Finding Lillian: The lost patients of Washington’s abandoned mental hospital

you're not supposed to be digging in the cemetery I haven't been moving anything for years living here I've heard people complain about the cemetery not being taken care of the headstones aren't there most of the grave markers are still there they're just buried it's B1 it's exactly the one I was thinking to be a lot of times the only thing left of someone's life is simply the marker on their grave when this chunk of concrete is the only thing left of someone's life you should at least be able to see it some of these people didn't even exist anymore until I was able to find a death certificate and put a name to them almost 1,700 people that are buried here there's a handful of people that there's any information aside from a death certificate it's definitely it's grave B1 it looks like the initials could be maybe like WN but I really can't read it so I can't identify this one but at least I've located it they just general whole mentality towards people with mental health issues like that back then they didn't care you're cast out from society they didn't want to see you there wasn't going to be a record of you left a lot of the history Northern State was lost right down to the people I think people deserve better than that [Music] really this shelf is like all of my genealogy stuff I remember kind of always knowing that my grandpa was adopted I never heard my grandpa talk about his mom we had taken my grandma out my grandma has dementia she just her 95 something came up about my grandpa and I said gosh I wonder what his mother I wonder what his mother's name was and she pipes up in the front seat she sits up she goes Lillian Massie and I was like okay didn't I had never heard that name before I kept coming back trying to find Lillian and I would search and find nothing it was family search.org signed up logged in and it pulled up her death certificate and that was like our first substantiation that she was a living breathing person she died in January of 1934 and it said that her death place where she lived was Northern State Hospital I had never heard of Northern State Hospital I feel like I've been to every Museum that has records from Northern State just trying to find every scrap that I can find about her what I've learned since since then is that she was just thrown away Northern State Hospital was one of three Mental Hospitals in the state of Washington northern state began in 1909 as a farming extension of Western State Hospital at its height there were 2300 patients here so it was very large and it was a major employer here in the county the whole establishment was like a small town you had your farm vegetables there was a print shop you even had logging and there were so many buildings and they were all interconnected Physicians and a lot of the administrators lived on the grounds the campus was designed by John Olstead and James Dawson who were part of the Olstead Brothers architectural firm and they planned very carefully how they were going to lay out the campus of a mental hospital and the philosophy of the Olstead Brothers was that beauty was an important part of healing and they didn't want it to look like an institution Northern State in its era was considered really The Cutting Edge of psychiatric treatment and some of those treatments we don't look upon with favor or we find that they were excessive there really wasn't any Cycle Therapy mostly sedation and restraints and electric shock therapy and Insulin coma therapy which I participated in and then there were a few lobotomies work therapy was considered a really important part of people's recovery patients came here with skills there were Carpenters there were plumbers there were Farm Workers there were women who could sew the belief was that you keep people busy there was a lot of negative uh connotations There Was Fear people didn't understand about mental illness I think it was mostly ignorant but it there was a lot of hostility the Northern State cemetery is really one of probably the loneliest places on the campus because it was the people who were generally forgotten the majority of people buried in the cemetery are people without families who had no one to come and claim them Northern State did not have an excellent record of caring for human remains to be honest there's a lot of conflict with the cemetery a whole lot of conflict with the cemetery and the more you dig in the more you learn the more conflict you find this is all the paperwork I started with for the cemetery and like here's the original map of the graves that they had and I taped it together and then I went up there and this is how I originally started the whole thing is I went up there and I found all of the markers that I have in Orange and not a single one of them are in this spot none of them were in this layout so I'm like okay this is worthless and I even numbered like some of them go like count up in this direction then suddenly they start counting up in the other direction so that's how I started it's like okay I wanted to see where the graves were and find them that was worthless and then I just kind of started going from there making my own there's the cremated remains buried up there but I only have record starting in 39 for the cremated remains I don't have any from 1927 to 1939 they were cremated they were put in food cans in the cany they stored them in the attic and then they buried several hundred at a time a lot of them were just buried randomly between Graves it was only probably maybe four or five years ago I really started being more in that and photography and checking out the buildings and