Behind the Walls of the World’s Psychiatric Hospitals
Behind the Walls of the World’s Psychiatric Hospitals
Ep. 6: Legends and Lore of Oregon State Hospital
Episode 6 explores the sudden deaths of 47 patients during dinner in 1942, the mysterious tunnels underneath the hospital, and the reason Oregon State Hospital was at the center of a series of Pulitzer-award winning articles.
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Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to Behind the Walls of the World’s Psychiatric Hospitals! I’m your host, Dr. Sarah Gallup, and I am so glad that you’re back for the final episode on Oregon State Hospital. Starting next week, we’ll begin looking into the history and treatments of another old asylum – and you’re gonna want to come back, cuz it’s a doozy!
In this last episode about OSH, I want to talk about three of the enduring legends and lore surrounding the hospital. They’re among the most talked-about stories and aspects about the hospital that continue to capture people’s interest.
The first story begins on the evening of Wednesday, November 18, 1942. The U.S. had entered WWII the previous year, which meant that tensions were high and staffing at the hospital was at a considerable low. Dr. John C. Evans was superintendent of OSH and the 2,728 patients who resided there.
November 18 had been just another ordinary day. Dinner that night was scrambled eggs, and patients gathered on their wards to receive their meal. Over on ward 23, I imagine there was the usual chit-chat between patients while staff members looked on. About 15 minutes into dinner, one patient groaned loudly and doubled over in pain, grabbing his stomach. He looked ill and tense and soon leaned over and vomited onto the floor. Across the room, another patient winced and gritted his teeth, leaning over and grabbing his side.
Over on ward 28, other patients began showing similar symptoms. By the dozens, patients were suddenly complaining of stomach cramps and nausea. They gasped for air. Some said they couldn’t even stand up.
Women patients on ward 39 suddenly became sick. Then men on ward 41. I can only imagine the panic that staff must have experienced at that moment. On such an ordinary day, why are so many patients getting so suddenly and violently ill? They must have phoned other wards, just to find out that their patients were showing similar symptoms.
On the unit where he worked, ward attendant R. C. Tillett tasted the eggs. Too salty, he thought, yuck. He cautioned his patients not to eat so much. Maybe that was what was making people sick.
On her ward, nurse Alie Wassell also tasted the eggs. Something was wrong. They tasted almost soapy. “Stop eating!” She told her patients. She urged patients to put down their utensils and to spit out the food in their mouths. She had heard that patients on other wards were getting violently sick.
The scene must have been awful. Patients concentrated on wards 23, 28, 39, and 41 continued to complain of terrible stomach pain. They struggled to breathe. As their symptoms worsened, they said they couldn’t move their legs – couldn’t stand or move. Many patients began vomiting blood. One thing was for sure: there was not enough staff to triage all of the sick patients. Certainly someone called Superintendent Evans to alert him to what was happening. Food poisoning, someone must have told him. It’s bad. Everyone seems to be getting sick.
An hour after dinner, a patient who had been vomiting blood and gasping for air suddenly passed out. A staff member noticed and ran over to check his vital signs. But he was dead. Dead! The sheer panic that must have taken over when that patient died alerted staff and patients alike to the severity of the situation. This was not just food poisoning. Something was very, very wrong. There were not nearly enough staff to manage everyone, so patients showing less acute symptoms must have been left alone to writhe in pain.
By 10 pm, 10 patients were dead and hundreds were sick. Nurse Alie Wassell, who had tasted the eggs earlier in the evening, was among the ill.
By midnight, 32 patients had died.
By 4 AM, 40 patients had died.
By the time the Capital Journal newspaper was released in the morning, the headline showed that 44 patients had died and nearly 500 were ill. The question that everyone wanted to know was: what happened at Oregon State Hospital? Superintendent Evans told the Capital Journal that five investigations had already started: the first was his own. The second investigation was led by Dr. L. E. Barrick, the Marion County coroner. The newspaper described the other investigations: “Dr. Frank Menne, pathologist from the University of Oregon medical school in Portland, was on the ground testing samples of the food served at the meal and analyzing the stomach of one of the victims.
