Souris Valley Mental Health Hospital — the demolished asylum that still screams, Weyburn

The Souris Valley Mental Health Hospital in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, was one of the largest mental health facilities in the British Commonwealth at its peak. Opened in 1921 as the Weyburn Mental Hospital, the massive complex housed over 2,500 patients at its capacity. The hospital gained international attention in the 1950s when psychiatrist Humphry Osmond conducted groundbreaking research on LSD as a treatment for mental illness — research that influenced both psychiatric medicine and the counterculture movement. The hospital was demolished in 2009, but its haunted reputation endured throughout its existence and beyond. Staff who worked there described hearing patients screaming in abandoned wards, seeing figures in hospital gowns wandering corridors that had been closed for decades, and experiencing a pervasive sense of despair in certain wings. The hospital's underground tunnels were particularly feared. After demolition, visitors to the site have reported hearing sounds from beneath the ground and feeling watched in the empty field where the hospital once stood. The Weyburn hospital's story is both a haunting and a cautionary tale about the institutionalization of mental illness in 20th-century Canada.