From Boys’ School to Ward: St. Albans Sanatorium, Radford

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 13, 2026 · How we verify

St. Albans Sanatorium stands on a wooded rise above Radford, Virginia, a heavy brick building wrapped in ivy and surrounded by ground that has been quiet for decades. It is one of the better known stops on the state’s haunted circuit, and unlike many of them it is still standing, still accessible, and still open to anyone willing to book a night inside. What draws people is not a single famous disaster but the shape of the building’s working life: first a school for boys, then a hospital for the mentally ill, and finally an empty shell with a reputation.

Quick Facts on the Radford Building

• Location: Radford, in southwestern Virginia
• Opened: 1892, as a boys’ school
• Converted: 1916, to a sanatorium
• Current use: closed as a medical facility; preserved and used for tours and overnight paranormal investigations

From Schoolroom to Ward: 1892 and 1916

The building began in 1892 as a boys’ school, a purpose it is worth keeping in mind when you walk the corridors, because the proportions of the place were set by classrooms and dormitories rather than by medicine. In 1916 it was converted into a sanatorium, and that change of use put it in step with a wider shift in how American institutions handled mental illness in the early twentieth century: more beds, more formal treatment programs, and a growing willingness to house patients at a distance from the towns they came from.

Over the decades that followed, St. Albans operated through an era whose treatments were presented as progress and are now read very differently. That tension, between the intention to heal and the methods available, is the honest core of the building’s history, and it is the reason a former hospital of this vintage attracts the kind of stories it does. The sanatorium eventually closed. The structure survived, and it is now kept as a monument to its own complicated record rather than being stripped out or knocked down.

Where the Record Ends and the Telling Begins

It is worth stating plainly what the documented history of St. Albans supports and what it does not. The dates are solid: a school in 1892, a sanatorium from 1916, a long institutional life, a closure. What is not established is any verified link between a specific named patient, a specific death, and any of the phenomena reported in the building today. The ghost stories attached to St. Albans are the accumulated testimony of visitors, staff and investigators. They are not hospital records, and they should not be read as if they were.

That distinction matters more at a former asylum than almost anywhere else. Buildings like this collect legends easily because their real history is genuinely grim, and the grimness of the real history gets borrowed to lend weight to claims nobody has tested. A visitor who keeps the two separate will get more out of the place, not less.

What People Say Happens Inside St. Albans

The reported activity at St. Albans is wide ranging rather than concentrated in one famous room, and the same categories come up again and again in visitor accounts:

• Shadowy figures caught at the edge of vision in corridors and doorways
• Voices and responses claimed as EVP captures during recorded sessions
• Abrupt drops in temperature in otherwise still rooms
• Unexplained noises: knocks, footsteps, movement on floors found empty
• Apparitions described by visitors and investigators
• Physical contact attributed to unseen forces, from touches to tugs on clothing

None of this has been verified in any controlled sense, and an old masonry building with long hallways, settling floors and uneven air flow produces a great deal of noise and sensation on its own. What can be said accurately is that the reports are consistent, numerous, and spread across years of visits by people who had no connection to each other.

Booking a Night at St. Albans Sanatorium

This is one of the rare sites where the visiting advice is simple, because the building is run for visitors. St. Albans offers structured ghost hunting tours and overnight investigations, led by guides who know the layout and the stories attached to each wing. For anyone who has only ever read about places like this, a sanctioned overnight is a far better proposition than trespassing on a derelict, and it keeps the building funded and standing.

Dates, prices and age restrictions change, so confirm directly with the site before traveling. Come prepared for an unheated, unlit historic building: layers, sturdy footwear, your own flashlight and spare batteries. Equipment such as EMF meters, infrared cameras and audio recorders is standard among investigators who come here, though none of it will settle anything; at best it gives you something to argue about on the drive home.

Whatever you make of the reports, the building itself is the reason to come. A school that became a hospital and then outlived both functions is not a common survival, and St. Albans is still here to be walked through, which is more than can be said for most of its contemporaries.

See St. Albans Sanatorium for Yourself

Sources

• A Brief History
• The Abandoned South
• Erasing history: Wrecking ball aiming for DeJarnette?
• The history of Western State and DeJarnette Sanitarium
• Virginia is here to help – Virginia 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (Virginia (official))
• Wikipedia: Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents

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