Fort Steilacoom Park

A former Army fort turned 19th-century insane asylum where over 3,218 patients were buried in numbered, nameless graves. Tour guide Jeff saw a phantom building appear and vanish, visitors hear marching music from empty fields, and an entity called The Doctor haunts the old electroshock treatment area.

A tour guide named Jeff was walking the Fort Steilacoom grounds at midnight when he heard what sounded like a group of people whistling marching music in unison beyond a line of laurel bushes. He went to investigate. The whistling stopped. The field was empty.

On another occasion, Jeff and two companions saw a two-story wooden building with a weathered exterior and small windowless openings standing in the park. They walked toward it. When they arrived at the spot, there was nothing but a concrete foundation.

Fort Steilacoom Park in Lakewood carries the weight of two separate institutions, each with its own body count. The U.S. Army established the post on August 22, 1849, one of the first military forts north of the Columbia River, on 640 acres leased from the Hudson's Bay Company near Lake Steilacoom. Its darkest early moment came on February 19, 1858, when Nisqually Chief Leschi was hanged on a gallows erected a mile east of the fort for the alleged murder of Colonel A. Benton Moses during the Indian Wars. About 300 people watched. The Army had refused to allow the execution on fort grounds. It took 146 years for Washington State to exonerate Leschi, which it did through a special historical court in 2004.

When the Army decommissioned the fort on April 22, 1868, Washington Territory bought the 625-acre property and 25 buildings for $850. Three years later, it reopened as the Insane Asylum of Washington Territory with 21 patients, 18 years before Washington even became a state.

The conditions were appalling from the start. An 1875 investigation by Dr. Hemenway and Dr. Willison documented abuse, neglect, and cost-cutting by private contractor Hill Harmon. Patients slept in cells and bunks in buildings "barely superior to barns." Wrongful commitments happened routinely, with patients' assets seized by court-appointed guardians. One patient, Alice Vinsot, was confined to her room for six years without contact or entertainment after being falsely committed. She got out only because letters she dropped from her window eventually reached the press.

By the 1940s, renamed Western State Hospital, the institution held nearly 3,000 patients with just 12 doctors and 40 nurses. Treatments escalated through hydrotherapy, insulin shock therapy, electroshock that caused cardiac arrest, and lobotomies. On July 11, 1949, Dr. Walter Freeman, the notorious "Ice Pick Lobotomist," personally performed transorbital lobotomies at the facility while staff psychiatrist Dr. James G. Shanklin administered electroshock sedation. There's a photograph. The hospital's most famous patient was 1940s Hollywood actress Frances Farmer, committed in 1942 for drunk driving and held five years. She reported sexual abuse, rat bites, straitjacket restraint, and ice bath immersion. Nirvana wrote "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" about her.

Between 1876 and 1953, over 3,218 patients were buried in the hospital cemetery. Their graves got small concrete blocks bearing patient numbers. Never names. A Washington State law actually prohibited hospitals from putting names on the graves. In 2004, volunteer chairwoman Laurel Lemke of the Grave Concerns Association campaigned to change that. She'd worked at Western State for years before she even knew the cemetery existed. Her volunteers sold dahlia bulbs and held bake sales to fund headstones. Among the newly identified dead: Mary Beran Hart, committed in 1884 after postpartum depression, dead by 1914. John Moore, founder of Des Moines, Washington, who died despondent in 1899 after losing his wife. Charles Wesley Cooley, a Civil War veteran whose headstone was funded by the U.S. Army.

The Hill Ward dormitory, built in 1932 for male patients and closed in 1965, became the epicenter. The three-story structure rotted for decades. In the late 1980s, military troops conducting urban combat simulations demolished much of it. What remained drew ghost hunters and teenagers who reported rattling sounds, voices from empty rooms, and a heaviness that sat on their chests. People described dark figures chasing them from the building. Cameras and phones malfunctioned. By 2006, the ruins had attracted gang activity, and over $600,000 was donated to tear down the rest and build a memorial. The 2009 memorial, designed by Larson Casteel, kept the original crumbling stairs and walls, added a stone labyrinth symbolizing healing, and bears a plaque: "Dedicated to all the people who lived and worked here."

The 340-acre park is open today. The reports haven't slowed. Early morning visitors see figures materializing in the fog that blankets the grounds. Dark shapes walk through the cemetery. People hear muffled screaming coming from beneath specific graves. Paranormal investigators have captured EVPs of voices pleading for help. An entity known as "The Doctor," believed to be a former physician tied to the electroshock treatment room, shows up as an overwhelming wave of anger, with furniture moving on its own.

Pretty Gritty Tours runs lantern-lit night tours through the fort grounds now, walking visitors through the same landscape where 3,218 people were buried without even the dignity of their names.