then learning about the people and just kind of turned into a bit of an obsession so Northern State had a newspaper they published on the grounds and this whole thing and that bin are all print blocks that were used in the newspaper glass skylights on the top of the two most detered buildings up there right now these are juice glasses that were actually used up there Windfield Hall the old Nur nurse's dorm the big one that they tore down so this is from Windfield copper roofing nails and I found a spot where I gathered a bunch of those one of my biggest connections is friend working on the campus in one of the old buildings in Behavioral Health I was a counselor there a case manager and I just be sitting in my office with this person that is too high functioning to qualify for any state services or anything to help them but too low functioning to live on their own and take care of themselves and dealt with hundreds of people like this and I'm looking out my window at this huge empty building and just thinking if there was only somewhere for this person to go that's what I need for these clients that I have that have nowhere to go is where I'm sitting right now just at heart I'm a social worker and care about people and think about people a lot and their situation and it just got to the point where I just got burned out I got tired of seeing people come through the door walk back out the door and die and I have that Facebook group friends of Northern State Hospital and that's my big thing is it's about the accurate history of Northern State Hospital some people want to go looking for the Gory details and stuff but most people want to know what it was they want to know the history of it they want to know about the people there and I do have people contact me all the time about family members and whether they're buried there and any information I could kind of Point them in the right [Music] direction Lillian didn't know our family when she was alive like she gave birth to my grandpa and within a couple of weeks she was back at the hospital and I don't know that she ever saw him again everybody who knew her in life of course is gone she was born in 1900 Lillian was the third the story was she was put in a hospital and died not long after my grandpa was born well she was put in before he was born and so his whole gestation he was in Northern State with his mother and she was paroled in late May of 1925 to have the baby the death certificate say she was divorced the divorce record said that her husband divorced her towards the end of 25 saying that the child wasn't his and then gave the baby to the Washington children's home she was an inmate at Northern State hospital because she'd been infected with syphilis no nobody knew his his mom's story nobody knew any of this had transpired nobody knew she was in a mental institution she had two little girls her daughters were three and 1 half and like a year and a half old she lost her kids and then she had this baby that was ripped away I mean I think about her being in that place and not having anybody and being alone she was put there in January of 25 and died there in January of 34 of uh pulmonary tuberculosis there's no record of her remains being claimed her records theoretically were destroyed in 1984 she had nobody to speak for her she had no voice she had no rights and she was real she lived and if it wasn't for her I wouldn't be [Music] [Music] here it's exciting it's scary it's a little nerve-wracking but I don't want to get my hopes up for anything it would just be really really cool to find something anything I mean even even to see her name written down on something that you know that you know that the the writer that held that [Music] pen knew her interacted with her maybe took care of her you know that would be cool welcome everyone Hi there and then for this if you just want to put um like Seattle Washington so we're just going to go Page by Page and we're going to turn it like that okay if you need any help we're happy to help you it's okay it's very I understand it's good it's just a lot yeah yeah what are you feeling right now she's in there she's in there somewhere I just got to find her oh my gosh all right so we're looking for January 25 let's go back and find that that was when she was admitted okay March 25 January 1st let me just make sure there she is oh oh my God 29- 4264 lilan Hansen from scet County female she was 24 years old married her occupation was housekeeping she was from North Dakota and she was received January 13th and committed January 13th of 1925 I've never seen that before oh wow wow within five minutes of pulling a box out there she is I prepared myself for there not to be anything so she was real this was her Pearl date of May May 27th 1925 to go give birth to my grandpa and so the next page was 293 we go the way oh that way you got it there she is returned from peole June 14th he was born june9 he got five days with his mother oh my gosh look at this register and this has a lot more information okay wow 1924 just about to 19 there January 1925 is going to start on this page there she is one line sums up 9 years of her adult life but what's interesting is it says that she was cremated but it doesn't give a date it just says January of 34 everybody that we've asked about the cemetery records say that there's no record of a burial of her remains [Music] wow it looks like they're alphabetical there she is yeah so she was treated with hydrotherapy once which doesn't sound bad until you read up on it and that they put them in a straight jacket and restrained him in the tub I just can't imagine that that's the only treatment she got the whole time she was