Lost and abandoned america

​

Terry Davis: One of the best stories I’ve had that creeped me out when I was younger – I was told the trees are evenly spaced apart because there’s layers of dead bodies in between them from where the patients died. Check them out. They’re pretty close!

 

Terri Riggle-Helt: My great grandparents are buried there. No headstones. It was called a pauper’s plot. People who had no money or life insurance to pay for a burial were buried there. My mother was very familiar with the place and told me stuff. They also sent people there with TB. I had an aunt there.

Tim Edge: Roney’s Point was required visiting back in the ‘70s. Fall was great because the trees on the way up were bent over the road like a live tunnel, and the sound of the wind blowing through the dying leaves was enough to scare your pants off before you even got to the main house. With broken windows, the leaves would blow into the house, and whenever someone would step on and crunch some leaves, everyone would freak out. A bunch of us were up there once, and we found a bunch of round, paper, printout discs; they looked like they recorded brain waves or something. Just added to the creepiness of the place.

 

Later that night we heard some sirens from up on the hill. We all took off like a bat out of hell and jumped in the car and cleared out big time. Wasn’t until we got the bottom of the hill that we realized we left one of our friends at the mansion. By the time we got up the nerve to drive back up to get him, he had run almost all the way back down the hill.

Judy Parsons Luzader: When I was a kid I used to go up with my mom to visit and play games with the patients. I always felt sorry for the people. At that time it was called the halfway house.

The Mansion and the Hospital.

The medical facility was constructed and operated by the state of West Virginia. Initially the staff concentrated on the tuberculosis outbreak, and then it was transitioned into a mental health facility. State officials, however, handed over the facility to the Ohio County Commission, and the county soon closed the hospital in 1972 because of the structure’s condition.’

 

After tuberculosis patients were no longer being treated, drug addicts, alcoholics, and the clinically insane received treatments at the former state hospital, a type of facility that was common in the 1950s and 1960s, according to Ohio County Commissioner Orphy Klempa.

“Those kinds of hospitals used to sprinkle the countrysides all over our country,” he said. “We separated those people from the rest of us. We weren’t very good to some of the people of our past.”

Former Ohio County Sheriff’s Deputy (and currently Ohio County magistrate) Charlie Murphy was frequently dispatched to Roney’s Point between 1978-87, and he has lived his entire life in this area of Ohio County. Many continue to believe the Schmulbach Mansion was used at one time as the sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, but Murphy confirmed that is merely urban myth.

“To the best of my knowledge , and I was born in 1955, the mansion was never used as a hospital,” he said. “The medical facility, first for the tuberculosis patients and then for the mentally ill, was always in the bigger building at the top of the hill.

“Most of the time I was sent to Roney’s Point to chase the parkers out or break up parties,” Murphy recalled. “People didn’t realize how dangerous it was up there because there were a lot of open water wells all over the grounds.”

 

The Schmulbach Mansion, according to local historian Ryan Stanton, was constructed for several years by brewer Henry Schmulbach, an investor in horse racing who didn’t run in the same circles of most of Wheeling elite citizens.

“Some people believe he was shunned in Wheeling, but I haven’t found that to be true. He wasn’t shunned. He was the one who shunned,” Stanton said. “He did what he wanted to do.”

Schmulbach moved into the mansion in 1913 at the age of 69 and soon married Pauline Bertchy the same year so he would have, Stanton said, “a hostess for the house.” It was also the year when West Virginia’s government enacted prohibition, forcing the closure of the brewery in South Wheeling.

“Her family was in the funeral home business, so they were pretty prominent in the Wheeling area, too,” Stanton said. “But then Schmulbach died in 1915, and she admitted she hated living all alone out there. That’s when she sold it to the county.

“After the county took ownership, it was opened as Ohio County’s poor farm. If you needed work, that’s where you went,” he said. “The mansion is where some of the workers used to stay so they could keep working. There are records that show some of the men lived there for as long as three years working that farm.”

 

Stanton also explained that, at one time, Schmulbach’s property featured a carriage house, a dairy barn, a greenhouse, a water fountain, and an ice house, as well as 11 other structures.

“In an article I found from 1972, it states those structures were used by the Valley Grove and Triadelphia volunteer fire departments for training,” Stanton said. “They burned them down.”

It was an accidental fire in 1975 that reduced the Schmulbach Mansion to the shell it is today.

“It destroyed the house, and I believe it was still in good enough condition where it could have been saved,” Stanton said. “After the hospital closed and the county took control, a lot of kids started going up there, and that’s most likely how the fire got started.

“I know there are a lot of rumors about the property, including the mansion and the asylum building, but the two structures are really about very different times in the history of Ohio County,” he continued. “But I do find it ironic that Ohio County now is making money from Henry Schmulbach from the oil and gas industries.”

 

The Man with the Shotgun.

His name was Cecil Tominack, a local coal miner whose family resided in the former nurses’ quarters near the hospital. Soon after Cecil was laid off from a local coal mine in 1986, his father, John Tominack, then a county commissioner, hired him to maintain and supervise the grounds. Cecil received zero compensation, but the Tominack family was permitted to move into the former nurses’ house.

So Cecil and his wife, Donna Lou, moved their three children (Jeremy, Olivia, and Lindsey) to Roney’s Point.

“The road going up the hill was a yellow-brick road, so that’s what my dad used to make us look forward to living there,” explained Cecil’s middle child, Olivia Litman. “And the house was a really nice place once my parents fixed it up. We had six bedrooms and five bathrooms all on one level.

“Because it’s where the nurses used to live, there were numbers on the door. No. 4 was where my mother did her sewing, No. 7 was our guest room, and No. 6 was the one Santa visited,” she recalled. “It was a great house, but then there was always that view out of our window of the old asylum, and that was always creepy to me.”

So creepy that Olivia slept with a large, white stick