VIRGINIA, USA: A staircase. CREEPY images reveal the dark history of a SEGREGATED, abandoned mental asylum where black patients were sterilised without consent ? the first of its kind in America. Eerie pictures showed huge metal hydrotherapy baths ? a now inhumane method of treating mental illness due to its punitive nature ? that had been left to rust. Other shots featured a bed laying strewn in a crumbling corridor, patients? cell-like bedrooms complete with personal effects, and dingy staircases which join the floors. Aerial drone shots showcased the sprawling grounds and central brick building of what was known as the 'Central Lunatic Asylum' when it first opened in Virginia, USA, in 1870. The pictures were taken by urban explorer and photographer Abandoned Southeast on a trip to the Virginia hospital ? which is still partially open. Abandoned Southeast captured his incredible images using his Canon RP and a DJI drone. It was the first facility of its kind in America - built specifically for black patients - and it wasn?t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that the state-operated facility was desegregated. During the 1890s, the use of mechanical restraints, hydrotherapy and hypnotics were common practice but the patients at the hospital were encouraged to use the asylum?s surrounding farmland to grow crops and produce food as part of the patient?s treatments. The hospital grew and by the early 1900s, it had over 80 buildings with men and women housed separately. Patients were assigned to wards for the acute, chronic, demented, tubercular, epileptic, criminal and suicidal. In 1980, an investigation uncovered that 1,700 patients had been sterilised without their consent between 1924 and 1973 at the hospital. A mass sterilisation programme was put in place by doctors to allegedly eliminate social misfits and promote the white American race. In the 1990s, the department of Justice investigated the hospital over excessive use of restraints and the two-year investigat