Hot Lake Hotel

Once a luxury sanatorium, then an asylum, then a morgue. Screams from the empty third floor and a piano that plays itself.

During one brutal typhoid epidemic in eastern Oregon, the Hot Lake Hotel served as a temporary morgue. Bodies were stacked inside what had been a luxury sanatorium until enough of them had accumulated to be moved out for burial. That is one chapter. Hot Lake has many.

The hot springs in the Grande Ronde Valley were sacred to the Native peoples of the region long before any structure was built around them. Tribal disputes were set aside in their presence. The mineral water was used for drinking and recovery. The first hotel went up on the site in 1864 to capitalize on the springs' reputation, but the building that became infamous took shape after 1904, when Dr. William Thomas Phy, a flamboyant and politically connected physician, started working at the property. In 1917 he bought it outright and renamed it the Hot Lake Sanatorium.

Phy added a state-of-the-art hospital on the third floor, complete with a surgical theater and x-ray facilities. By the 1920s the complex had grown to 105 guest rooms with a 1,500-guest dance hall, marketed as one of the largest resort hospitals in the West, where the wealthy could come to be healed by mineral water and modern medicine, both at once. Phy operated. People recovered. People also died.

A devastating fire on May 7, 1934, destroyed the west wing and left only the brick portion standing. After that, the property cycled through every grim institutional use the twentieth century had to offer: a nursing home, a nurse training center, a World War II flight school, and a mental health asylum that operated until 1975. Then a brief stint as a restaurant and country-western dance club, and after that, abandonment. From 1991 onward the building stood empty for over a decade, attracting urban explorers who came back with stories.

The third floor produces the heaviest reports. That floor was the surgical ward when Phy ran the place, and the asylum wing later. During the 1970s, owners Donna Pattee and her husband, with their caretaker Richard Owens, lived on the second floor and repeatedly heard screaming from the empty floor above them. Pattee described it to a reporter as a woman's voice crying out, the sound coming clearly down through the ceiling on nights when there was nobody upstairs at all. Owens reported a heavy rocking chair on the third floor moving on its own across the bare boards, with no draft and no vibration to explain it.

There is also a piano. The lodge says the piano once belonged to the wife of Robert E. Lee and was placed on the third floor during the hotel's heyday. Witnesses across multiple decades have reported hearing it playing on its own, the notes drifting down through the corridors of the former surgical ward and asylum wing.

The named ghosts are fewer than the activity suggests. A male figure believed to be a former groundskeeper who killed himself on the property has been seen walking the grounds. A nurse who was scalded to death in the springs is reported near the water. The rest is mostly anonymous: the screams, the rocking chairs, the piano. A century of suffering distilled into ambient noise.

In 2001, the building was featured on ABC's The Scariest Places on Earth. The Manuel family bought the property in 2003 and put millions into restoration, opening a gallery and bronze foundry on the grounds. The Lodge at Hot Lake Springs now offers tours and overnight stays. The mineral water still flows at the same temperature it did when the Cayuse came here to drink it. Whatever the building absorbed from a hundred years of patients, the inheritors of the property have decided to leave it where it is.