Abandoned sanatorium: Mental home of Cheste I

This was a sanatorium at a few kilometers from Cheste (Xest in Valencian) in the Valencian Community, Spain.

During the almost two decades from its abandonment in 2001, a legend about this place grew: paranormal phenomena, psycophonies, ghostly apparitions… It is a very visited place by fans of this sort of stories, has been written a lot and a radio report was done some years ago.

I visited it past August. In the first part I’ll tell the “paranormal version”; in the second part, the “normal version”.

Paranormal version

In this version, the place is called ‘mental home’ or ‘psychiatric hospital’, and it was built in the 60’s, during the fascist dictatorship of Franco. It was an asylum for children, who were confined here and suffered weird and sometimes cruel treatments. We can’t know the horrors which happened here, because archives were conveniently deleted. Finally, a night, a patient caused a fire, causing her own death and the death of several other patients. Then this mental home was closed and abandoned.

If one looks for information in newspapers archives or official sources, nothing is found, as if someone deliberately deleted all the information about this creepy place.

Since its cloisure, many groups have come to do paranormal phenomena studies and they have recorded psycophonies (kids crying, shocking screams). Also satanic groups have come to practice rituals, and other groups to do ouija and dark arts. The place became well known after a famous Spanish journalist specialized in pseudosciences (Iker Jiménez) made a radio broadcast about it, with images in youtube, so increasing visits of this sort even more. Now it appears always in lists of terrifying places in Spain.

Tomorrow the second part.