12. Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center, Wingdale, New York
Location: New York’s Wingdale
Time: 1924
Building cost: $20 million*
This mental health facility used to be at the forefront of the now-outdated lobotomy method. Throughout the 20th century, numerous patients at the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center had their frontal lobe pathways severed. When the Center first opened its doors in 1924, it was intended to cure and care for “the insane.”
Wingdale, New York’s Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center @UntappedNY/Pinterest
The center’s 900 acres and 80 buildings were situated on the site of an abandoned jail. The hospital featured its own ice cream shop, bakery, dairy farm, baseball field, bowling alley, and golf course. The center could accommodate 5,000 patients and just as many staff members at its busiest. Following twenty years of deterioration brought on by the construction of larger, better facilities, Harlem was shuttered, and the supposedly haunted property was abandoned.
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