Northern State Hospital

An abandoned mental hospital that operated from 1912 to 1973, with a cemetery holding 1,487 patients interred on the grounds.

Commissioned by the Washington State Legislature in 1909 and opened to its first patients in 1912, Northern State Hospital was designed by the renowned Olmsted Brothers landscape firm -- sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of Central Park -- alongside Seattle architects Saunders and Lawton, who rendered its buildings in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. At its peak, the campus sprawled across more than 1,000 acres of the Skagit Valley, operating its own dairy, lumber mill, quarry, greenhouse, bakery, and canning facility. Originally named the Northern Hospital for the Insane, it was meant to relieve overcrowding at Western State Hospital in Steilacoom, but the institution would grow to house 2,700 patients by the 1950s, far beyond its intended capacity.

Behind the progressive facade of occupational therapy and pastoral farmland, Northern State harbored darker practices. Dr. Jones and Dr. Shanklin, who had trained under the infamous Dr. Walter Freeman at Western State Hospital, brought the transorbital lobotomy procedure to Northern State in the late 1940s, where records show at least 21 procedures were performed in 1949-1950 alone. Patients endured electroshock therapy, insulin-induced comas, and deliberate malaria infection in the hope that high fevers might cure mental illness. Between 1935 and 1940, at least 100 patients were forcibly sterilized under Washington's eugenics laws. One patient named Emmett, who documented his shock therapy sessions, described the experience as feeling like "convicts without the honor of trial by jury, waiting their turn in the electric chair."

When the hospital closed in 1973 under Governor Dan Evans, it left behind a cemetery where 1,487 patients had been interred in anonymous graves -- each marked only with a small concrete block bearing a plot number and the patient's initials, mandated by privacy laws of the era. After a crematorium was built on the grounds in 1927, the remains of non-Catholic patients were burned and stored in ordinary food cans labeled with identification numbers. In a discovery that shocked the community, 204 dusty cans of ashes were found forgotten in the crematorium attic before the building was demolished. Another 200 food cans containing patient remains were discovered in 1983 at Hawthorne Memorial Park in Mount Vernon, where they were finally buried in a common grave.

The most frequently reported apparition is that of a young girl playing with a red ball, accompanied by a man who appears to be chasing after her through the maze-like corridors of the abandoned wards. Visitors and former Cascades Job Corps residents who occupied some buildings have also reported a nurse hanging from a noose in the old medical wing and another nurse pushing a man in a wheelchair down empty hallways before vanishing. A prankster spirit known as "Fred" has been blamed for tossing sheets and bedpans in the night, while disembodied voices whispering "come play with me" have been captured on audio recordings. The underground tunnels that once transported food, laundry, and patients between buildings are a particular hotspot, with witnesses reporting heavy dragging sounds, phantom footsteps, and an oppressive sense of dread.

In 2007, the TAPS team from Syfy's Ghost Hunters investigated the facility in Season 3, Episode 13, titled "Lost Souls." Facility manager Dan Singleton, who was dedicated to preserving the hospital buildings, had requested the investigation. The team recorded unexplained humming on audio tape and captured a transparent shape moving on a first-floor video feed while all investigators were accounted for elsewhere. However, upon review, most phenomena were attributed to the facility's aging infrastructure -- heating pipes and a water main accounted for many of the reported sounds and visual anomalies. Singleton, who vowed that no more buildings would be demolished during his tenure, died of complications from a heart attack in 2009.

Today, the grounds are split between the Northern State Recreation Area, the SWIFT Center (a Port of Skagit development since 2018), and the Cascades Job Corps campus. The cemetery, tended for years by volunteer John Horne -- who has uncovered more than 200 sunken headstones and believes hundreds more lie in the surrounding woods -- received $175,000 in Washington state funding for a memorial bearing patients' names. The award-winning "Lost Patients" podcast by the Seattle Times and KUOW, which has been downloaded nearly one million times and earned a Peabody nomination, brought renewed attention to the forgotten dead. The entire campus was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.