Sunland Hospital was a notorious eyesore in Tallahassee until it was demolished in 2006. Before then though it was a popular spot for amateur ghost hunters, who claimed to have seen all sorts of eerie things within the crumbling walls.
Here’s a bit of history about the place…
Within a year of the Center opening, it started to suffer from a shortage of funds and overcrowding conditions. These forces caused a variety of problems to form within the hospital from poor and inadequately prepared food, overcrowding of the cottages, inactivity of the children, unsanitary conditions, inadequacy of dental services, to unacceptable hygienic practices. Conditions within the hospital continued to worsen causing various psychologists to call for the closing of the center.
Over time, to help cover costs of various vocation and rehab programs within the state, funds were shifted away from the Sunland Centers to other programs. After various scandals, lack of funds, and the move towards community care, the Sunland Center closed in 1983.
The property was almost purchased in 2004 by a Winter Park businessman, but that deal fell through. Over a year later, the property was finally sold for use in a housing and commercial district project, which later became the Victoria Grand Luxury Apartments.
Demolition of the hospital building and all the surrounding buildings and wooded areas started in early 2006 and was completed in November of the same year. Months later, construction began on the Victoria Grand Apartments. Today, there is no sign of Sunland at Tallahassee remaining on Phillips road. However, relics from the old hospital were said to be collected and used to create part of the Sunland Asylum wing at the Terror of Tallahassee (a local haunted attraction).
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Geographic Information
- Address:
- 2350 Phillips Rd
Tallahassee, FL 32308
United States
Get Directions » - GPS:
- 30.460121838867614, -84.24454271793365
- County:
- Leon County, Florida
- Nearest Towns:
- Tallahassee, FL (2.6 mi.)
Woodville, FL (10.0 mi.)
Midway, FL (12.7 mi.)
Lloyd, FL (13.4 mi.)
Havana, FL (15.2 mi.)
Wacissa, FL (16.9 mi.)
Waukeenah, FL (17.7 mi.)
Calvary, GA (19.5 mi.)
Saint Marks, FL (20.7 mi.)
Crawfordville, FL (21.0 mi.)
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Disclaimer: The stories posted here are user-submitted and are, in the nature of "ghost stories," largely unverifiable. HauntedPlaces.org makes no claims that any of the statements posted here are factually accurate. The vast majority of information provided on this web site is anecdotal, and as such, should be viewed in the same light as local folklore and urban legends.
I went there with my dad and wow it was super scary. He has alot more stories but my encounter with that place was on the children floor the third floor we was standing outside and we saw a huge white head floating from window to window. It was so amazing and then we seen so many orbs flying around wish I had a camera to bad it is tore down.
Went here in 1996 as a silly highschool girl trying to see something scary. we broke in with wirecutters through the fencing. yeah…it was a truly creepy scene….footnsteps above and below us on different floors. All of the glass windows had been broken…tons of graffiti. What stood out to me most were the animated wall coverings in the children’s ward. i kept a sliver of the wallpaper. i also kept two old playdoh tins that I found on the floor. we ventured out onto the “sun porches”…very upsetting. but most upsetting of all we went downstairs….to the basement area where we found low, long ceramic shallow basins….much like those that u see in creepy movies for autopsies. i think they may have been bathing basins but have been told otherwise…as u can imagine. It has since been demolished..apartments built over. i still have photos of the half demolished site with construction workers looking at me bewildered. to sum it up…i do not think the site is haunted. but i do think that maybe there are upset memories of devastating healthcare of the past…may we never repeat them.
I haven’t seen this for myself, since I can’t afford to live there, but I’ve heard stories from someone in the Big Bend Ghost Trackers that the apartments where Sunland used to sit there’s still creepy stuff going on. Things like footsteps, voices, and the elevator doors opening and closing on their own. Apparently the ghosts are more attached to the land then they ever were the building, itself, and have transferred their haunting activities to the new apartments.
not a credible story – there are no elevators at Victoria Grand
Im so pissed I was so happy to read these comments then I saw they have completely built over it.
My aunt lives in the new apt. complex that they built on the land. It is nice, but I never comfortable there and I can’t stay there for long or I get really nervous and antsy. My 2 nephews went to the buildings a few months before they demolished them and stayed most of the night each time. They told me that they heard and saw some strange things and it was definitely haunted. I used to pick up some of the children and took them to different outings and I felt the same way then as I do now that it is an apartment complex. Its creepy, then and now.
I did community service at this place in springtime of 1980. I was a juvenile at the time, I think I was about 16. I worked in the kitchen preparing the trays, and then loading them on a refrigerated/heated cart up to the various floors, and plugged the carts into electric outlets on the walls near the rooms. I remember retarded children in very unsanitary conditions, eating off of the floor that was often covered with excrement and puddles of urine. It was very nasty and very creepy place. Over the years after they closed it, I heard it was haunted. I wouldn’t doubt it a bit, the place gave me the creeps even when it was still open in 1980. What is more haunting is the realization how old I am, how fast life has gone by, and how things like this building are just memories now. Kind of sad really.
I grew up in Tallahassee. I went to Sunland twice. We called it “Sunny land.” The first time, we went in through the back corner (don’t remember which N,S,E,W). We entered through a room that looked like a boiler room. Maybe that is just my Nightmare on Elm Street inspired memories affecting my perception of that room. That was about as far as I could go. A couple of years later, we committed to actually going inside. We really explored the area. It was crazy that things we saw. I expected to see just a shabby building in disrepair, but we saw stuff from straight out of horror movies. We saw kids toys including a dirty naked doll lying on the ground in one room. There was graffiti from people that had been in there before us. The creepiest thing I saw was a red pentagram on the ground about 8 feet in diameter that had remnants of wax at the points. That’s when we made out exit.
