Location: Now a series of dilapidated and aged structures reclaimed by wilderness and largely deserted, Entonsburg was a former small rural farming community in the 1890s to 1930s, now abandoned and reclaimed by woodland located within the Mahaffie Natural Preserve off Highway 41, fifteen miles north of Charleston, South Carolina and part of the Francis Marion State Forest. The main grounds of the hospital are part of the former town limits accessed beyond the former town and deep within the winding dirt roads of the preserve and considered condemned. 

Description Of Place: Once covering around 450 to 500 acres of former farmland and woodlands connected by long dirt roads crisscrossing the property, Entonsburg Mental Hospital once consisted of almost fifteen structures linked by numerous underground tunnels to research buildings, medical wards, housing dormitories and an on-site crematory. Other structures included barns, sheds and storage buildings along with silos and a cemetery on the grounds, most of which is now thickly overgrown with trees and brush and neglected. The main administration building was situated in a large two story white manor house which is now condemned and placed on a small bluff overlooking the area. Although derelict, sections of the structure are in a preserved state, left virtually untouched since it closed down in 1987, still almost completely stocked with medical gear, chemicals, furniture and out-dated files. 

Ghostly Manifestations: It is next to impossible to find witness testimonies for reputed haunted houses that have been deserted in excess of twenty years. At some point, a location is considered haunted by the people who presided there before it was abandoned or by a number of substantiated witnesses who frequent the location, but such is not the case when it comes to Entonsburg Mental Hospital. Unlike locations like Greystone Hospital in New York and Vannacutt Hospital in California, Entonsburg has no reputation for being haunted since the days it closed in 1987. Despite this lack of reputation, there are a few witnesses who believe something still presides the halls and corridors of the eerie dilapidated structure.

"I never believed in ghosts before I returned to the old asylum." Reverend Lyle Dey is an ordained priest from Holmes, Maine, who once lived in the shadow of the hospital. As a child, he was treated for emotional problems at Entonsburg and later adopted in 1989 by foster parents. It was the funeral of of one of his old school mates, author Brax Young, who left a dying request in his will that Dey and his friends return to the old hospital where they had first met to put their old skeletons to rest. However, one of those ghosts did not retreat into history that easily.

"I never headed to the hospital looking for ghosts, and I never entered it expecting to find ghosts." Dey adds. "We weren't even looking to revisit the past, but once you start down a path of rediscovery, you tend to stay on that path until its end."

Although Dey's memories of his past in the hospital is light on details, the revelation that his life there was motivated by more sinister motives is obvious, and those details shed some light on some of the activity there. The sounds and shades of young children who died there are possibly haunting the creaky desolate structure. One presence in particular seemed very familiar with Dey and his friends there and seemed to reach out to them personally.

"To be honest," Dey continues. "I remember feeling a presence watching me the week before the reunion. I never thought about until it after, but I was working on my sermon at the seminary when I felt the sensation of someone watching me. I looked up and around and walked through the storage area, but no one was there. I started wondering if it could have been my imagination, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that someone had been there. It hasn't happened again or since, but I just have the feeling that my experiences at the hospital was linked to my previous encounter."

Dey's former classmate, Jennifer Jones, a psychology teacher at Strayer College in Pennsylvania, also felt visited by something in the days immediately prior to the reunion. Her visits were also accompanied by poltergeist activity that took over a slide projector and sent it clicking quickly through several slides with no one near it or its remote. Even Brent Sykes, their old classmate, a lawyer from D.C., later added that in the days up to the funeral that he had recurring dreams of being chased through the woods by something he couldn't see. 

"When we were kids," Jennifer reveals. "We were not aware the location was a hospital. My memories of the location was that the place was more of a boarding school where we were raised and schooled but going there now and seeing these ruins and the grounds unattended... and then learning the place was actually a mental hospital, you start asking questions like, "What the hell were we doing there?""

Lyle, Brent, Jennifer and other classmates had been brought together by the funeral of former classmate, author Brax Young, creator of novels such as "The Library" and "The Girl Who Cried." Young's death and funeral in 2007 reunited Lyle and Jennifer with other surviving classmates who were sent on a scavenger hunt to their old school and former mental hospital. Whether Young was hoping to stir up the truth of their memories about the old place is unrevealed, but he couldn't have predicted the experiences they would have there.

"I just didn't recognize the place." Jennifer continues. "But yet, I had this strange feeling I had been there before. I knew exactly where to find a first first aid kit after Wayne hurt his leg, I knew how to find the examination room and somehow I found our old room where we once lived and yet, I still have contrary memories of having attended a school in my youth that did not resemble this place. How is it possible that my memories changed so far from reality?"  

Jennifer is not the only one with this disturbing revelation. Their schoolmate, Gina Conte, now an actress in New York City, was also disturbed by the altered memory. Brax's scavenger hunt had taken them to a barn on the location where she had strong feelings of a presence or of being watched. They hadn't seen anything yet, but that was yet to follow. When they were off exploring the mansion on the grounds, classmate Wayne Morrison, now a general contractor from Virginia Beach, felt as if he was pushed down the outside stairs into the mansion basement.

"I didn't stumble." He swears. "I felt pushed, and I came down right on my leg. I've stumbled several times and never dislodged my ankle and ripped my leg open, and yet this time, it happened."

Wayne also reports nearly getting decapitated by a window that once seemed solid that waited to suddenly come crashing down when he stuck his head through to look out the bars outside of it. Pulled away at the last minute, he almost had a concussion to go with his scarred leg.

"That was another thing." Dey adds. "I recall Wayne trying to open this window further, and it wouldn't budge, but the second he starts sticking his head through, down it comes like a French guillotine."

