A Twilight Tour of Grand Traverse Commons

The former asylum tour is so informative, it’s scary

On a cool day in October, more than 20 people gathered for the Twilight Asylum tour in the lower level of Building 50 in the Village at Grand Traverse Commons. After signing in, some read about the property’s history posted on the light-beige brick wall as they waited for the tour to begin.

The hospital’s timeline starts in 1881, when the Michigan Legislature approved funding for the construction of “The Northern Michigan Asylum for the insane.” At the time, it would be the state’s third such institution.

Its tranquil location and proximity to fresh water made it an ideal site for treating patients under the Kirkbride Plan, developed by American psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride. His philosophy was based on moral treatment for patients that utilized the hospital buildings as a tool. During the day, patients were locked out of their rooms to encourage activity and maximize exposure to fresh air and sunlight. They worked at an onsite farm and were given independence as a way of treatment.

At its peak in 1966, the hospital had about 3,600 patients, but by 1989, it had dwindled to about 200 before its closure due to lack of funding and new medications.

The Guides

“Many of the patients had it better here than where they were coming from,” says tour guide Tony Lombardi, who added that the hospital had running water and electricity when many nearby residents did not have such amenities when the hospital opened.

Lombardi and Natalie Balogh recently led the more than two-hour tour. Each has different backgrounds and connections to the hospital, but are equally passionate about the property. Lombardi has been helping with the property’s renovations for the past 26 years and provides a solid understanding of the buildings’ architecture.

“Tony has worked here longer than I have been alive,” says Balogh, whose grandmother was a nurse at the hospital in the 1940s.

Kate Angove, who handles tour bookings and scheduling, says all 12 of the Commons’ tour guides have some sort of personal connection to the hospital, including two guides whose fathers worked at the hospital.

“We are very selective in our tour guides,” says Angove. “We want to be sure that they have a connection. They are a really close group of people who get together regularly and talk about the history and the things that they’ve discovered in their research. They are just an amazing group of people who are so committed to sharing the accurate history of the property.”

The Grand Traverse Commons offers several different tours throughout the year, but October is its busiest. The tours began more than 13 years ago, according to Angove.

“So many people come here thinking it’s going to be this really scary place, and that there were all these really scary stories,” says Angove. “People were here because they were sick and they had issues, so not every story is a happy one, but they really were trying to care for people here and that’s really what we want to remind everyone and make sure that people who visit here know. …When you learn the history of it, it creates a way more meaningful visit to the property.”

Over the years, the tours have changed as the property has been developed into shops, restaurants, and living quarters. And more development is in the works for Buildings 34, 30, and 32, which includes more condominiums and potentially a hotel. There could come a time when the tours don’t include an inside look of some of the buildings.

“The redevelopment will continue until everything’s been brought back,” says Angove. “But I don’t ever see a time where we don’t do some type of history tour. If it comes to a point where we aren’t able to access a building, there is certainly the history can be shared in other ways through photos, and the tunnels will always be part of the tour.”

Out into the Twilight

After a brief introduction in Building 50, the tour heads outside for a view of the former hospital’s palatial façade against a darkening sky. Tourgoers learn how the hospital was laid out and operated on the 135 acres.

Building 50 was the first building erected and took less than two years to complete. The first patients were admitted in 1885. The building was designed to house 500 patients from the Grand Rapids area—250 women on the north side and 250 men on the south side.

“For the most part, they didn’t really intermingle,” Balogh says. “However, within their first year of operation they had 22 live births. So, make of that what you will.”

Additionally, the tour guides share their disdain for the current building at the center of the complex, coined the “Flub,” which stands for “the flat, ugly building.”

“They wanted modern, shiny new offices, and that is not what we had here at the time,” Balogh says. “Rather than bring that section of the building up to fire code, they had the gorgeous double-wide mahogany staircase in the entry deemed a fire hazard, and they tore the entire front center section of this building down.”

The now-drab administrative building replaced the main center building in the 1960s.

A large portion of the tour takes place outside, but it heads indoors to the pitch-dark Cottage 30, which has been abandoned since 1968. (The building is currently being renovated and will eventually be condominiums.) Tourgoers get the opportunity to explore the building from top to bottom with flashlight in hand.

“If you see something, say something,” says Balogh, who refers to trespassers who might be lurking in the building. “And watch out for bats, but don’t swing at them—they are more scared of you.”