“From Washington, D.C., came word from Dr. P. B. Dunbar, assistant chief of the federal food and drug administration, that inspectors and chemists from his department would be sent [to Salem].
“J.D. Walsh and M. L. Belgangle of the AMA are en route to Salem from San Francisco by plane to conduct their own inquiry.”
On Thursday afternoon, one more woman and two more men died from the mysterious illness. They were the final fatalities. The bodies of the dead were stored in the small hospital morgue, the chapel, and hallways. The hospital chapel, which measured 30 feet by 50 feet, had bodies stacked from one end to the other.
Physicians and nurses from Salem and the surrounding areas came to the hospital to help manage the approximately remaining 467 sick patients. These patients were expected to recover, pending no serious changes in symptoms. Still, six of those patients remained in critical condition, and dozens were kept in bed under strict observation.
Meanwhile, Superintendent Evans wondered if there was something wrong with the eggs that had been used or if something more nefarious were to blame, like an intentional poisoning. There were, after all, patients who worked in the kitchen handling the food. He told the Capital Journal that the eggs had been obtained from the federal surplus commodities corporations and that “a third of the two-ton shipment of eggs had been served previously without ill effects. They were received two or three months ago, packed in two-gallon tin containers, and were frozen en route to Portland in a refrigerator truck.”
Arthur Doell, president of National Egg Products, told the Capital Journal, “’If eggs were bad enough to cause such a violent poisoning, no one would ever have cooked them.’ He remarked that it was ‘rather abnormal’ to hold frozen eggs in storage for six months, as the Salem hospital had done before serving a scrambled egg dinner last night…Frozen eggs, he explained, must be kept at temperatures from 5-25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. At 5-10 degrees above, eggs soften and spoil.
“’The Oregon tragedy sounds like chemical poisoning to me,’ Doell said.
“Chemical poisoning, he explained, could be connected with eggs if they were cooked in a copper kettle or with treated water, or if some other poisonous ingredient was added.’”
Since the eggs were from a government surplus supply, similar batches of eggs were sent to institutions around the country – as well as to troops fighting overseas. It suddenly became imperative to find out – and soon! – if other eggs could be similarly contaminated. “in Washington, the agricultural department announced that it was halting distribution of frozen eggs through regional agencies pending results of the investigation.” Superintendent Evans worried that, “since many such eggs are shipped to the army, there is the possibility that some saboteur poisoned a can.”
By the following day, November 20, 1942, the remaining unopened egg yolks from the batch had been tested and ultimately ruled out as the cause of the illness. Clearly, something had been added to the eggs prior to consumption. Dr. Joseph Beeman, director of the state crime laboratory, said…that the organs of those who died and the cooked eggs showed the presence of sodium fluoride in “considerable quantity.” Pathologist Dr. Frank Menne identified the crystalline substance as the poison found in roach powder.
As the Capital Journal pointed out, “Roach powder was available at the hospital. It was kept in the fruit cellar, accessible from the kitchen. But the fruit cellar door was locked Wednesday night as it is at all times. Only regular kitchen employees had keys. Other kitchen supplies, such as salt, baking powder, or powdered milk, which resemble the roach powder in appearance, were kept in a separate room.
“A. B. McKillop, the [assistant] cook, said he put the egg batter in big bowls Wednesday night, then went to the basement and came back with the milk powder. He said there was nobody in the fruit cellar. McKillop met Mary O’Hare, another cook, on his return from the basement. While she rolled biscuits, he mixed the scrambled eggs, which were made of the egg yolks, powdered milk, salt, pepper, and water.”
But that wasn’t exactly true, and the two cooks, McKillop and O’Hare, were both arrested on Sunday, November 22. Both A. B. McKillop and Mary O’Hare were emigrants from Ireland. Diane L. Goeres-Gardner points out in Inside Oregon State Hospital that “initially they were suspected of being part of a terrorist plot, as the United States had entered WWII almost one year earlier.”
