An abandoned insane asylum? Yes please! I’ve got to say, for my first couple days ever exploring abandoned places, going to an insane asylum was a pretty damn cool start…
This was a strange place to explore, for more reasons than the obvious “this could be in a horror movie” feel. The first, very correct feeling I got from this property is it is shrouded in secrets. And my gut feeling turned out to be spot on. I was stopped and not only asked to leave, but told to delete all my pictures. Of course I did not. Why delete them?
The second uncanny thing about this property is that it sits abandoned in the middle of the businesses that surround it, like the Finger Lakes Disability Services and Wayne County BOCES offices. Which means there is quite a bit of traffic around, and a lot of people. Why does this building stand abandoned and ignored?
So, not surprisingly, I have thus far found little to nothing about this property. I believe it could be the Town of Arcadia Custodial Asylum, but there is really no information available. I also think the property could have been associated with Willard Insane Asylum, a huge campus located in Ovid, NY.
We tend to want to forget darker days where “mentally ill” people were locked up for their disabilities. That’s why we keep exploring and keep these places alive.
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Abandoned in NY 
It’s last official name was the Newark State School. It’s first name, when opened in ~ 1876, was New York Custodial Asylum for Feeble-Minded Women. It was at first and experimental extension of the State mental hospital at Syracuse, but early on separated from that operational affiliation, to a self-managed entity. The institution shut down in the 1990s, and several building in then campus have since been repurposed. One new tenant being the Newark extension of Finger Lakes Community College. Many of the major buildings indeed are rotting away.