Location: Located between Portland and Seattle, Washington, the Washington Southwest Mental Hospital is an isolated and remote sanitarium at 1208 Rural Route 26 surrounded by extensive woodland located five miles east of Centralia off Old 603 Highway in Lewis County.

Description Of Place: Surrounded by a chain-link fence, the hospital is in a large clearing off Rural Route 26 surrounded by woodland and accessed by Rural Route 26, which has been virtually deserted since the Interstate was finished in the 1970s. Built around 1900, the structure is a five-story Mission-revival edifice with rooms for 375 patients, seven operating rooms, three shock therapy rooms, a physical fitness room and an on-site swimming pool and spa. The basement was out-fitted with jail cells when plans were made to turn the location into a prison, but money for renovations dwindled and the project was never finished. Since then, the location has deteriorated and fallen into neglect. Doors are blocked and sealed off from the inside, floors are strewn with relics and puddles of water, dust has caked on walls and windows, cabinets of old patients files are layered with thick dust and paint peels from the walls and ceilings. The structure continues to degrade as vandals trespass the property marking the exterior walls with graffiti.

Ghostly Manifestations: Abandoned hospitals and sanitariums are astounding places to visit. They are magnets for the curious and those fascinated by history. They are favorite destinations for urban explorers to visit and catch photos of history frozen in time. Deserted dusty bathtubs left abandoned, lonely dark hallways with crumbling light fixtures, forgotten patient histories collecting dust in old cabinets and even human remains and vials of dried human blood sitting waiting alone in darkened offices and storage rooms. Shattered windows stare down upon dusty floors strewn with trash, rusting pipes and fixtures crumbling under the hand of time and deteriorating equipment once witness to lives saved and lost rest in empty rooms. Visitors walk these rooms and wonder of those people who once walked these desolate halls, the names of hundreds lost to the ages. Even familiar objects like safety razors and fast food containers reveal someone once presided here. The location is speaking to us, and in we return we experience cold spots, disembodied voices, and possible ghosts roaming the halls. It sits on a great hill overlooking the land, and seems like a reigning fortress of gloom in its eerie, decaying state. The atmosphere is further darkened by unconfirmed rumors of dark and selfish activity that might have once happened here.

Though abandoned, the location is not entirely deserted. The grounds are owned by the county, and a security guard employed by the Centralia Police Department comes out here to deter vandals and trespassers. Outdated equipment from local hospitals are stored here, and technicians come here to strip old machines for parts. Occasional vandals are caught, as are the odd amateur ghost-hunters. There are reportedly many ghosts who are said to roam the premises of the hospital. One of these spirits is a spectral figure in black who not only wanders the grounds during the day or night but who also routinely patrols the road beyond the grounds and stares menacingly into lost cars as they drive by.

"It's not a popular local story." Leon Henderson has driven the route to the location twice a day for five days out of every week from nearby Galvin. Since 2007, he has been the on-site security guard watching over the places, reporting damages and turning away would-be paranormal researchers. He was a police officer straight out of high school with thirty years on the job, and instead of retiring, the white-haired grandfather decided to keep himself busy by making daily trips to the location to walk the grounds and keep aware of activity on the site, so he has a good idea of what's normal here and what's been disturbed.

"Sounds don't bother me." He responds. "I know every noise the "old lady" makes. I don't have the imagination to see ghosts around every corner, and I'm fully aware my movements down the hall in this place can cause things to fall over. There's enough shattered windows to blow doors close, and shadows don't bother me, but I sure as heck get annoyed by guests three to four times a month asking to wander the building looking for spooks."

What Leon doesn't talk about was the high turnover in security guards that tried looking over the hospital in the past and were scared away by voices, people who vanished in empty rooms, rattling noises from no where and enough odd stories "for Stephen King to produce twelve more novels."

"The place gets to you." Dan Knight worked as guard for the place from 2004 to 2007. "When I first started there, I thought what everyone else thinks, you know, "No ghosts, just over-active imaginations." but over time, those odd sounds start getting to you and you start imaging things or hoping you're just imaging things. Eventually, you start getting the feeling you're being watched, and then you start seeing people where people aren't, and you look back and no one is there. I can't tell you how many times I've sneaked up stairs trying to catch teenagers wandering the halls, but no one is ever up there, but now the footsteps are coming from where you just left!"

Dan was a former football player who wrecked his back just before he was about to go professional, and despite almost six and a half feet tall and three hundred pounds, he can move with a speed and stealth that has to be seen to be believed as he demonstrates how he takes stairs two at a time to sneak up on intruders. He isn't scared of the "old lady," but with Leon around as company, he doesn't mind re-walking his old patrol to describe experiences by himself and others.

"I'm not telling you no one ever saw anything..." He clarifies as Leon silently listens. "I'm telling you I never saw anything, but I did get... Oh, I imagine you'd call them "mirages," figments of the mind's eye... images of people in rooms that vanished when I turned my head, but, no, I never walked up on a headless figure or a wailing woman in white. I just got the sounds and noises, noises and sounds and the umpteen impressions of being watched back as I watched the place. That's what made me walk away from the place... I just never got over the feeling I that I wasn't alone."

