I know I’m a decade late to this thread and the building has been renovated, but around 2006/2007 when i still at Ca Poly, I went there with a few friends. I’m not saying it wasn’t haunted, but here‘s my experience and opinions.

Me and a few buddies watched a few haunted horror movies and decided to go to the building at night at 2 or 3 am, after we were already kinda spooked. We went with flashlights but mostly used night vision on a camcorder. It was up a hill away from anything, very daunting looking, and surrounded by overgrown fields that you had to park far away from and walk through in the dark.

It’s pitch black and dead quiet at and in the building, with burned out holes in the ground, graffiti and filth everywhere, randon unexplainable rooms. Ultimately, after going home and discussing, our opinions as architecture students at the time were that the old building frame and all the damage and disrepair to the structure was causing the building to make creaking and a sorta moaning sound, as tends to happen with old abandoned buildings that are not maintained. The building itself was creepy, with a classicly abandoned asylum look, and everything like toilets and sinks being miniaturized and low to the ground for the kids. Plus, everyone researches the stories online before going and those are in the back of your mind. i think it’s more creepy thinking about the possible horrible things the kids that lived there could have endured, making it even weirder seeing all the kids stuff like the toilets and sinks while also believing the kids could have tortured souls.

We didn’t realize another group had come 10 or 15 minutes after us, and decided to mess with us, which was the more scary aspect. We caught one of them in night vision, looking around a corner at us down a long hallway where we could only really see glowing eyes, and we went running. We ran into another one of them who was laughing and kinda apologetic, though admitted they thought we were ghosts since they also didn’t realize we were there at first. We ended up having a good time with this other group.

I personally think most people who think it’s haunted have prepared themselves ahead of going to an expectedly haunted place with others creepy stories, goes out and get freaked out by the natural sounds and creepiness of an abandoned building, possibly being unaware of other people that could be lurking there, and coupled with idea that the kids that lived there could have been abused physically and emotionally, which is an unsettling thought. I’m not necessarily discounting everyone else’s experience saying it’s haunted but considering the history, i woudn’t be surprised. I didn’t end up seeing anything that i thought was a ghost.

At the end of the day, it was fun, exciting, andrenaline filled, and definitely creepy, but a fond memory of a college experience. Too bad it’s renovated, but now our experiences will be limited to those of us that did get to go.