St. Ignatius Hospital has stood empty above Colfax, Washington since 2000, five brick floors of old hospital and older nursing home. The guides who walk it report being kicked, tugged backward, and met by footsteps running up a staircase with nobody on it.
There is one room in the abandoned St. Ignatius Hospital in Colfax, Washington where the flies collect. Room 312. The haunted-travel sites that catalog the building both fix on that same detail, and both give the room a tenant: a man named Michael, remembered as having a terrible temper, said to rush at visitors and try to scare them out of his space.
Nothing supports him on paper. No surname, no admission date, no line in the county paper or the hospital's own history that ties a Michael to 312. Nobody explains the flies either.
The building itself is documented. Spokane Historical records how Colfax outbid Pullman and Palouse City for a hospital in 1893, offering free land, free water and an interest-free loan of $3,000; the nuns who won it brought in Mother Joseph Pariseau, the architect who put hospitals and schools across the Pacific Northwest, to design it. It opened as Whitman County's first hospital. Its first recorded death came in 1893: F. E. Martin, crushed between two railroad cars. Every telling of the place still has him walking the halls, and Haunted Rooms describes the apparition as a mangled and disfigured man who is mostly harmless.
It ran as a hospital for about seventy years, until 1964 or 1968 depending on which account you take, then spent decades as a care home. The last residents left in 2000. One of them is supposed to have stayed: Rose, who knocks on the walls of her room and shoves the people who come too close.
Ghost tours started in 2015, and Valoree Gregory, who ran them, says she used to be a skeptic. Then she took a hard kick and turned to scold the other guide, who was down the hall and nowhere near her. She and a police officer both watched a figure cross a hallway, went to the spot expecting a break-in, and found no doorway there at all. Only walls. Her worst night, she was on the fourth floor with her son and five of his classmates when the whole group heard people running up the stairs toward them. Nobody was on the staircase. The running stopped when Gregory reached the third floor. "We're not a haunted house," she told the Daily Evergreen. "We have real ghosts."
Austin and Laura Storm bought the place in 2021 and are restoring it in phases; a new roof went on in 2024. They also police the lore. Under a People magazine writeup on their own press page, they append a correction: no evidence anyone died in the elevator shaft or by falling from a window. Chalk it up to creative license.
What they don't correct is the nuns' quarters. Olivia Harnack walked it in the dark for the Whitman County Gazette, heard faint whispers, then felt something take hold of her shirt and pull her backward. She put in earbuds, turned on music, and got out.