The tour starts in the attic of the building, where Lombardi asks everyone to stand on the edge of a large round room with a high cone-shaped ceiling that leads to one of the many iconic spires that are key in ventilating the century-old buildings. The windows are broken and the walls are mostly exposed wooden studs. Props like an antique chest and a creepy doll remain from a previous event held in the building. (Balogh reassures tourgoers that the props are not associated with the tour or the building.)

Signatures and Graffiti

Lombardi points out signatures on one of the walls from construction workers and employees, including nurses, who often stayed in the attics while the patients stayed in the floors below.

“My first job was helping with the original roof assessment,” says Lombardi. “As we were going through the attic, we kept finding stuff written all over the wall. It was like a timesheet for the masons and everyone else. A lot of the stuff we learned about the building, we learned from all these notes. A lot of them were actually written in German. There were a lot of German tradesmen here. In the cottages, it was a big tradition for staff to always sign and date any brick in any building they were working in. We traced a lot of these names—almost all staff.”

One of the signatures belongs to a tour guide’s father, who was a nurse’s attendant at the hospital.

More clues were discovered during renovations in Building 50, when sagging soffits led to a cache of old alcohol and wine bottles—some unopened—hidden 100 years ago by workers who were not permitted to drink in the attics, according to Lombardi.

On the lower level, tourgoers used black light flashlights to illuminate fluorescent graffiti plastered on the walls and floor. Balogh says crude graffiti and trespassers are the bane of her existence.

“If you are going to break into a building and trespass, at least make it good graffiti,” she says, as she referenced several misspellings in the spray-painted messages on the walls and floors. “Everybody and their brother got in here back in the day, and they still try to this day. The place got abandoned for about a decade, before they figured something should probably be done.”

Treatment History

The penultimate stop on the tour is Kirkbride Hall. The former chapel is admired from the outside before going inside for a deeper dive into the building’s history and secrets. From the parking lot below, the glowing wavy stained glass windows are on display. Inside, the ornate cathedral ceiling steals the show.

Lombardi says while renovating the building, secret rooms were found. The hall was used for various reasons over the years, including a library and a “Lunatic Ball” hosted by hospital staff.

During this point in the tour, Balogh gives a talk about how the Traverse City asylum was more compassionate than other institutions. In great detail, she hammers home the macabre act of lobotomies and how it was practiced but not widely accepted here.

“The two things people always want to know about is electroshock and lobotomies,” says Balogh, who is also a surgical technologist in the operating room at Munson. “Electroshock was a very common treatment back in the day. The nice thing about here is that once anesthesia was figured out, they did their electroshock under anesthesia, which not everybody else did.”

From Balogh’s research from state archives, only two lobotomies were performed at the hospital, despite the state sending Dr. John Jack Ferguson to perform 500 transorbital lobotomies in 1954.

“He shows up. His tools did not,” Balogh says. “They were all lost during transport somewhere along the way. So, he’s wandering around, observing the staff and patients, waiting for his stuff to show up, and he realizes that even on the most disturbed wards of this hospital, the staff and the patients have a wonderful rapport. It’s unlike anything he’s experienced as he’s traveled across the country doing these lobotomies, and he has this kind of moral epiphany.”

Dr. Ferguson never performed another lobotomy in his life, the guide adds.

The Tunnels

The last stop on the tour ends 14 feet under Building 50 in the brick-lined ventilation tunnels. Some of the tunnels leading to the original power plant’s main distribution hub have since been closed off to prevent theft and trespassing.

The tunnel conjures up an eerie feeling on its own, but the lights are shut off to further set the scene for a ghost story in the dark. Balogh narrates a story about a woman in a red dress from Angels in the Architecture by Heidi Johnson. The story is an account from nurses that had worked at the hospital.

“The girl with the red dress—that story is infamous,” says Angove. “It’s out of one of the books that we have here from stories that people told when it was open. The red dress story is well known.”

After the story, Lombardi takes photos of individual tourgoers with their phones with the tunnel as the backdrop. The guides encourage photos throughout the tour and often receive messages later from past tourgoers looking for an explanation of what appeared in their photos.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Balogh says of the inquiries about the unexplained and apparitions on the property. “I would like to think if there are people still here, instead of being angry, vengeful or stuck, maybe this is the nicest place they have ever had. Or maybe this is the best they were ever treated. Maybe they are just fine hanging out.”

Learn more about the Commons tours at thevillagetc.com/tour.

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