Visitors to the abandoned Northern State Hospital in Sedro-Woolley, Washington keep reporting a little girl with a red ball and a man following her, through the halls and out in the cemetery, where 1,487 patients lie under stones carved with initials and numbers.
At Northern State Hospital in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, visitors keep reporting the same pair: a little girl with a red ball, and a man following her. She runs the halls of the old buildings. She stands out in the cemetery down the hill. Nothing in the record names a child who died at Northern State.
Other figures come with her. A nurse hanging from a noose, seen at a dorm bedroom window and again near a lamppost on the grounds. A nurse pushing a man in a wheelchair through one of the buildings. And a prankster the reports call Fred, who throws sheets and bedpans around the Hub, the old chapel, at night.
The hospital opened in 1912 with 100 male patients moved up from Western State, who helped build the place they were sent to. It grew into a colony that fed itself: roughly 700 acres of farmland, a dairy plant, a cannery, a bakery, and a dairy herd ranked among the finest in Washington. Patients ran an Easter egg hunt for the children of Sedro-Woolley, and townspeople carried Christmas presents onto the wards.
Many of the people committed here would not be called mentally ill today. Epileptics. Immigrants. Alcoholics. Rebellious teenagers. People admitted for "excessive worrying." Treatment ran from farm work to ice-water immersion, electroshock, insulin-coma therapy, and deliberate infection with malaria. About 100 sterilizations were performed between 1935 and 1940. There were 21 lobotomies in 1949 and 1950, and the superintendent who took the job in 1950, Dr. Charles Jones, had trained in transorbital lobotomy under Walter Freeman. Ginny Darvill, a student nurse on the wards in 1963, said of the electroshock: "It didn't look like therapy, but it was the cutting edge."
A Ghost Hunters crew filmed here for an episode that aired September 26, 2007. In the tunnels that connected the wards, they got cool spots. Two investigators heard a humming that seemed to carry words nobody could quite make out. On video, a transparent shape crossed the first floor with every investigator accounted for somewhere else. Most of the night was written off as heating pipes. Not those two things.
The last patients left on August 16, 1973. Down the hill, a plaque reads: "In respectful memory of the 1,487 Northern State Hospital patients interred in these grounds." The markers over them are small flat slabs of concrete, carved with a patient's initials and a number. No names. Privacy law.
John Horne, a retired social worker who worked from 2007 to 2020 in a drug-treatment center on the old campus, probes that ground with metal rods and marks the hits with orange paint. He has uncovered around 200 stones. Each winter the soaked soil pulls some of them back under, and one season took about 150, three or four whole rows. Horne works out there alone, late into the night, and says the place isn't spooky. He calls it peaceful.
There are still hundreds of markers under the mud he hasn't found.