Over the years, former Washington Southwest staff and employees and even a contractor and and a realty agent have confessed to seeing figures in the hospital and grounds. The descriptions are sort of varied. The apparition of a doctor wearing a tie is seen

looking out a corner window of an office on the top floor. A young woman in a nurse's uniform has been observed pacing the third floor hallways, and a phantom orderly is seen throughout, making his rounds. Some people have even seen the image of a former mental patient in what is described as the "cage room," a padded room on the top floor for containing patients who went violent. Distant crying noises also come from that room. The spirit of a young girl, who was alledgedly struck by a car nearby is also believed to haunt the location; her ghost has been heard giggling and often seen playing out front by the tattered ruins of the hospital's sign. However, the most oft seen presence is that of a cowering male figure in black. He stands on the grounds and stares up to the windows or appears menacingly at the top of stairways as if warning the living from advancing further.

"Did you tell them about Darlene?" Dan asked Leon.

Leon looked away as if he thought the story wasn't worth repeating.

In 2010, Darlene McCormick was a police officer in Centralia, and when Leon took a week off to attend his neice's wedding, she volunteered to fill in as security guard for the extra money, but apparently, she was not prepared for the remoteness or the atmosphere of the location. After her brief job there, she fumbled through her police duties for another month and then left the force entirely to focus on life as a housewife and mother for her military husband transferred from nearby Fort Mercer to Fort Marshall, South Carolina.

"The story I hear is that she was so completely rattled by something here, that she wasn't able to do her job anymore." Dan continues. "It was a real shame. Her father was a cop, her brothers were cops and her grandfather had been a police detective during Prohibition, but after losing her nerve, she couldn't keep on doing the job.

"Eventually, she confessed to her brother who told me what she had told him, that she was coming down the stairwell in the front of the building where the windows are when she caught a reflection of another person coming down behind her in the same reflection. Now, this is a very second-hand story here, so I can't confirm it, but I'm not going to deny it considering all the other stuff that happens here, but Jimmy told me that Becky described what looked like a young lady with long wavy red hair wearing a hospital gown following her down the stairs, and that when she turned around, the figure was gone. The odd part is that this figure has been seen up there since before the place shut down and is believed to have haunted the north wing where the female patients were kept."

Because of the odd sightings and reports here, a host of paranormal shows have visited here, including one group that has a photo of this elusive yet distant red-haired apparition standing in a room and staring out transfixed from the window. The original photo is long gone, but it has been reproduced and heavily edited several times to look even more menacingly.

"My favorite is the one with Lindsay Lohan photo-shopped into the window." Dan jokes, but even he is quick to turn serious about some of the darker activity here. In the Nurses Dormitory, poltergeist activity has been blamed for throwing things like sheets and bed pans across the room. While working in the hospital toward the end, many nurses complained of random cold spots throughout the structure, even in the middle of summer while others described a little girl with a bouncing red ball often seen and an adult male figure in black standing on the grounds then turning his head up to the witness. After shutting down, other people claimed to see the full bodied apparition of a nurse walk from one room into another room where she vanished. Rooms reportedly lit up without power on the building, doors on empty floors slammed shut and distant voices have been heard. The smell of food often wafts from the kitchen though no meals have been served since 1989 when the hospital was closed. Other odder reports included a floating head looking down from a third floor window, and the flicker and sounds of a TV from an empty day room.

In 2008, Becky Olsen, a field news reporter from Seattle's KING News station, decided to feature several local haunted locations from the area into a week-long Halloween expose, but being unfamiliar with the area, she called upon two paranormal enthusiasts, J.R. Williams and David Plumb, from the nearby University of Washington to find the locations. They covered the Seattle Central Community College, the Pike Place Market, the old Starvation Heights Hospital and the Harvard Exit Theater, but refused permission into Northern State Hospital, they finagled permission to shoot at Washington Southwest Mental Hospital with Plumb acting as the guide and Williams manning a camera.

"I think the state has done its own part to create the dark, secret or spooky part of Southwest Mental by saying it's off limits," Olsen reveals. "They say it's off limits, now everyone wants to go there.

"I find the place spooky and intimidating as hell, but then part of it could be the reason that it's all the way out here alone without any sounds of civilization. Of course, your imagination is going to go on overdrive here. When I came here, I just felt a very intense foreboding; you could feel there was a lot of pain there. You really felt the pain and confusion of the people who had been there."

During the filming here, Olsen adds she had the feeling she was being watched. Even Williams was uncomfortably finding himself looking over his shoulder as he filmed in the location.

"I once heard a rumor that a group of kids here were given a tour by a guy claiming to be the security guard." He remarks. "I don't know if its true, but the story is that he lured the kids to the top floor and ditched them there. As they were coming down, they ran into the real guard and was forced off the property. He wasn't the guard that led them upstairs, and yet, there was no one else on the grounds at the time.

