Camarillo State Mental Hospital Site

The bell tower at California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo, California is the campus's official symbol — the red-tile Mission Revival landmark on all the signage. It's also the spot students have reported a woman in white for two decades. She walks the upper hallways, the story goes, and many take her for a nurse. She vanishes when anyone gets close.

The students walking past her to class are walking through Camarillo State Hospital.

It opened in 1936 and was built to hold 7,000 patients and 700 staff, which made it the largest mental hospital in the world. By 1957 the population had passed 7,000; in 1954 it counted 7,266. The treatments of the era were what you'd expect: electroshock therapy, which ran here into the 1970s, and lobotomies. A grand jury that looked into the place wrote one line that stuck — "the omission of real nursing care has been noted time after time" — alongside a string of suspicious patient deaths. By 1996 there were 871 patients left.

The hospital closed in 1997, and the state university system took the campus. CSU Channel Islands held its first classes in 2002. It kept the architecture, kept the bell tower, made the tower its emblem — and the lore came in with the buildings. Beyond the woman in white, students tell of a screaming lady in the tower, and child voices and laughter in the building that was once the children's center.

The strangest true thing about the place isn't a ghost. In July 1946, the saxophonist Charlie Parker was committed here to dry out after he set his hotel mattress on fire. He stayed six months. He played in the hospital's Saturday-night band, tended a lettuce patch, and wrote 12 bars in the bathtub that became "Relaxin' at Camarillo," recorded for Dial in 1947.

He wanted to call it "Past Due." The hospital records he left behind are still on campus — kept in the university library that now sits over the same ground.