The Disturbing History of Hotel Henry (Former Asylum)

these buildings are so dark apart even the sky i'll never get out [Music] it's long since been known that the mentally ill have been subjected to severe and unimaginable treatment in the united states centuries ago it was viewed as a stain on your family's image if someone in your home were suffering from one of these disabilities because of this disabled family members would be locked away inside of sellers abandoned in the streets or hidden away in barns they were punished for conditions to which they had no control over and by the 17th century it was clear that change needed to happen which brought along an all-new kind of horror asylums asylums were set up to be safe spaces for the mentally ill to stay and receive treatment but very quickly many of them became overstuffed testing grounds for disturbed practices in the early days it was believed that internal imbalance was to blame for these illnesses to combat this doctors would cut patients open and have them bleed into buckets to restore their balance when this didn't work the treatments would get more and more extreme teeth would be pulled tonsils would be removed and eventually they even began trying to remove pieces of the stomach small intestine and the colon all because they thought this would restore balance to the body and the mind however many of these treatments often led to death and we know now that they were virtually ineffective aside from the unimaginable procedures patients were kept like prisoners being trapped in overcrowded dark rooms that were rarely if ever cleaned and if they didn't comply to orders they would be beaten it was painfully clear that these asylums just weren't working and in fact they were doing more harm than good this inspired famed architects henry richardson and fredrick olmstead to come together to create a facility that was different an asylum that could heal patients rather than harm them and with that the buffalo state asylum for the insane was created [Music] the asylum featured a multitude of different groundbreaking architectural designs that were supposed to help heal the patients the architects believed that natural sunlight would help to settle the sick and eventually aid in their healing process because of this over 2 000 large windows were installed in the buildings along with incredibly high ceilings to make the rooms and halls seem even more open the building also featured many curved walls which supposedly was done to make it more difficult to place rows of patients on hospital beds throughout the hallways this discouraged overcrowding which was a common problem in many asylums at the time so basically what they did here was they made these almost like cages so that the patients could come out and get fresh air and natural sunlight which that was the whole idea of this place when it first started it was for better care for the mentally ill and so they gave them outdoor time like this and they gave them natural lighting with all the windows in there and they tried to do things better at first but things changed despite its admiral beginnings the buffalo asylum slowly became a notoriously gruesome place to live a building designed for patients to have space and to avoid overcrowding soon became overrun in a facility built for just 600 patients as many as 3 000 ended up being held there at a time this led to a lack of space which forced many of the sick to live in the halls or even outside because of the influx of patients the care only got worse as the hospital had stopped using innovative treatments and instead resorted to the more commonly used cruel practices patients would be tied to their beds and beaten if they misbehaved meanwhile they would be subjected to electroshock therapy as well as hydrotherapy and the procedures just got worse those suffering from schizophrenia would often be given insulin so that the patient would fall into a coma at the time it was thought that the patients would wake up with a clearer mind however this came with a fatality rate that was estimated to be as high as 10 percent the hospital would also use things such as metrozol to induce seizures in patients and even lobotomies which were notorious for causing permanent brain damage as well as death patients would also be artificially sterilized by doctors as they didn't want them to reproduce the dream of the buffalo asylum ever becoming a place of healing for the mentally ill had faded and in the end it became everything that it tried not to be over time the patients would slowly be pulled out of the asylum until the 70s when operations would be shut down completely causing the building to become abandoned and to slowly deteriorate but even before this happened there were stories of the paranormal inside of this complex and to this day it's renowned as one of the most haunted places in buffalo the city where i grew up as a kid i would hear stories of how the ghosts of former patients still roamed the halls of the abandoned building lost souls trapped in a place that was likely hell on earth for many of them it's a building that i've drove by a thousand times and it's always left me creeped out whenever i would think of it just picturing how many people died within those walls and the tragic ways in which they passed it always just made sense to me that it was haunted an abandoned haunted insane asylum it's certainly nightmare fuel but as it turns out it's not abandoned anymore the complex built in the 1800s was an asylum for people who had mental disabilities the richardson complex buildings are currently being transformed into a hotel and conference center there is new life in the richardson olmsted campus with hotel henry after 100 million dollars of renovation the former asylum has now been turned into a luxury hotel providing it with one of the darkest backstories for any hotel that i've ever heard of and with all things considered many believe that this could turn out to be one of the most haunted hotels in the country given its history alone and tonight we'll be staying there what's that smell this place definitely has an odor to it i seriously cannot believe this i think we have this place to ourselves too it's like no one around it's got a weird feeling to it just knowing that this used to be a psych ward ready yeah [Applause] oh my god what the hell this is amazing obviously all this way is the hotel right but as of this part as of this fenced area over here everything that way is abandoned so it's still there's nothing in there it's completely run down when the buffalo asylum was renovated into the hotel henry the building was in such disrepair that the 100 million dollar budget only funded one-third of the building's renovation with the rest of the property still being abandoned and sealed off to the public but it's not just the abandoned parts that are off limits because of the current pandemic the majority of the hotel itself is closed off making it impossible to fully explore normally