The Ridges

In health class today we were talking about mental institutions, lobotomys and I started telling my students about "The Ridges" at my alma mater, Ohio University. It was a mental health center to treat patients with severe psychiatric disorders until it finally closed in 1993 and currently is being used by the University.

Click here and you will be able to read all about it...it's fascinating, trust me.

In 2000, when I was a Senior, the school set up a haunted tour. It was a full moon on Friday the 13th....just too good to pass up, you know? We went there and there were thousands of people there so they cancelled it. Did that stop us? NOPE. We went to one of the only abandoned buildings....."The Tuberculosis Ward". If you click on that link it shows the exact places we saw too! I still get goosebumps when thinking about how a few of us bunched up together with one flashlight and creeped around it. In the children's TB ward part there were these tiny rooms with tiny doors with shackles on the walls...terrifying. The stickers on the windows you'll see in the pics had the eyes either ripped out or colored in black. The piano had all the black keys removed. One of the classrooms had a chalkboard with nailmarks sliding all the way down it!

If you have some spare time, just surf about that whole site, whoever that was did a great job with it. There is a true story, found here, about a patient who died and her body rotted into the floor. Now my students are all creeped out and want to go to Ohio University!!!