there now I want to know like where was she what building what board did she go to all three of Lillian's children were alcoholics they were all cheaters none of them had good home life my grandpa didn't beat his kids but he terrorized him so that stuff's hard but when you think about where he came from family stuff's hard but if you don't have them what do you [Music] have because there's so much we don't know and this is like the only records receptacle that may have any clues at all if there's nothing here then maybe there's nothing anywhere but I don't want there to not be anything anywhere I'd like there to be an answer I'd really like there to be an answer realistically is there one I don't know but I'd really really like there to be an [Music] answer I'm a little overwhelmed right now brain's a little tired but we found her now if we could only find where her remains ended up that would be really really [Music] cool you want you spend enough time in the cemetery you can spot unmarked Graves pretty easily it's aot harder right there when you first look at it it just looks like a grassy field there were about two dozen I'd say that were visible when I started up there last time I counted there's 205 of them that are visible now and I've located about 600 so far oh nope but if that's the edge of one I'll have metal probes I'll around and I'll probe in the ground until I find a grave marker and they mark it with a survey flag so this is one I couldn't find because that one's not in the right spot it's not in line these are in line that also means there's one right there too that's not in line this one's really close to the surface [Applause] what I want to do now is go grab the iPad and look up who that is and then whoever with these initials right around that um grave number then we'll figure out who's it is Arthur jaab I thought that said jaab James Arthur Brit died 1919 207 there is a seven j a b looks like a zero so that 717 is way out of place that one shouldn't even be there James Arthur Brit born about 1880 he was a fruit Packer he was a white he was a widower he about 39 years old that's not very old um from Seattle and he died of General pus of the insane which is untreated syphilis which is a v a very large portion of people died from that tuberculosis I don't suppose the correct one is right next to it it's a grve marker right next to this one how far down is that so this is a good example of things being out of place I found every one of these like this un covering a headstone that's been covered in grass for 20 years it's like wow this person was completely gone to history and now at least there's something that's brought back of them most of the people up there everything about them has been forgotten there's nothing left when Northern State closed in a lot of ways people just walked away from it it closed 50 years ago and then the camp is just kind of sitting empty they repurposed some of the buildings that for the most part theyve just kind of sat there a lot of people were transferred to different facilities a lot of people were pared there were a lot of people that had nowhere to go they just simply open the door and let them out and just wish them the best of luck some were released to families and some were simply given bus tickets to Seattle and they just became part of the unhoused population in Seattle the thing about Northern State is it's a complicated place and I think our human tendency is to want to make it either like a Utopia that was a heaven on Earth or that it was a house of horrors and a horrible thing and it was neither because it was just human the preservation of Northern State Hospital and just acknowledging the things that happened and the history of it I think exists for not only remembering what we once had that we lost as far as services for people but also the things that happened that should never be repeated if you forget those things sometimes in history they end up happening again every time we go up there you know it's like pick up a pebble or an acorn or a pine cone pieces of glass from some of the broken windows it's a way to be connected I like this one's Gothic style not sure why they did that it's really pretty it's really cool I like it so are these original yeah yeah these are all original and those are heavy oh my God one of the old push button light switches those are all original too and these lights hanging by the cloth cord still I think it's beautiful for me it's like it's just it's kind of awe inspiring because Hospitals now don't look like this I just wonder if she was in a frame of mind enough that they would have allowed her to come here I mean I hope so I hope she was able to not just be in a locked W somewhere well let's go here just looking at that from what I could say it's very likely she was in here though because of deteriorated this is when you were worse off you were in here we've known that she was here but to see those confined spaces that was was hard cuz she didn't want to be here she didn't have to be here I just can't imagine what that would be like you know you just want to go home to your [Music] kids when I found Lillian's death certificate then I like scrolled a little before and a little back and was just shocked at the number of death certificates that are from Northern State how many of them are like Lilian that are just gone and I don't want to let her down a lot of people may not know that they had family members there they're dying again to go and get forgotten [Music]

Channel: The Seattle Times

Views: 200,256

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Id: ZU-rCd3q8oE

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2024