Steve Roberts isn’t sure he believes in ghosts. But without them, he can’t really explain what happened several months ago at Pennsylvania’s infamous Pennhurst Asylum.

In May, he joined a group of paranormal fans at Pennhurst Paracon, an event exploring the sprawling institution that closed in 1986 and has long been rumored to be haunted. “I just find the mystery of it fascinating — it’s the mystery of the unknown,” said Roberts, a tech worker from Sykesville, Maryland, of the ghost stories that led him, and his daughter, to Pennhurst.

Inside the old asylum, plaster peeled from mottled walls and holes gaped in the ceiling. Some rooms held battered bed frames or operating tables. In one basement room, empty aside from a single chair, the pair came across two women in the group using recording equipment and speaking to someone or something Roberts couldn’t see.

“She’s asking these questions: ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’” Roberts said. “And then she says, ‘Can you tell me the name of anyone in this room?’” By then he’d turned away, ready to move on.

As Roberts and his daughter approached the door, he recalls, the woman asked one more question into the darkened room: “Did you say ‘Steve?’”

He didn’t wait for whoever — or whatever — it was to clarify. “I was very freaked out,” he said. “I just walked into this room and something knew my name.”

Roberts and his daughter left the building, fast.

First opened in 1908 as the Eastern Pennsylvania Institution for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic, over time Pennhurst became notorious for inhumane treatment of people with both physical and intellectual disabilities. In 1968, it was the subject of an NBC exposé, “Suffer the Little Children,” which publicized the severe neglect residents experienced there.

Pennhurst Asylum, once the subject of a 1968 NBC exposé, is now sought out as a destination for spooky tourism by visitors in search of haunted places. AmityPhotos/Alamy Stock Photo

Today, the former facility in Spring City, 30 miles from downtown Philadelphia, is a macabre tourist attraction.