Waylaid by a vehicle with a dead battery and lack of cell phone service, the team of six former students offered to wait for someone to find their stranded vehicle or for sunlight before they started trekking off the grounds. Their only choice was to camp out in the dilapidated hospital surrounded by forgotten files, soured medical supplies and ruined surgical supplies to wait out tonight, but Brent Sykes was not open to that suggestion.

"Brent ranted and cursed while we stranded there." Jennifer testified. "He definitely had no patience for the scavenger hunt Brax had left, he started losing it after our rental car stalled and the entire proposal we stay in the dingy comforts of the old hospital seemed to push him off the edge. I wonder if that led to him getting lost in the place, what, three times."

"I don't see how Brent couldn't gotten lost there." Dey picks up. "He claims he got lost going in circles trying to find his way back to the examination room, but he kept turning up near the day room. The halls were not that complex, but I do agree several of them looked identical. However, I passed through the area near the day room at least once in the two hours he was missing from our group and I never saw him, and when he finally showed up, he was nervous and jittery, claiming something had lunged at him from a pile of old toys on the floor."

While most of the strange feelings, disorientation and creaking noises of the place were not enough to suggest they were being haunted, as the hospital grew darker and shadows began encroaching, things escalated when Beth Patterson, a CPA from Raleigh, North Carolina, reported seeing a phantom girl passing through their collective peripheral vision. According to her story, she had casually paused before a mirror in the children's living quarters and small a small girl standing behind her.

"She was about four beet tall." She reports. "Long stringy dark hair to her shoulders, sullen large brown eyes, small thin lips, slight of build in an old flowered dress with her hands hanging by her side and her head held slightly up with her mouth lightly open. At the bottom of her dress, she just floated... she had no legs."

Beth screamed and whirled around, but no body was there. Gina thought she had seen her as well drifted beyond the edge of a hall and Brent in his angry frustrated wandering claimed he was terrified by a sudden dark shape that lunged at him from the day room. The turn of the location's mood was very quickly began to prey on their imaginations in the place. Gina even suffered a violent headache as if someone was squeezing her head. At one time or another, almost everyone saw the ghost of the girl.

"I'm almost inclined to believed something there was affecting our senses." Dey mentions. "But that doesn't explain the distant sounds of voices we experienced. It was a distant rambling we could hear, like a television in another room, but we couldn't find the source. Brent was becoming unhinged, Wayne was in constant pain, Gina couldn't get over her inexplicable panic attacks. It was as if this spirit was trying to torture us...

"For the most part, Gina and Beth described her as a young girl, but Brent described her as an adult woman in a long flowing dark dress. Were they the same spirit, or two different earthbound souls, I don't know. All I know is, I spent that night trying to assuage their fears with Bible verses and Catholic invocations and the following morning at first light, we found an old wheelchair and rolled Wayne and his leg off the grounds down the hill, across the grounds to the highway and flagged down the first driver who would stop for us."

History: Entonsburg was founded as a Pre-Civil War town around 1795 and almost entirely decimated during the Civil War by both Union and Confederate soldiers pillaging and burning down the town. between 1864 and 1865. By 1911, Entonsburg Hospital was founded on the grounds of an abandoned farm as a segregated Negro hospital that was fully integrated as a mental hospital by the Late 1960s. 

Between 1954 and 1976, Entonsburg Mental Hospital was one of several mental facilities in the South doing behavioral studies on the mental development of children between the ages of eight and twelve. These studies were usually privately funded and concealed to the general public. Families were paid a fee for their involvement, but most children were taken from broken homes, single parents and destitute families. Over six hundred children were involved in sociological experiments regarding behavior and response in over thirty hospitals through Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama. With new policies in psychiatric therapy, many of these children were returned to their families or foster homes or adopted by doctors and staff members, although several are reputed to have vanished altogether, either becoming runaways or passing away under practically squalid conditions. 

Most of these hospitals were closed down by 1982 with the one in Entonsburg staying open until 1987 when it finally shut down and became part of the county. Although hikers and campers frequent the woods often, caretakers and park rangers patrol the grounds of the abandoned hospital to deter trespassers.

Identity of Ghosts: No one is exactly sure how many children lost their lives at Entonsburg Mental Hospital, but the estimate is that between 100 to 150 children alone died at Entonsburg, not as a result of the experiments but from the undesirable living conditions. According to Brax Young, as many as fifteen to twenty children were usually committed to a room, sometimes both boys and girls. Hours were confined to schooling and subjective research by the doctors and staff with limited outdoor access and strict curfews. Those who tried to escape were usually picked up in minutes or dismissed as runaways within a few hours.

One such disappearance was a girl named Karen Slidell who vanished one day in August 1973, and whose remains were found in a trunk located on the grounds by Dey and his retinue in 2007. Forensic analysis suggested a lack of foul play, but Gina Conte provided details from her youth that she had been mentally suppressing for years.

"Karen was a friend of mine... Sort of..." She confesses. "We were the last eight kids living at the hospital before it closed in 1987. The adults called us the "Crazy Eight." Anyway, in 1973, we were playing in the old barn, and she decided she didn't want to go back to the school and we decided to hide her in an old trunk, even giving her a few of our toys to make her feel better till we got back, but we forgot about her, and she was left behind... stuck in that trunk until Brax found her years later and placed the trunk for us to discover for ourselves. I imagine she stayed trapped in that trunk and died in it, her spirit left to wander the grounds until Brax got us to return to the old hospital."

Source/Comments: Crazy Eights (2007) - Architecture based on Crownsville Hospital in Crownsville, Maryland. Activity based largely on the movie and on Seaside Mental Hospital in Waterford, Connecticut.