Linda Hazzard starved paying patients to death in the woods above Olalla, Washington. All that survives of Starvation Heights is a foundation and a concrete box, and visitors report figures among the trees and a hunger they cannot explain.
What is left of the sanitarium at Starvation Heights, in the woods above Olalla, Washington, is a concrete foundation under ivy and a seven-foot concrete box standing in the middle of it. Visitors to the surrounding trees describe figures moving among them, and a heavy sense of being unwelcome that makes people want to leave. The box is believed to have been the incinerator. There are stories that Dr. Hazzard burned bodies in it, or dumped them down the nearby ravine, though nothing has ever turned up.
Linda Burfield Hazzard had no medical degree. She held a Washington license through a loophole that grandfathered in alternative practitioners without one, and she was fierce about the title. "I have told you time and time again, it is Dr. Hazzard," she snapped at reporters covering her trial. "Mrs. Hazzard is my mother-in-law." Her 1908 book rested on a single argument: "The sole source of bodily ills is impure blood. The cause of impure blood is imperfect digestion." Her cure was to stop eating.
Paying patients came to her Kitsap County property, which she called Wilderness Heights and the neighbors renamed Starvation Heights, for fasts that ran days to months on tomato juice, asparagus juice and thin broth. There were enemas that lasted hours and used up to twelve quarts of water. There was massage, which meant Hazzard beating her fists against a patient's forehead and back while shouting, one alarmed witness reported, "Eliminate! Eliminate!" Skeletal patients wandered down to town begging for food, and nobody fed them. "They said they didn't help them because they were afraid of Dr. Hazzard," author Gregg Olsen told the Kitsap Sun.
The count of her dead is disputed and no source reconciles it: at least 15 documented between 1908 and 1912, as many as 40 by some estimates. What stopped her were two British sisters. Claire and Dorothea Williamson arrived in 1911, were installed on vegetable broth, and were offered space in Hazzard's office safe for their diamonds and deeds. Claire died weighing about 50 pounds. When the sisters' childhood nanny reached Olalla and found Dorothea living alone in a rough cabin, she noticed Hazzard wearing Claire's silk dressing gown and her favorite hat.
Hazzard was convicted of manslaughter on February 4, 1912, served two years at Walla Walla, and was pardoned on the condition that she leave the country. She came back around 1920 with money and built the sanitarium she had always wanted, calling it a school of health because the state had pulled her license. It burned to the ground in 1935.
South Sound Magazine reports that psychics who visit the property come away with the same complaint: unexplained hunger. In 1938 Hazzard felt unwell, put herself on her own fasting cure, and starved to death.
