Taunton State Hospital

Massachusetts' second psychiatric hospital, opened in 1854. Over 800 patients died here, buried in unmarked graves at Mayflower Hill Cemetery. Serial killer Jane Toppan, who confessed to 31 murders, was committed here for life.

They call it "America's Most Haunted Asylum"—a place where some say the Devil himself checked in. Taunton State Hospital rises from 154 acres along the Mill River in southeastern Massachusetts, a sprawling complex that once housed over forty buildings and witnessed more than a century of human suffering that left permanent scars on the very fabric of reality.

The facility opened on April 7, 1854, as Massachusetts' second state lunatic asylum, built to relieve catastrophic overcrowding at Worcester. Designed by Elbridge Boyden in the revolutionary Kirkbride style, the hospital was intended as a place of healing—a "moral environment to effect cures" with fresh air, sunlight, and therapeutic grounds. The main building featured a distinctive 70-foot dome crowning a three-story administrative structure, with stepped-back wings designed to maximize light and ventilation. When patients first arrived, they were called "patients, not inmates," and the grounds were meant to restore sanity, not destroy it.

But within decades, Taunton transformed into something darker. Overcrowding swelled the population far beyond capacity. By the 1930s, Governor James Curley witnessed conditions so appalling he declared the wards "horrible places to put animals in." Patients endured lobotomies, electroshock therapy, ice baths, and prolonged solitary confinement. Pseudoscientific methods like phrenology persisted into the late 1940s. The theory of eugenics shifted the institution's philosophy from treatment to neglect—warehousing society's unwanted.

Among the countless troubled souls who passed through Taunton's doors, two stand out for their particular darkness. Anthony Santo, an Italian immigrant born in 1894, confessed in 1908 to murdering two cousins and a six-year-old girl. He claimed "mad-spells" from a childhood bout of scarlet fever compelled him to kill, and he spent the rest of his life confined within these walls.

But no patient casts a longer shadow than Jane Toppan—"Jolly Jane"—one of America's most prolific female serial killers. A nurse who confessed to 31 murders but may have killed over 100, Toppan used morphine and atropine to experiment on elderly and frail patients at Cambridge Hospital. She derived sexual pleasure from climbing into bed with her dying victims, watching the light fade from their eyes. "My ambition," she once declared, "was to have killed more people—helpless people—than any other man or woman who ever lived." Found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1902, Toppan spent her remaining 36 years at Taunton, ironically developing a paranoid fear that her own food was being poisoned. She died in 1938 and lies in an unmarked grave at Mayflower Hill Cemetery.

The paranormal activity at Taunton exists on a scale that defies easy explanation. The most terrifying entity is known simply as "The Shadow Man"—a short, sometimes grotesquely stretched male figure who crawled along the walls and ceilings of patients' rooms, glaring down at the terrified occupants. This entity was said to originate from the basement of the main Kirkbride building, traveling through walls, floors, and ceilings as though the building itself was a body and he was a virus spreading through it.

The basement holds other horrors. Persistent rumors claim a Satanic cult operated within the hospital for generations, using patients for dark rituals and human sacrifices. Strange symbols and illegible text appeared on horsehair-plastered walls—markings that workmen would wash away only to find them reappearing, sometimes as entirely different images. One account describes a young interning psychiatrist fleeing the facility after witnessing what he described as executions being carried out in the basement. Staff members who attempted to investigate reported being stopped on the stairs by an invisible force that prevented them from descending.

Those who venture near the grounds today report blood-curdling screams echoing across the property—disembodied cries for help and sobbing that seem to seep from the very soil. Visitors describe cold invisible hands grasping at them, whispered commands to "leave," and an overwhelming sense of torment emanating from the buildings. Poltergeist activity has been documented throughout the campus. The entire 154-acre property is considered haunted, including the surrounding woods where something dark seems to have spread beyond the walls.

The main Kirkbride building closed in 1975 under circumstances that some consider suspicious. In 1999, the iconic central dome collapsed. Then on March 14, 2006, a five-alarm fire—one of the largest in Massachusetts history—destroyed much of the historic complex, requiring over 100 firefighters from eighteen departments. Shortly after, with mounting rumors and bad press, the governor ordered the remaining structures demolished.

But demolition may not have ended the haunting. Some claim the structural materials were salvaged and distributed nationwide, raising questions about whether the evil that saturated Taunton's walls traveled with them. A small portion of the hospital remains operational today, housing 48 psychiatric beds. But the legacy of over a century of suffering—the thousands who lived and died within these walls, the serial killers who walked its corridors, the shadow entity that still roams its foundations—ensures that Taunton State Hospital will never truly close.