Highland Hospital Site

A 1948 fire at Highland Hospital killed nine women, including Zelda Fitzgerald. Neighbors still smell smoke on Zillicoa Street every March 10th.

On the night of March 10, 1948, the central building of Highland Hospital in Asheville caught fire. It started in the kitchen. The flames climbed the dumbwaiter shaft and reached all four floors before anyone could get the locked wards open. Nine women burned to death. One of them was Zelda Fitzgerald.

Zelda was 47. She'd been a patient at Highland Hospital on and off for nine years, since 1936, treated for what doctors at the time called chronic schizophrenia and what modern psychiatrists now suspect was bipolar disorder. She was on the fifth floor the night of the fire, heavily sedated. A nurse tried to reach her and was driven back by the smoke coming up the dumbwaiter. Zelda's body was identified by a slipper. The manuscript of her unfinished second novel was in the room with her. Both burned.

The Highland Hospital site sits on Zillicoa Street in Asheville's Montford neighborhood. The central building is gone, but some of the hospital's other structures survived the fire and are still standing, some converted to other uses and some preserved as historic property. The grounds are quiet. You can walk them.

The ghost stories here are smaller than the tragedy deserves, and that's probably appropriate. People who live in the Montford neighborhood describe the smell of smoke on the evening of March 10th, Zelda's death date, with no fire nearby. Dog walkers have reported a woman in a long dark coat seen at a distance on the hospital grounds, walking slowly and not leaving a direction. Photos taken near the surviving buildings sometimes return a pale figure in a window where the window is boarded. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that makes a good tour.

The Asheville paranormal tour operators include the site on their Montford loops, but most of them handle it carefully. There's a protective instinct in the local storytelling around Zelda that you don't get at other haunted spots. She was a real woman, a writer in her own right, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and she died sedated and locked in a ward that couldn't be evacuated. Making her into a tour prop feels wrong to most of the people who tell the story.

The most persistent non-Zelda haunting at the Highland Hospital site involves the other eight women who died in the fire. Most of them weren't famous. Their names are in the Asheville obituaries of March 1948, and the patterns of reported activity, voices in empty rooms, the sound of women calling to each other through walls, footsteps in locked corridors, are attributed to the group as a whole rather than to any single victim. That collective quality is unusual and, in context, it makes sense. They died together. They didn't choose to be there. Whatever's left of them seems to have stayed together too.

The best time to visit isn't Halloween. It's March 10th. Bring a coat, walk the Zillicoa Street sidewalk, and pay attention to the air. If you smell smoke, you're not the first person to report it.