Glore Psychiatric Museum

A museum named for founder George Glore, housed in a section of the former State Lunatic Asylum No. 2 which opened in 1874. Called one of the most unusual museums in the U.S., it displays the evolution of mental health treatment including replicas of historical treatment devices.

The Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri, occupies a building that was once part of State Lunatic Asylum No. 2, a sprawling institutional complex that opened in November 1874 with twenty-five patients and grew to house nearly three thousand by the 1950s. The asylum's early decades were marked by the crude and often barbaric treatments that characterized mental health care in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the suffering that occurred within these walls over more than a century has created a haunted atmosphere that even skeptics find difficult to dismiss.

Dr. George C. Catlett served as the hospital's first superintendent, overseeing an institution that quickly outgrew its original 275 beds. Additional wings were constructed, and the patient population swelled to include not only the mentally ill but also tuberculosis patients, syphilitic patients, alcoholics, and people with physical disabilities -- anyone whom society could not or would not accommodate. The conditions, particularly in the earliest decades, were defined by overcrowding, inadequate staffing, and treatments that by modern standards constitute torture.

In the 1960s, George Glore, a longtime employee of the Missouri Department of Mental Health, began assembling a collection of artifacts that depicted the evolution of mental illness treatment from the sixteenth century onward. His collection -- which includes replicas of restraint devices, hydrotherapy equipment, lobotomy instruments, and other tools of institutional psychiatry -- formed the foundation of what is now one of the most unusual and disturbing museums in the United States. The museum moved to a 1968 building that was originally a clinic for asylum patients, ensuring that the exhibits would be housed in a space that had witnessed the very suffering they documented.

Around the time the collection began to take shape, hospital staff started reporting sightings of apparitions and shadow figures throughout the complex. The reports increased as the institution transitioned from active hospital to museum, as if the process of documenting the patients' suffering had stirred the spirits of those who endured it. Paranormal investigation groups now visit the museum regularly and report consistent activity: electromagnetic anomalies, EVP recordings of voices that speak in tones of distress and confusion, and the sensation of being watched from empty rooms.

The most documented ghost is a full-bodied apparition that lingers in the old morgue area, a figure that investigators believe may be the spirit of a patient who died during treatment and whose body was processed through the very room where the ghost now stands. The Glore Psychiatric Museum hosts ghost hunts and paranormal events through American Hauntings, offering visitors the chance to explore a space where the line between historical exhibit and active haunting is remarkably thin.