If you grow up in a town with something weird or noteworthy, you sort of become desensitized to it. It’s just a normal thing that you pass by every day. In Saint Joseph, Missouri, that place is the Glore Psychiatric Museum, a morbid trip through the brutal treatment of mental illness through history. It’s the sort of place that draws curious visitors from far outside the town and occasionally gets national attention for just how out there it is — a site that deserves its time in the spotlight. It’s eerie, bizarre, and possibly even haunted.
Oh yeah, and I spent a summer working there, so I know all about it …
5
From Hospital To Museum
Let’s table the discussion of ghosts for a second because honestly, the definite eeriness of the Glore Psychiatric Museum deserves just as much credit as the spirits that may or may not reside there. Glore is housed in a real insane asylum, or part of it anyway. The museum is located in what used to be the surgical building of the State Lunatic Asylum #2, which opened in 1874 and sounds like a location that should be in the new Resident Evil game. The campus of the asylum was large and almost entirely self-sufficient. As forms of occupational therapy, patients at the hospital grew crops and did other activities that kept the hospital running for more than a century.
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In the 1960s, George Glore entered the picture. Glore was a longtime mental health professional, and in 1968, he and patients at the hospital constructed what would become the first exhibits in the museum. It might have looked like he was constructing torture devices because that’s basically what he was doing. Glore wanted to increase awareness for how poorly the mentally ill were treated, even in that very hospital, and did so by creating reproductions of horrific inventions that asylums used to “treat” patients. This includes the “Bath of Surprise,” a tub that patients were unexpectedly dropped into — the shock of the water was supposed to calm them down.
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After these exhibits were finished, they were put on display for the public for Mental Health Awareness Week, and they were a big hit. Some people were fascinated to learn about just how inhumane old hospitals were; others just thought the macabre stuff was cool. Either way, the success of the exhibits led to the formation of a permanent museum for them. Then there was a whole transition in the way that mental illness was treated that led to the old asylum growing obsolete. In the end, most of the buildings that made up the asylum campus were turned into a prison, except the old surgical building, which became the permanent home of the Glore Psychiatric Museum.
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Yes, the museum is scenically located next to a prison.
4
Is It Haunted?
All right, now let’s get to the question that everyone wants to know: Is the museum haunted?
Initially, publicity for the museum came from the brutal reproductions that George Glore made, but as it settled down in its location and visitors regularly came by, the museum earned itself a new reputation. According to many, the museum was haunted by the ghosts of the asylum’s tortured patients. During my time at the museum, I heard all sorts of stories from other museum employees, volunteers, and visitors. Some said that they heard screaming in one place or another. Others felt unexplained bursts of cold air as they walked through the old hospital. Regularly, ghost hunters make their way to the museum, either because they heard from other paranormal folks that it’s a lively place or because the museum hosted a ghost event.
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