In Brief
On Zillicoa Street in Asheville, locals quietly tell of a woman walking the old Highland Hospital grounds. They say she is Zelda Fitzgerald, who died in the 1948 fire that killed nine women locked inside a ward that wouldn't open.
The Full Story
On Zillicoa Street, in Asheville's Montford neighborhood, the old Highland Hospital ground keeps a quiet ghost. Former staff describe a woman in period clothing walking the grounds where the central building once stood, and they tend to identify her as one person: Zelda Fitzgerald, who took long walks here while she was a patient, and who died here in 1948. One former employee said she looked at him and seemed to be trying to remember his name.
The hospital began in 1904 as Dr. Carroll's Sanatorium, founded by the psychiatrist Robert S. Carroll, who treated patients with exercise, diet, and outdoor work. Carroll donated it to Duke University in 1939, and it became part of Duke's neuropsychiatry program. Zelda, the wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and a writer in her own right, was first admitted in 1936 and treated on and off until the night of March 10, 1948. She was diagnosed at the time with schizophrenia, though later opinion has leaned toward bipolar disorder.
The fire was discovered around 11:35 p.m. It started at a table near a dumbwaiter shaft in the third-floor diet kitchen, and the shaft acted like a chimney, carrying flames up through every floor. Within about 25 minutes, fire had burst through the roof. The windows on the upper wards were shackled with heavy chains and the porches were screened, both meant to keep psychiatric patients from jumping. Those same fittings kept rescuers out. One staff account put it plainly: "The fire traveled so fast. It seemed no time at all until the entire building was like a furnace."
Eleven women were pulled out. Two of them later died, and seven were presumed dead in the rubble. Nine women died in all. Zelda was 47, on the fifth floor, sedated before the fire began. Her body was identified by her dental records and a single charred slipper.
A follow-up investigation raised the possibility that the fire had been set. A month later, on April 12, the night supervisor, Willie Mae Hall, walked into the police station and turned herself in. A psychiatric evaluation found psychological disturbance rather than criminal intent, and no charges were filed. What she said still sits over the place: "I don't know. I really don't know. I don't believe I did, but I could have."
The burned central building is gone now. Other parts of the old hospital remain on Zillicoa Street, including Highland Hall and the Carroll residence, protected within the Montford historic district. The grounds where Zelda once took her long walks are open to walk today. And former staff say that on the spot where the building stood, the temperature drops without warning, and someone is heard who isn't there.
