Traverse City State Hospital

Michigan needed a third psychiatric hospital in the 1880s, and lumber baron Perry Hannah, “the father of Traverse City,” used his political influence to bring the Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane to his town, and architect Gordon W. Lloyd designed the main structure as Building 50 in Victorian-Italianate style under the Kirkbride Plan for mental institutions. Dr. James Decker Munson served as the hospital’s first superintendent from opening through 1924.

The hospital sat on 135 acres, a large rolling campus with West Grand Traverse Bay just half a mile away, and the building was angled to give patients a view of the water. Building 50 contained 386,740 square feet of space on a stone foundation, constructed from buff brick cast at the Markham brickworks in Greilickville. Accounts of opening day differ: one history says the facility opened in 1885 with 43 residents, while the Traverse Regional History Center says it welcomed its first 300 patients on November 30. The population grew to nearly 3,000 by 1959, eventually covering 1.4 million square feet across its peak. Between 1887 and 1903, twelve housing cottages and two infirmaries were built to accommodate increasing numbers of male and female patients.

Munson practiced a “beauty is therapy” philosophy that forbade straitjackets and emphasized kindness, fresh flowers from the asylum’s own greenhouses, and exposure to natural surroundings. He also believed “work is therapy,” and patients ran a laundry, gardened, canned fruits and vegetables, and built furniture. The campus farm produced a world-champion milk cow named Traverse Colantha Walker in the 1910s through 1930s; her grave remains on the grounds near what is now Historic Barns Park.

Treatment shifted dramatically after Munson’s retirement. By the 1940s, invasive procedures including insulin shock therapy, electroconvulsive treatment, and lobotomies had become standard. The farm closed in the 1950s, and most of its buildings were demolished by the mid-1970s. In 1963, the original 1885 center wing of Building 50 was destroyed as a fire hazard and rebuilt; the attached wings remain original. The hospital closed in 1989 after serving over 50,000 patients, eliminating more than 200 local jobs.

During the years the buildings stood vacant following closure, urban explorers reported lights flickering in rooms with no power connected, shadows moving through corridors, and electronic voice phenomena captured on recording equipment. Psychics claimed to communicate with patients who had died at or were bound to the site. Workmen have reported figures in empty upper-floor windows of Building 50, and investigators have captured audible voices on recordings made in spaces they knew to be empty. The laundry room has produced an unsettled feeling and doors slamming with regularity not explained by wind.

A photography instructor who brought college students to photograph the abandoned wards recounted a November afternoon when a blast of hot air struck the group at a busted-out doorway despite 45-degree temperatures; people nearby looking through windows felt nothing at all. Tour groups taken through underground steam tunnels have heard secondhand ghost stories from former asylum workers. In February 2024 a woman who stayed in Room 118 at the Munson Manor said she heard voices in the empty bathroom, and another night she heard a man by the window calling a woman’s name over and over.

One man who worked on the first phase of renovation, had his own keys and was alone in the building after dark more than once, recalled hearing doors open and close, footsteps, keys rattling, and whistling during that first phase of work.

The Minervini Group bought the property for one dollar, in 2000 by one account and 2002 by another, and has put about $60 million into restoring it. The site reopened in 2002 as The Village at Grand Traverse Commons, a mixed-use development housing shops, restaurants, offices, and condominiums within the restored Victorian-era buildings. The unrenovated sections of Building 50 remain off-limits, though visitors can book historical tours of the grounds, and trails run through the Grand Traverse Commons Natural Area behind the old hospital.