My final horror short story I wrote for 2023 and just got in under deadline, was for an anthology calling for haunted or creepy locations throughout America. While I chose a different real-life location in Maryland carrying its own infamous history of haunts for my story, I took more than a few minutes to absorb these stark photos of this long abandoned sanitorium, the Glenn Dale Hospital in Glenn Dale, Maryland.

The Glenn Dale Hospital was a tuberculous and isolation hospital spotted in the outskirts of Washington, DC, first built in 1934 and closing its doors in 1981. 23 buildings spread over 213 acres to the center, the facility was shut down due to a mass asbestos breakout, which has given the interior of the adult and children’s facilities an ironically leprous, diseased appearance today.

Rumors of human remains being disposed inside the hospital’s incinerator fueled a growing legend of the premises being haunted. It was later proven the hospital burned waste items instead. A series of tunnels connecting the children’s and adult buildings, each housing their own morgues, only added to the growing curiosity from ghost chasers, graffiti artists and horror freaks about the location’s growing infamy.

What we do know is Glenn Dale’s dilapidated walkways, basements and tunnels are dangerous to traverse with corrosion, garbage broken glass, vine overgrowth and metal hunks originally coated with lead paint are all over the place, along with rats, bats and other wildlife making the grounds their home. 

You may have seen something like Glenn Dale Hospital from all over the world on the Travel Channel or History Channel, and I’m sure there are scores of left-for-dead sanitariums and hospitals, each bearing their own reputed terrors and ghost sightings. Here in Maryland and the surrounding DC hubs, Glenn Dale has carried decades’ worth of apparition sightings and inquisitive lookee-loos.

I was more than tempted to choose Glenn Dale Hospital for my story, but I feel like it’s been well-tapped already, even incognito under fictional cover. Assuming my story is chosen for publication, I will reveal the location of my setting at that point. 

Still, Glenn Dale gives even a horror buff like myself the willies for its ramshackle negligence alone. It’s been said the facilities will either be demolished, or if kept alive, converted into a senior citizen home. With COVID still a real thing, I have to pause and think about a place like Glenn Dale Hospital being stuffed to the gills in its prime with such a calamity as we’d experienced. They were hardly equipped, space or technology-wise, to take on something of such magnitude.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.

All photos courtesy of the public domain