Starvation Heights Sanitarium

The site of Dr. Linda Hazzard's notorious fasting sanitarium where she starved dozens of patients to death under the guise of a fasting cure.

In the remote forests of the Kitsap Peninsula, on forty-one acres of strawberry fields and ravines overlooking Colvos Passage, Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard operated a sanitarium she called Wilderness Heights beginning around 1908. Born in Carver County, Minnesota in 1867, Hazzard had no medical degree but practiced legally in Washington through a loophole that exempted practitioners of alternative medicine from licensing requirements. Her philosophy was absolute: there was only one disease, impurity of the blood; only one cause, impaired digestion; only one remedy, fasting. Patients consumed nothing but small amounts of dilute tomato and asparagus juice for weeks or months at a time, endured daily enemas of up to twelve quarts of water, and submitted to brutal osteopathic manipulations that amounted to beatings. Locals in the tiny community of Olalla, who sometimes encountered skeletal escapees staggering down the road begging for food, gave the place the name it would carry into infamy: Starvation Heights.

Among Hazzard's earliest Washington victims was Daisey Maud Haglund, a Norwegian immigrant who died in 1908 after a fifty-day fast, leaving behind a three-year-old son named Ivar who would grow up to found the famous Ivar's Seafood Restaurants in Seattle. Other documented deaths followed: Ida Wilcox in 1908, Blanche Browning Tindall at age twenty-five in 1909 after a year-long treatment that also claimed her infant daughter, former state legislator L.E. Rader in 1910 whose vital organs Hazzard removed before an independent autopsy could be conducted, and Earl Edward Erdman in 1911 after just three weeks. Hazzard performed autopsies in a bathtub in the sanitarium's basement, attributed deaths to conditions like cirrhosis rather than starvation, and systematically stole her patients' jewelry, clothing, and valuables. She and her husband Samuel even extracted gold fillings from corpses and sold them to a dentist.

The case that finally brought Hazzard to justice involved two wealthy British sisters, Claire and Dorothea Williamson, who arrived at her Seattle office in February 1911 after seeing an advertisement for Hazzard's book while staying at the Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia. Within weeks of being transferred to the Olalla sanitarium, both women had become emaciated shadows of their former selves. Claire died on April 30, 1911, weighing less than fifty pounds. Hazzard performed an autopsy and declared the cause of death as cirrhosis. She had already manipulated the starving Claire into revising her will, naming Hazzard as administrator, and attempted to have Dorothea declared insane to gain guardianship. Dorothea, reduced to roughly fifty to sixty pounds, was saved only because the sisters' childhood nanny, Margaret Conway, received a cryptic telegram from Australia, sailed to Seattle, and found Claire dead and Dorothea barely alive. Conway smuggled word to the sisters' uncle in Portland, who came to rescue Dorothea. The British Vice Consul in Tacoma, Lucian Agassiz, pressured Kitsap County authorities to prosecute. In January 1912, Hazzard was convicted of manslaughter after the jury deliberated less than an hour. She was sentenced to two to twenty years of hard labor at Walla Walla State Penitentiary but served only two years before receiving a full pardon from Governor Ernest Lister in 1916 on the condition she leave for New Zealand, where similar deaths reportedly occurred under her care.

Hazzard returned to Olalla around 1920 and built a new facility she called a School of Health, since her medical license had been revoked. She continued supervising fasts until the sanitarium burned to the ground in 1935. In a final act of grim irony, Hazzard herself died on June 24, 1938, while attempting to cure herself through fasting. Author Gregg Olsen, who accessed court transcripts and Hazzard's prison correspondence for his book Starvation Heights, estimates approximately forty people died under her care, though the true number may never be known.

Today, the original Hazzard house still stands in deteriorating condition on private property, its claw-foot bathtub where she performed autopsies still visible among the crumbling structure. The Old Olalla Cemetery, established in 1901 and abandoned in 1930, sits on a plateau above Olalla Bay accessible by a steep trail off Olalla Valley Road. Many of Hazzard's victims are believed to be buried there, their graves marked only by red-painted pipe poles where headstones once stood. Visitors and nearby residents report hearing screams and moaning near the old cemetery on the hillside, scratching on the exterior walls of homes built near the property, footsteps outside with no visible source, and skeletal figures walking along the roadsides at night. One former resident reported returning from cooking to find every dining room chair stacked against the bathroom door by unseen hands. A landlord of a neighboring property hired paranormal investigators to help release the spirits of children after occupants heard laughter and running footsteps in the middle of the night. The location was investigated on The Dead Files, where medium Amy Allan encountered what she described as a crazed dead woman whose sole focus was killing the living, along with the pained spirits of her victims still suffering the trauma of their deaths. Multiple psychics visiting the property have reported the same recurring sensation: overwhelming hunger pangs.