Riverview Hospital In British Columbia, Canada
Head to the small town of Coquitlam, British Columbia and you'll find one of the most "endangered heritage sites" of Canada, according to The Heritage Canada Foundation. It is the Riverview Hospital, a now-defunct mental asylum that was first built in the early 1900s.
The territory of the abandoned asylum covers 247 acres of land, where a number of buildings that make up the hospital are located.
The first building erected was the West Lawn Pavilion, which was opened in 1913 and housed the region's most psychologically disturbed male patients. This section of the hospital was closed in 1983. With daunting pillars and a dilapidated front porch, it is now the most photographed section of the abandoned asylum.
But the rest of the abandoned hospital is just as haunting to see.
The Riverview Hospital was originally intended to serve a dual function as a mental health facility for the patient overflow from Victoria's Royal Jubilee Hospital and as a botanical garden for British Columbia. There was a ubiquitous belief at the time that access to nature and sunlight was the primary antidote for mental illness. Eventually, however, the idea was scrapped, and the official botanical garden was moved to the University of British Columbia.
The Riverview Hospital — which housed over 4,300 patients in the 1950s — holds a terrifying past. Though the number of patients declined due to the advancement of mental health medication, the harmful practices that were used at the facility continued until as late as the early aughts when the hospital was still in operation.
Reports revealed that the hospital still employed electroshock therapy in the 21st century and allegedly illegally sterilized a number of patients. In 2005, nine women received settlements totaling $450,000 following a joint lawsuit filed against the facility over the alleged sterilizations. The hospital was finally closed in 2010.
These days, the abandoned asylum is allegedly haunted and has become a popular filming location for supernatural-themed productions like The X-Files, Supernatural, and Watchmen.
