<p><font size="3">The day began fairly uneventful. It was a hot sultry day, and we were clammy and sweaty people; everyone was sweaty, the sun was sweaty. Luckily we kept hydrated, unfortunately everything we drank made its way out our pores and into our already soggy stinking clothes.<br/><br/>The Allegheny mountain range is gorgeous, small by comparison to other mountain ranges perhaps, but nonetheless just as beautiful. Maybe even more so. The Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is located in the small town of Weston, West Virginia, population 4, 239 (give or take). The building itself, formerly known as the Weston State Hospital, is generous in size with ample room to hold just as many memories as ghosts. The largest hand-cut stone masonry building in the United States and the second largest in the world, next to the Kremlin, the Asylum was originally designed and built to hold 250 patients.  <br/> <br/>During the Civil War the grand old building was still under construction when it was seized and used as a military base by Colonel Erastus Bernard Tyler of the Seventh Ohio Infantry. The southernmost wing, the only completed portion of the Asylum, (now known as the Civil War Room) and surrounding grounds
became Camp Tyler, making Weston an important military post for the Union.<br/><br/>Confederate raids between 1862 and 1863 would eventually oust the Union troops and in 1864 the partially built Asylum would be ransacked and all of the food and clothing intended for its first group of patients would be taken . At the end of the war the completion of TALA took precedence and construction began once again. Weston was shielded from a post-war depression because of the Asylum and the area boomed with the newly funded construction and completion of the Asylum in 1881. <br/><br/><br/><img title="Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum - 1930s" height="311" alt="Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum - 1930s" src="http://www.ghosthalo.com/content_images/1/1930sfrontgate.gif" width="441" align="center" border="0"/><br/><font size="2">TALA as it was in the 1930s<br/><br/><br/><img title="Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum - 2008" height="311" alt="Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum - 2008" src="http://www.ghosthalo.com/content_images/1/2008frontgate.gif" width="441" align="center" border="0"/><br/>TALA as it is now in 2009.</font></font></p>