Instead, McKillop recanted his earlier story. He had not gone down to get the milk powder, he confessed. He was so busy because they were understaffed, so he handed over his keys to a patient, George Nosen, and sent him to get the milk powder. The problem was…George Nosen couldn’t read. So when he accidentally went into the wrong room and grabbed a container he thought was the milk powder, he had no idea he had inadvertently grabbed roach powder instead. Nosen brought the powder back up to the kitchen, and McKillop instructed him to add it to the egg mixture.
As soon as they heard that patients were getting sick around the hospital, the cooks knew there was a major problem. And I have to read this direct excerpt from McKillop – I just wish I could do a halfway decent Irish accent: “I think it was Mrs. O’Hara said the matron told her that all the patients were getting sick on the wards. Mrs. O’Hara asked me, ‘Are you sure that the batter got powdered milk?’ I says, ‘No, I am not sure but I am going to find out.’ I took that patient down with me and said show me where you got that powdered milk and he showed me the door to the fruit room. I says, ‘There is no powdered milk in there that I know of’ and then we went in and I says, ‘Where did you get the powdered milk?’ and he says, ‘In this keg right here,’ and I says, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ So then we came upstairs to the kitchen and I asked Mrs. O’Hara what was in the small barrel in the fruit room and she says it was cockroach powder and I told her, ‘Well, that’s what he brought me up for powdered milk.’
“She says, ‘God Almighty, that is poison,’ that is after the reports came in that they were sick. So I says, ‘What shall we do? And she says, ‘I don’t know,’ so I said, ‘Well, we won’t do anything now or yet, I don’t know which, so I said, ‘well I don’t know what to do.’ We did not do anything. I said well, no I don’t think it was right then. I went to her and said we ought to go and tell the doctor and she says, ‘Well, we won’t do anything now.’ We were both scared so bad we did not know what to do. She did not sleep and neither did I. I felt better getting it off my chest. I here say this that she had nothing to do with getting the powder, getting the key or anything. I mixed it, I did.
“McKillop said he realized it would have been better to tell the doctors so they would know what kind of poison they were combatting “but we were scared to death, you know how you would feel if you did something like that and we did not know what to do, to tell you the truth.”
The cooks McKillop and O’Hara were ultimately not held criminally responsible for the incident, and their charges were dropped.
Patient George Nosen was targeted for his role in the poisoning incident for the rest of his life. Goeres-Gardner says, “’Nosen was anything but a meek target of abuse, however: A thin, chain-smoking man, he frequently started fights with real and perceived enemies at the state hospital.’ He lived at the hospital continuously from 1971 until he died in October 1983 at the age of 68. He’d tried to live in three different community settings before 1973 but always returned to the hospital. He was living in a geriatric ward when he had a scuffle with another patient while all the ward attendants were in a staff meeting. He collapsed after being struck repeatedly in the head and stomach and died a few minutes later. Dr. Peter Batten, Nosen’s clinical psychiatrist and Marion County medical examiner, listed his death as a homicide.”
In total, 40 male patients and 7 female patients died as a result of the accidental food poisoning on November 18, 1942, and 467 patients became ill. The story of the poisoned scrambled eggs is one that lives on in local lore. I remember hearing it when I was still in school. It continues to fascinate and horrify everyone who hears it.
The second area I want to discuss is less one story and more lore. These are the myths and the legends of the tunnels under OSH.
During the construction of the original insane asylum in 1881, a need arose for transporting construction materials from one area of the hospital to another. An underground tunnel system was created with a narrow gauge rail system. At the turn of the century, the main way to get to the hospital was by train. The train tracks later became Asylum Way or what is now known as Center Street. When the Dome Building opened in 1912, the tunnels expanded to go under Center Street to easily move people and goods from the main hospital to the Dome Building. As the hospital continued to construct new buildings, the underground tunnels also expanded. Eventually, the route of the tunnels looked a little like a trapezoid, tracing from the main hospital across Center Street to the Dome Building, then connecting to four other buildings on the same side of street, before crossing Center Street again to the main hospital.
In total, the tunnels under the hospital are just under two miles long (1.87 miles to be exact). At some point, the underground rail system was discontinued and paved over. During the mid-20th century, women staff members sometimes roller skated through the tunnels from building to building. I like to think that that’s what I would be doing in them, too!