During their tour, Olsen confessed she heard noises and strange sounds, reverberations she thought were footsteps. As Henderson is quick to point out, the old structure reverberates with the natural noises of a building in bad need of repairs. Rain warps the floors through broken windows, and the contracted floor boards creak and expand with the temperature. Breezes flowing through the building cause other noises, and then there are the local vagrants and transients that sneak in that he doesn't always catch. In 2009, a runaway named Roxanne Williams was discovered living in a basement room after five years.

"The Roxanne Williams case is actually interesting because her father had actually worked here at the hospital." Olsen recalls the story. "A group of professional roller skaters had become stranded here after their van stalled down the road, and they had camped here over night until Leon came in the following morning. During their stay here, they reported a lot of weird sounds they blamed on Roxanne, but they also reported the dark man who up till now was mostly just wandering the road. They said his apparition lurked around outside as if he was trying to get in. One of them, I think it was their driver, got the security cameras working and even tracked this figure wandering the grounds. What's interesting about this account is that it connects the phantom highwayman to the property for the first time by a group of people completely unaware of the stories of the hospital."

Since 2010, the location has been rented out to the owners of Custom Costumes, a costume warehouse in Seattle to use as a Halloween attraction from September 25 to November 5. The idea was to attract potential buyers or investors seeking to purchase the property. Nick-named "Blood Sanitarium," the first floor and part of the second floor location is taken over young adults in costume getting paid to terrify and horrify paying guests with loud noises, fake theatrics and "bone-chilling" effects.

"According to rumor," Dan adds. "You're always getting someone who claims to see something not really part of the show. A girl comes charging out of a closet claiming she was touched by something, an innocuous figure in a tie stands and watches from the top of the stairway or there's an extra mental patient in the second floor shock therapy room.

"I myself had an experience I'm not sure was real or not." He continues. "Last year when I was taking my teenage daughters through the place, we were passing Room 33, one of the shock therapy rooms, and it was set up like a mad scientist lab, the crazy scientist, the monster jumping off the slab, the psycho medical staff... It had the works. However, my attention for some reason was distracted to the old patient room across the hall. Sitting in a deserted rocking chair through the cracked door before the window was a small girl. I looked at her, she slowly looked up at me noticing her and then lights outside flashed on outside the window and she was gone. The rocking chair was suddenly empty.

"Did I see a ghost? I really don't know, but to this day, I still wonder and think about her..."

History: Washington Southwest Mental Hospital was built around 1900 and 1905, although some sources place construction starting as early as 1888. The structure was based on the Mission-revival architecture of Linda Vista Hospital in California, a style almost as popular as the Kirkbride architecture on the East Coast, the scenic idyllic countryside hoping to aid to the health of the patients here. It was built by Ernst Cavender who died during construction and left completion to Bert J. Hackle, who left the area afterward to vanish into obscurity. Owned by a council of physicians headed by Dr Walt Garrity, it was intended to be a tuberculosis hospital, but it gradually converted into a mental hospital by the 1930s.

From the Late 60s to its closing in 1989, the Chief of Staff here was Dr. Steven Williams, and it's during his tenure that the once promising location started to go down hill. Unlike the rest of the mental hospitals in the area, crowding never became a problems, but cleaning staff was reduced that it became harder and harder to keep the location maintained. There were also unconfirmed rumors of unprecedented experiments being conducted here. (Williams was a known admirer of "psychiatric maverick" Dr. Richard Vannacutt, and he believed Vannacutt's theories still had merit.) Rumors of LSD experiments were also believed happening here, but it wasn't the unsubstantiated rumors that closed the place down. New and more practical ways of treating mental illnesses were moving cases to other hospitals and convalescent homes, and the place lost funding in favor of other newer more modern hospitals. Williams, himself, disappeared himself, but his daughter, Roxanne, became a runaway, even living out of the hospital until she was discovered in 2009.

Since closing down, ownership of the building changed hands many times, once proposed to be converted into a prison. Once the property value dropped to thirty-percent below market value, it became county property and has been reputed to be used for deranged activities ranging from drug drops to demonic worship. The owners of Custom Costumes have a definite bid for the structure and grounds, but as yet, the sale has not yet been made and the hospital still remains within county property.

Identity Of Ghosts: Over the years, several apparitions have been described and reported here so there is much difficulty to identify the reported spirits roaming the structure. These include the ghost of an old woman has often been seen near the front entrance waving at would-be guests, a red-haired young "Lindsay Lohan" wanna-be prowling the stairwells of the second and third floors, a little girl dubbed "Mary" bouncing a ball near the nurse's station and third floor solarium, a young boy without eyes staring from a window, nurses in white, phantom orderly, a spectral doctor in an upstairs office (possibly Dr. Garrity) and the figure in black who Roxanne Williams believes to be the ghost of her father, now "devoid of compassion and angry for being taken from his work."

Source/Comments: Room 33/Fear Asylum (2009) - Activity based on Northern State Hospital in Sedro Woolly, Washington, Danvers State Mental Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts, Linda Vista Hospital in Los Angeles, California (an exterior location for the movie) and Pennhurst Mental Hospital near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Fort Marshall from "Army Wives" (2005-2014)