Agnews State Hospital Site

There's a tech campus in Santa Clara, California where Oracle runs research and conferences, and the people who work late there are mostly walking over graves. The ground under the lawns holds the dead of the old Agnews asylum — and the dead are the part of this place no one moved.

Agnews opened in the 1880s as the Great Asylum for the Insane, a red-brick Kirkbride building outside the village of Agnew. On April 18, 1906, the earthquake brought the main building down. The central tower fell through all four floors into the basement. It was the single greatest loss of life in Santa Clara County that morning — more than 100 patients and staff, by most accounts roughly 117. Many of the dead couldn't be shipped home, so they were buried in mass graves on the grounds.

That wasn't even the first mass grave on the property. An earlier plot holds 606 former patients, none in coffins. The lot set aside for them was too small, so the bodies went into dug-up ditches. Decades later, neighbors complained that the grave markers were unsightly, and the markers were pulled. The plot sits gated off today, next to a small history museum the city runs.

The hospital was rebuilt as a Mission Revival campus of stucco buildings, reopened around 1911, and passed through hands until Oracle took it over in 2010.

The ghost stories sit on top of all that. On one guided tour, a long-tenured employee pointed out a woman in a white dress who walks the perimeter searching for a lost daughter, a blonde girl around six who favors a janitor's closet, and a faceless janitor in a brown overcoat. The heaviest room, the guide said, is the old operating theater they call the lobotomy suite — three exterior walls, an upper floor, isolated.

The guide knocked before going in. As a courtesy, he said, to the ghosts.