Small squares of purple glass had been installed in the ceiling of the tunnels to provide a sort of skylight for people travelling from one place to the another. Even today when walking around Salem, small purple glass squares are visible on the street, indicating that a tunnel is below.
While the hospital was struggling with severe overcrowding, storage rooms in the tunnels were used as extra bed space. I understand the exploding patient population in the 1950s meant desperate times, but I cannot imagine putting patients in a cold underground tunnel on a dirt floor without staff supervision. It seems like that would have not only been incredibly creepy for the patients but also potentially dangerous.
At some point – I think during the construction of the new hospital around 2010 – the tunnels were sealed off. Or so they say… But the stories continue. Before I began my training at OSH, people asked me if I had been in the tunnels. What did I know about them? Do patients still go down there? Of course, I didn’t have the answers to these questions, and I had not been down in the tunnels…darn it. But other people I worked with had. There were plenty of secondhand and third-hand stories about experiences people had had. What is true and what is superstition probably hinges on what people wanted to believe when they were down there. But here are some of the enduring stories:
One myth is that the tunnels connected to Oregon State Penitentiary, which is about ¼ mile south of the hospital. Legend says that dangerous patients were transported between the hospital and the state pen without anybody knowing. But, as good of a story as it seems, there were no tunnels, regardless of how close the two institutions are.
Another myth says that the tunnels connected to the Capitol Building in Salem. This seems even more far-fetched, as the Capitol is 1.2 miles west of the hospital. Not impossible, just not very likely. I can’t imagine the governor would want to hop on over and visit the asylum in secret. But, according to Diane L. Goeres-Gardner, the story goes that this alleged tunnel was built either during WWI or WWII and would allow Oregon’s power structure to escape if the state were ever attacked.
Yet another myth claims that the tunnels were used as the site of unethical practices and experiments on patients. Again, that’s not outside the realm of possibility, but why hide these practices in the tunnels when they were openly and proudly conducting dangerous experiments and inhumane surgeries above ground in the Dome Building? They had no reason to hide what they were doing – they were bragging about their “successes”! So this myth is another I simply don’t believe.
However, and maybe similarly, there was something that was referred to as “tunnel therapy.” This was when patients would allegedly go down into the tunnels and, ummm, “get down,” if you know what I mean. In 1957, a hospital physician, Dr. William W. Thompson, was quoted as saying the following:
“At Salem we are concerned, from the lowest person on staff to the highest, about ‘tunnel therapy.’ That is, in the service tunnel of the hospital, patients are making emotional relationships to other patients of the opposite sex. At times employees discovered intimate relations between patients in the tunnel, which are embarrassing to all concerned.
“This problem has two aspects. A public administrative one, in which the hospital might be justified in stopping all patients from having ground privileges because of the abuse of a few, denying patients access to the tunnel, and various other restrictive measures.
“On the other hand, it may well be that, since the hospital functions to allow a person to make emotional relationships with people, that such activity going on in the tunnel is actually helpful to the patients involved and is actually a part of their motivation to becoming well and leaving the hospital.
We have known patients who, after their discharge from the hospital, have married other ex-patients, probably on the basis of their increased ability to relate to people. The hazard, of course, is pregnancy, and I understand that it does occur occasionally” (Goeres-Gardner 231). Of course, this became headline news once word got out. An investigation looked into potential pregnancies at the hospital and found that, although 17 patients had given birth at the hospital in the previous five years, none seemed to have gotten pregnant at the hospital. Superintendent Dean Brooks even took members of the press down to the tunnels, pointed at the cement floor, and said, “There. Do you imagine anyone wants to make love here?” I dunno, man…if they’re desperate enough, anywhere will do.
The most enduring stories of the tunnels, however, suggest that they are haunted. Staff members have claimed to hear keys jingling or wailing when no one else is around. They’ve heard heavy footsteps coming closer to them but no one is there. Some people have claimed to see bloodstains on the wall, almost as evidence of the torture that allegedly happened there. Doors have been said to close on their own. Some people experience “cold spots” in certain areas of the tunnels. Shadows linger in corners and doorways only to vanish inexplicably.
