St. Francis of Assisi was one hellava Saint if you care to look him up. A rock star amongst Saints. I remember Frank McCourt thinking the world of him in Angela’s Ashes. I think he prayed to him, so the family wouldn’t starve to death.
The dark church in this snowy picture (that is snow, not clouds) is named after him and it is a beautiful old structure in this sleepy little hamlet called Staunton, established in 1761 with the town formally incorporated in 1801. I imagine this church was built sometime after a railroad stop appeared in 1854.
The City is home to the Western State Lunatic Asylum which was built 1871, or 72. When the first building was closed, (from what was likely inhumane treatment) they built a bigger building for the inmates..err…I mean patients were basically let go. So they dispersed throughout the town. This has lead to many stories about all sorts of things on people who populated this town, or died in that building…or died in the second building, but have come back as ghosts to haunt the town.
When modern medicine and psychiatry caught up to the third building, treatment improved greatly, and the ghost population diminished.