an abundant amount of tagging that I seen, but about one tag between each of the many doorways on this side.  This one in-particularly, I felt, was befitting 😂

This picture is of the main shower on the floor.  It was one huge room with a shower head coming down from the ceiling.  If I had to guess the size, I would approximate it around 15ft X 15ft!

It too, still had it's original flooring!

The main dining room for this dormer was in sad disrepair.  A portion of the ceiling has caved in in between the main dining area and the kitchen area due to poor design of the roofing.

This is where things got pretty freaking cool though...  If you take a look at this picture, you'll notice a tag on the back wall.

As I said earlier, we took this tour because it was our twelfth anniversary.  My name is Nicole and my partners name is Tristen.....  How awesomely weird is it that we find this tag - the ONLY tag in the dining/kitchen area with our initials in it???

In the dining room area there was a cordoned off set of stairs.  Below is a picture of them... because I though they looked cool AND because of the railing.  This isn't a normal railing made of wood.  It is actually cast iron made to look like a railing!  We were not allowed to tour the basement area or any of the floors above us due to integrity issues per our tour guide 😢

From the 'cabin' we moved onto the steam tunnels.  This is the part that I had waited for the entire time - and it was the most disappointing point of the tour 😒  It took us 10 minutes to get through this portion.  I thought we would be able to walk through quite a bit of the tunnels, as there is a tunnel from every building on the property formally owned by the asylum, but we were only able to walk through a very small portion of one of the tunnels directly under the main building.  Below are the only two pictures that really turned out.

Here is the fire door leading into the moderately sized room just before the entrance of the steam tunnel.

This is the steam tunnel.  It's brick all the way around and the floor is rounded up on each side to help keep the flow of the steam going through the pipes.  Of course, they have added the lighting to the ceiling all the way down the tunnels now as this is no longer used to heat up the building above it.

For those of you that believe:

I fully expected to feel some sort of energy during the tour, either in the dormers or in the tunnels - but I did not.  This company does sell night tours where they push the paranormal experience.  I was actually considering doing one of the overnights during the last Halloween season but just couldn't coordinate the time between mine and Tristen's work schedules...  I'm glad I didn't!  There was nothing - No energy spikes, no sense of other worldly entities.  I'm quite sensitive to these sorts of things, but there is nothing left here.  So maybe our tour guide wasn't full of BS when she said there wasn't a lot that had gone on here...  or maybe we just didn't visit any of the areas where there was activity.  Either way, I'm glad I got to take the tour.  It did not turn out as I expected it too but I did get some pretty awesome pictures, and that tag in the kitchen area was perfect!!

Have you ever been here before or toured a different old asylum?  What were your thoughts on it?  Let me know in the comments!!  I'd love to hear your stories!!!