Now, admittedly, I’m a skeptic. I think there are plenty of more logical explanations. The lighting was generally inconsistent, there was no heating, and sounds bouncing off the tunnel walls could have come from anywhere. But, perhaps most saliently, is the general spookiness of being underground in a very old asylum where terrible things did happen. The psychological games that someone might play while down in the tunnels would creep out pretty much anyone. But – I’ll bite. If you have been down in the tunnels under OSH or know someone who has, I’d love to hear more stories. Pretty much anyone from the Salem area has a story they heard from a friend of a friend of a friend who went in the tunnels back in the 60s. But I’m curious what other stories are out there. Send me a message or an email!
Just to deviate for a moment from the hospital tunnels, I think it’s also important to note that Salem has a vast underground web of other tunnels that criss-cross through the downtown area. Salem has a rich, although also terribly racist, history that pushed many residents underground. I didn’t spend too much time looking at information about these other tunnels, so if you’re interested, I encourage you to look up the work of John Ritter, who was a longtime Salem resident. He was an historian who helped rediscover many of the tunnels in downtown Salem and who gave tours of them. Sadly, Ritter passed away in 2021, taking most of his knowledge about the underground system of Salem with him. He and his partner Rebecca Courtney, who worked at the Reed Opera House, found a treasure trove of history under the streets of Salem. They found a firing range, which definitely doesn’t seem safe; a swimming pool; a discotheque; and Chinese opium dens and bordellos. Ritter explained that, due to severe discrimination, Chinese residents of Salem were unable to meet safely in public above ground – so they went underground instead. Ritter found a brass opium pipe and empty opium syrup bottle as evidence of former shenanigans.
People from the Salem area know, but others who are not local, may not know that this area used to have the largest presence of the KKK west of the Mississippi. That’s not a part of our history that we’re proud of. Ritter discovered areas of the tunnels below historic buildings where members of the KKK used to gather for meetings. Clearly, the tunnels below Salem – both under the hospital and downtown – had dark and nefarious histories.
The final story starts near the beginning, when Oregon State Insane Asylum was newly opened. You may remember from episode one that when the asylum initially opened, patients who died there were buried in a hospital cemetery across the street. For this section, I’m going to borrow heavily from the book Inside Oregon State Hospital by Diane L. Goeres-Gardner. She wrote that in 1910, Superintendent Steiner had a crematorium installed to dispose of infectious waste products, and three years later, a crematory was constructed. Legislation at that time directed authorities at the asylum to exhume and cremate any unclaimed bodies buried in the cemetery. By this time, patients had been buried in the cemetery for 30 years. “Between 1913 and 1914, the hospital exhumed 1,539 bodies from the Asylum Cemetery so buildings could be erected on the site.” The bodies were cremated and placed in “copper urns about the size of soup cans and warehoused in the basement of building 40. The cans appear to have been sealed by hand, and many look as if they were beaten and dented by trauma. Many have mineral corrosion leaking from the seam, creating a varied and intensely colored patina covering portions of the cans. The last hospital cremation took place in 1971 before the hospital contracted with local mortuaries to take care of patient remains.”
By 1976, over 5,132 cans were removed from the basement of building 40 and moved to underground storage areas. A former fishpond was renamed Memorial Circle and made into a columbarium, a vault for the cremains. Over the following 20 years, “water seeped into the columbarium, destroying many of the paper labels identifying the individuals in the canisters. For many canisters, the only identification is the numbers embedded on their lids.” Once this was discovered, the cremains were placed on shelves in the Cremains Room in building 75, near the crematorium where the bodies were originally incinerated. “At that time, the cremains were inventoried with the ultimate goal of trying to unit them with family members. After a wave of publicity reunited 500 canisters with family members, dented cans holding the unclaimed remains of 3,490 people remained.