i would feel totally comfortable exploring all around this hotel but obviously because of the coverage restrictions they have to be kind of careful despite the limitations we were able to visit every floor of that particular wing with each floor proving to be extremely similar with the exception of four okay behind you oh my god oh my god what the heck i can only imagine what is in there you getting any spooky vibes here very much yeah there's something on this floor it feels a lot less welcoming i guess there's something very very off you're right from there we walked around the perimeter of the complex and realized just how massive it really was as well as how deteriorated the abandoned sections had become look this is a whole another building to this complex that's also abandoned now this place it's huge this place is this just a walkway to nothing oh my god this walkway should lead to stairs which would go up to that door and now the door is just kind of floating there should i try and open it go off so what happened earlier is we saw a bunch of these things from our window just scattered all throughout the lawns here and we thought there was some kind of concrete thing but really they're just they're just tiles from the roof that have fallen off because the abandoned part of this hotel is literally falling apart at the seams oh my god look at the pile of these look at the pile of them oh damn roofs here come on sweetie go pose with the roof come on i'll be uh an instagram girl with her wings on her birthday yeah balloons on her birthday except it's molded ceiling tile i just i can't wrap my head around how big this is think about all the rooms in here and you know the craziest part about it we've seen how big this is it was completely filled in fact it was so filled that they were overrun completely and that's why the character got so bad you think about all that all the mistreatment that they had here all the people who were so sick i can't even imagine how many people died here all the whilst we are sleeping in this building and it is now a luxury hotel all right so like we just got all across this whole entire building i'm thinking we're done right here no it keeps going all the way down there okay so you know how you said earlier that this is like the perfect place for a horror movie yeah well it was the inspiration of some horror content one of my all-time favorites actually in 2013 one of my favorite horror games of all time outlast was released the game takes place in the fictional asylum known as mount massive which as it turns out was modeled off of the buffalo asylum which is now hotel henry which just adds to the already terrifying building there's people going around like let's see what is your outlast impression they're just like [Music] so i've stayed at quite a few haunted hotels in my life but i feel like this is different like don't you think this is like that yeah definitely it's different because at those other haunted hotel rooms and that's typically what they always were but here a room like this was probably used to keep patients in which is horrifying to think of it is horrifying to think of we're going to be sleeping on this bed in a luxury room now meanwhile people were chained to beds in this room i feel like there's a really good possibility that somebody passed away in this very room basically i feel like out of all the places i've stayed this room probably has the best possibility of being haunted basically all i'm gonna do right now is ask some questions see if there's any spirits around hopefully they can give us a sign maybe that they hear us is there anyone here who would like to communicate are there any former patients of the buffalo asylum in here with us we are inviting you in we yeah we all right we're all on this together trademarked song banger sorry can you move something do you hear that mariah and i both heard a noise coming from the bathroom that the microphone just barely picked up and honestly it wasn't anything too crazy or convincing but it is relevant to what transpires next it sounds like it came from the bathroom i wasn't even [ __ ] around like come in here we're gonna shut the door [Music] are you trying to communicate with us all right this is your last chance and then we're gonna go if you want to communicate with us if you want to speak with us then please let your presence be known okay i think we're good alrighty so we did get the one little noise there but you know yeah we got one little spook all right but not enough to really convince me not enough to keep us up at night yeah but there's more as mariah and i were talking on the bed i heard what sounded like a whisper followed by obvious movement at the time i couldn't make out what i heard but when i listened back it sounds like something is softly saying hello this whisper was followed by loud thuds that to me sounds like footsteps walking away from us the strange noises continued as this time an obvious tapping noise could be heard coming from the bathroom a noise that seems unlikely to have been caused by any sort of natural creaking is there someone here with us is there someone here so we heard the first noise it was definitely different it wasn't a tapping it was more of a thud then it was just all this weird tapping or you could hear it and it was definitely coming from the bathroom and in case you didn't realize we are alone in this hotel room obviously but there's also no one else in this hotel right now like it is we time to drink you know we are so dumb for saying anything we should have just kept our mouth shut you should have kept your mouth shut shut hey it's depressed editing nick here nothing new i had the rest of the footage for that night on a separate sd card and now this is saying it's corrupted it's unreadable i basically lost all of that footage um it's unusable it literally worked fine yesterday i should have downloaded all the clips i caught some great stuff that night i was excited to show you guys um and now i just really don't know what to do so kind of sucks pretty devastating um and now i'm kind of scrambling so i'm gonna sleep on it and come up with a plan tomorrow after taking the night to mull over my options i decided that my best bet was to just go back to the hotel and spend another night which was expensive but it also allowed for us to investigate even further hey we're back buddy definitely different layout in here so unfortunately we weren't able to get the same room that we were at last time which does suck because i feel like we were actually onto something i mean we captured a lot of crazy [ __ ] that night but it does give us the chance to explore another room to see if maybe this one is haunted as well so we're gonna run a similar session in this room so all in all it should be another spooky night here okay so we're gonna kind of run back the same test that we did at the other room to see if there's anything spooky going on here because after all each room is going to be different it's