Starvation Heights Sanitarium

A fake doctor with no medical degree starved approximately forty patients to death at her Olalla sanitarium between 1908 and 1935, stealing their valuables and extracting gold fillings from corpses. Visitors near the property report skeletal figures on the roads at night, screams from the hillside cemetery, and every psychic who visits describes the same sensation: overwhelming hunger.

Claire Williamson weighed less than fifty pounds when she died at Starvation Heights on May 19, 1911. Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard performed the autopsy in a bathtub in the basement and declared the cause of death cirrhosis. She had already convinced the starving Claire to revise her will, naming Hazzard as administrator.

Hazzard had no medical degree. She practiced legally in Washington through a loophole that exempted alternative medicine practitioners from licensing requirements. Born in Carver County, Minnesota in 1867, she operated a sanitarium she called Wilderness Heights on forty-one acres of strawberry fields and ravines overlooking Colvos Passage near the tiny community of Olalla on the Kitsap Peninsula, starting around 1908. Her philosophy was simple and absolute: one disease (impurity of the blood), one cause (impaired digestion), one remedy (fasting). Patients consumed nothing but small amounts of dilute tomato and asparagus juice for weeks or months. They endured daily enemas of up to twelve quarts of water and brutal osteopathic manipulations that amounted to beatings.

Locals in Olalla sometimes encountered skeletal figures staggering down the road begging for food. They gave the place its real name: Starvation Heights.

The body count started early. Daisey Maud Haglund, a Norwegian immigrant, 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. Ida Wilcox died in 1908. Blanche Browning Tindall, twenty-five, died in 1909 after a year-long treatment that also killed her infant daughter. Former state legislator L.E. Rader died in 1910. Hazzard removed his vital organs before an independent autopsy could be conducted. Earl Edward Erdman died in 1911 after just three weeks. Hazzard systematically stole her patients' jewelry, clothing, and valuables. She and her husband Samuel extracted gold fillings from corpses and sold them to a dentist.

The Williamson sisters were what finally ended it. Claire and Dorothea, wealthy and British, arrived at Hazzard's Seattle office in February 1911 after seeing an ad for her book while staying at the Empress Hotel in Victoria. Within weeks at the Olalla sanitarium, both had become emaciated. After Claire died, Hazzard tried to have Dorothea declared insane to gain guardianship. Dorothea, reduced to roughly fifty or sixty pounds, was saved because the sisters' childhood nanny, Margaret Conway, received a cryptic telegram from Australia, sailed to Seattle, found Claire dead and Dorothea barely alive, and smuggled word to the sisters' uncle in Portland. The British Vice Consul in Tacoma, Lucian Agassiz, pressured Kitsap County to prosecute.

In January 1912, the jury deliberated less than an hour. Manslaughter. Two to twenty years at Walla Walla. She served two before Governor Ernest Lister pardoned her on the condition she leave for New Zealand, where similar deaths occurred under her care. She came back to Olalla around 1920, built a new facility she called a School of Health since her license had been revoked, and kept supervising fasts until the building burned in 1935. Hazzard died on June 24, 1938, attempting to cure herself through fasting. Author Gregg Olsen estimates approximately forty people died under her care. The true number may be higher.

The original Hazzard house remains standing in deteriorating condition on private property, the 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.

Residents and visitors near the property report hearing screams and moaning from the hillside cemetery, scratching on exterior walls of homes built near the property, and footsteps outside with no visible source. Skeletal figures walk along the roadsides at night. One former resident returned 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 at night. The Dead Files sent medium Amy Allan to the site. She encountered what she described as a crazed dead woman whose sole focus was killing the living, and the pained spirits of her victims still suffering the trauma of their deaths.

Multiple psychics visiting the property have reported the same sensation: overwhelming hunger pangs.