“On November 1, 2004, Peter Courtney, a Democrat and president of the Oregon State Senate, was part of a tour group that included several other legislators and two Oregonian editors, Rick Attig and Doug Bates. They opened the locked storage room for the first time since 2000. An individual accompanying the tour labeled the room ‘The Room of Forgotten Souls.’ […]
“Dr. Marvin Fickle, who became superintendent on April 26, 2004, had this to say: ‘The story about the cremains is in large part a metaphor of what has happened here in terms of the mental health system…It is, of course, ironic that people, in essence, seem more concerned about the dead than the living.’
“In 2005, photographer David Maisel was allowed to enter the storage room housing the remains. His remarkable photographs were made into a book, Library of Dust. He recalled his first visit and a young OSP prisoner who was cleaning outside the room. The young man leaned into the room and whispered to Maisel, ‘The library of dust,” thus creating the title for his book. Maisel believed the copper canisters evoked the evidence of trauma and displayed the evolution our bodies go through when we die and the souls that once occupied them. […]
“In a further effort to publicize the cremains and reunite them with their families, the Oregon State Hospital posted on January 28, 2011, on the internet the names of approximately 3,500 persons. The names are listed alphabetically and include the date of birth and death. The first name on the list is Marie Abner, and the last is Mary Helen Zucher. […]
“Officials of the hospital were able to identify all but four of the canisters. Unfortunately, about 25% of the hospital’s list of had incorrect or misspelled names. […] By January 2012, family members had claimed more than 1,600 of the 5,118 urns. The discovery of the remains was one of the catalysts for the approval of a new state mental hospital.
“There is no doubt the discovery and publicity of the cremains accelerated the hospital’s efforts at renovation and rehabilitation. Coupled with the cremains discovery was an influential series of 15 editorials featured in the Portland Oregonian beginning on January 9, 2005, and ending on September 18, 2005. […] Two of the major writers [for these articles] were Rick Attig and Doug Bates,” who had been on the tour that discovered the cremains.
The 15 articles from the Oregonian offered deep insights into the current conditions of the hospital and exposed many of its critical issues. It also looked forward to possible solutions. There were photos of the hospital in its dilapidated state and stories of buckets catching rainfall through cracks in the ceiling. They showed statistics about how Oregon’s treatment of the mentally ill was 49th in the country, almost dead-last. The editorials helped change legislature and effect change in the hospital itself.
“By the end of the series, Oregon had successfully addressed many of the problems plaguing the mental health system…The legislature changed the law so insurers could no longer dictate unreasonable terms of care for the mentally ill. The Oregon legislature and funded 250 bed in community settings…But most of all, Oregon was now committed to erecting a modern hospital to house the criminally insane.
“Rick Attig and Doug Bates were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Reporting in 2006. They were cited for ‘clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in what the writer conceives to be the right direction.’[…]
“On September 3, 2008, Senate President Peter Courtney was a member of the group breaking ground for the new mental hospital to replace the decrepit buildings at OSH. Finally, after years of advocating for the mentally ill in Oregon, he was part of a new beginning.”
And that, my friends, concludes my story about Oregon State Hospital. There is so much more that I didn’t have time to share, so I encourage you to check out the book Inside Oregon State Hospital by Diane L. Goeres-Gardner. If you’re able to, go visit the OSH museum in Salem. It’s small but mighty, and they showcase different exhibits every few months. When I was there last, they were setting up an exhibit on patient veterans and the emergence of PTSD as a diagnosis. So very interesting stuff. If you haven’t seen it – or you haven’t seen it lately – go watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and see why Dr. Dean Brooks gave this story a chance by having it take place at OSH.
Thank you so much for listening and learning with me over these past six episodes! I am so thrilled to have people listening from all around the world! Special thanks this week to Ashley from Dallas and Leslie from Salem for recommending folks to the Facebook page!
I hope you all come back for the next series. I have the hospital picked out, but I’m going to keep it a surprise for a little while longer. But trust me, you’ll want to tune in for the history and treatments of this one because it is both fascinating and horrific what happened at this hospital. It makes me glad to live in modern times and also makes me curious what we have yet to learn because…there’s always more know.
So, as always, “do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” Until next time…
https://www.willametteheritage.org/haunted-salem/