going to tell a different story because different patients stayed in each one of these so it's possible that one room's haunted here and the other isn't are there any spirits in this room that would like to make contact with us are there any patients here from the buffalo asylum whose spirits are still trapped in this building as we were waiting for some kind of response we did hear some strange noises seemingly coming from all directions that you that just made that noise is it hard for you having all these people come into this building the building where you once suffered so much and now people are just living lavishly okay so in the last room weirdly enough the bathroom seemed to be like a real hot spot for whatever reason i don't know why but i think we should go to the bathroom all right ready let's go is there anyone in here that would like to communicate with us all right so this is your last chance if you want to say anything if you want to make your presence known this is it and then we're going to be leaving the room so nothing really convincing um kind of like last time the first session went we didn't catch anything and then it was kind of after that that everything started to happen i'm just not feeling anything that paranormal in here yet you know yes yes let's just say we got a long night ahead of us though after failing to get any solid results from the session we decided to visit another wing of the hotel a wing that we hadn't yet explored okay so this is actually the other wing of this building and we're not sure if anyone's actually staying in here or not we're about to find out okay so what i'm thinking here is that they're not putting people in this wing at all you could tell there's no ac it would definitely have a c just like the other wing if there were people up here because it's just it feels like it's 100 degrees in here and it's not just because of the hoodie you know [Music] man's be sweating over here we were shooting a scene talking about how hot it was in the swing and honestly it was a scene that i was right about to delete but then i noticed something when i played it through for the final time another voice while i'm talking a clear whisper can be heard as soon as i finished speaking it feels like it's 100 degrees in here and it's not just because of the hoodie you know bruh you know and to me it sounds like something is saying don't speak it feels like it's 100 degrees in here and it's not just because of the hoodie you know [Music] so i'm assuming that means that we have this wing of the building to ourselves in the moment mariah and i were so shocked to find this random cradle in the seemingly empty building that we didn't even notice the sound of footsteps it sounded like someone was running away from the area if people were staying in this wing why the [ __ ] would this be in the middle of the hallway i just don't get it why would this be kept here right here am i crazy or does that look like it's a load of a person yeah that definitely does what the absolute what the [ __ ] man it literally looks like there's a person just standing there watching us should we go check it out okay so i'm assuming it was just this pillar that makes you feel a little bit better are you sure why is the ears getting louder is there someone in there the noise went away in the moment this was one of the scariest things i've encountered it sounded exactly like someone was pounding on the door and the high-pitched noise just made it even more off-putting why is the ear splitting noise getting louder but looking back my assumption is that there was likely machinery in that room potentially connected to the elevator but it was impossible to say for sure and whatever it really was it terrified us both the issue is i don't know what's behind that door so i don't know if it's anything paranormal but it sounded literally like pounding against that door the [ __ ] is this okay it doesn't go far dude [Music] after exploring for a while we ended up going back to the room and doing one more session to see if we could capture anything else before we went to bed after this we're gonna go to bed we're gonna leave and we will be gone so this is your last chance to interact with us to let your presence be known can you move something can you say something can you give me a sign that you hear me all right we're gonna leave so i'm gonna ask one more time can you give me a sign that you hear me so kind of a disappointing way to end the night i have a feeling that maybe this hotel room isn't haunted at least not as much as the last one was but the night's not over yet because we still have to sleep here you know i'm gonna keep the camera by the bedside and if anything happens i'll turn it on and i'll let you guys know and if not i'll talk to you guys in the morning evening i woke up the next morning to loud banging noises seemingly coming from our door i checked the people and i saw nothing given the daylight and the time that it happened i'm more inclined to believe that this wasn't paranormal but then again i didn't see anyone in the hallway all right so we officially made it through the night last night nothing crazy happened i actually slept really well and this morning i was woken up by some banging noises it was pretty creepy i'm not gonna lie but there's no way to really tell if that's paranormal it was probably just somebody maybe in the hallway moving something around so i can't say for sure what it was but other than that it was actually a really normal and relaxed and comfortable night we survived buddy the second time throughout our time at hotel henry we managed to capture quite a few strange moments with the most convincing to me being the whispers strange sounds can always be blamed on a creaky building or someone in the halls but hearing actual voices saying actual words i can't find an explanation for it because of the hoodie you know throughout the past year i found myself believing less and less in the paranormal but these visits have actually made me change my perspective and i truly believe that the hotel henry is in fact haunted but of course i'm not an expert and that's ultimately left for the individual to decide it's all made me question the decision to turn this former asylum into a hotel something about staying in a fancy expensive suite all the while snowing that people suffered in that exact room it just didn't sit right with me and though it may be an incredible architectural gem its past is so twisted that no amount of remodeling could ever cover up the disturbing history of hotel henry you

Channel: Nick Crowley

Views: 1,424,277

Keywords: The Disturbing History of Hotel Henry (Former Asylum), the disturbing history of hotel henry, hotel henry, dark history of hotel henry, overnight at hotel henry, Hotel Henry, Buffalo Asylum for the Insane, Richardson Complex, Haunted Hotel Henry, haunted hotel, buffalo ny, haunted

Id: fVHa0D3yLzc

Length: 31min 33sec (1893 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020