My roommate and I lived in what was Victoria Grand Apartments 2016-2018, while it was rebranding to Century Capital City. My roommate– let’s call her Usa– moved in fall 2016, I joined her about 6 months in, and we extended the lease another year. As far as apartments go it wasn’t bad. No bugs, decent water pressure, pricey but that’s Tallahassee for you. It was most definitely haunted.
For a little background, Usa is pagan and there was a prominent little altar on the coffee table for the entire time she lived there. I don’t ascribe to any particular religion but I think there are a lot of things in the world that humans don’t quite understand yet; I figure the existence of some kind of ghosts isn’t out of the realm of possibility. So if sometimes I felt a presence, or like I was being watched despite being on the second floor, or if the cats chased and played with and stared at nothing, or we both heard unintelligible voices and knocking/tapping, or saw the occasional figure in peripheral vision, or when the bedside lamps kept switching back on if one of us went to bed and forgot something important– well, when you put it all together, it seems obvious. But as individual incidents, it didn’t feel too unusual. Inside the actual apartment nothing felt outright malicious so much as sort of casual and bumbling. The wooded area outside was a different story but it’s not as if I regularly went tromping through it, just parked on the edge and made a beeline for the indoors.
I didn’t bother researching the apartment before moving in since I figured Usa would already know all the ins and outs of the place. I’m not local either, just came to Tally for school in 2013. The first time I heard someone mention Sunland was after I’d been living in the apartment for maybe 9 months. A new coworker was having car troubles and I offered to drive her for a few days, so we were talking about where we each lived. When I mentioned Phillips Road she asked if I lived where the haunted hospital had been, and of course I looked up everything I could. I didn’t find tons of detail (I was NOT about to watch the videos when I would be locked into that lease for 9 more months) but immediately things started clicking. I brought it up to Usa that night and she confirmed that she’d known the area’s background but hadn’t wanted to spook me. I don’t know if it was a dose of confirmation bias or that I now had context for all the strangeness, but the activity ramped up from there. Usa and I started referring to the cause of the incidents as Friend, since we didn’t want to invite more direct interaction by giving them a name or speaking directly to anything.
Luckily for us the haunting never got out of hand. Looking back I think it’s equally likely that Usa’s and my acknowledgment of Friend made them stick around or even attracted them in the first place, and that her saging and lowkey wards, casual protections as they were, kept something worse away. The scariest thing I remember happened when I was in bed alone and Usa was in the shower. I’d just put my phone away and settled in to sleep when I heard and felt someone lay down on the bed right behind me. The shower was still running and I could even hear Usa singing, but I heard steps and felt the dip of the bed and the other end of my pillow. I got a strong ominous feeling and stayed still for maybe 10 minutes of the presence before I made myself look. Nothing was there, and when I turned over again the weight beside me shifted in place and left.
The worst thing for me was the mural in the children’s ward. The children had no eyes. They also had some electric shock tables. One time I went with my friends and they flipped out. They said they saw something and we had to go so we ran down the stairs. I asked them if there were other people there because I heard people on the steps behind me and saw lights but my friends were so scared they kept running til we got out. I asked them if there were other people there they said they never wanted to go back. My ex told me about a small lake nearby that he saw stuff written in the fog.
I currently live in these apartments and have always heard that they were haunted. About 1 month ago I came home to find the decorative lights turned on in my bedroom. They are battery operated. I asked my son why he turned them on and he said he didn’t even know they were there or how to even turn them on because you couldn’t really see them unless they were on. He told me that only a week before did he have something strange happen too. He got a hair on the back of your neck chill and then the dog went crazy barking and hair standing up. Keep in mind that this dog doesn’t bark and if she does it’s only one bark because your aren’t paying attention to her. Thought about going to the wooded dog park and taking pictures to see if I get any orbs on camera but I am to much of a chicken to do it by myself .. LOL
Sunnyland and Victoria Grand!
I remember visiting Sunnyland while I was attending FSU, somewhere between 2003 and 2005, with a large group of friends…I remember seeing the elevator shaft full of water, stainless steel medical devices and steel sinks within same room as the cribs and rocking chairs… food trays strewn about… I remember the auditorium with large red curtains on a small stage…. I did not experience anything paranormal that night, but a handful of friends experienced someone whispering in their ear all at the same time, and naturally, we all took off!
I also ended up living in Victoria Grand apartments not long after they were built right on the demolished Sunnyland property… I experienced paranormal activity in this place almost immediately! One of the first nights I stayed in my single story, ground level apartment, I slept on an air mattress on the living room floor. I woke up to what sounded like a freight train approaching, but then as it got louder and closer it was more like thousands of feet running across my ceiling and I could hear giggling. I had another incident not long after, once I got my bedroom set up. I was sleeping on my back and woke up (or stayed in somewhat of a dream state maybe?) to this feeling of someone scooping me up under the armpits like you would pick up a baby, and then was just held me or I hovered rather, over my bed and saw myself on the bed below… I can’t explain it. I usually bury things that don’t make sense or scare or hurt me (everyone copes differently) and I am able to move on not thinking too deeply about it. Thinking back on this now (I raaandomly looked up Sunnyland after scrolling instagram and being intrigued by other haunted buildings and remembering I’ve been in an asylum) I’ve never experienced anything ever like that and probably never will again. That realm is there and is real. Just depends if you tap into it.