The View from a Drawbridge

As strange as it may sound, as I passed through the gates of what was once Northern State Hospital (NSH) in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, I was feeling a little nervous. I half expected to be locked up there, never to be let out again. Maybe I was picking up on the residual feelings of the thousands of people who took this journey for much more tragic reasons from 1909 to 1973.

During that period, Northern State Hospital was the largest mental health hospital in the state of Washington. It was one of those sprawling asylums that you’ve heard horror stories about, in terms of overcrowding. And it’s true, many of the patients, who were then called inmates, never left. I could easily have been one of those people.

That’s why I chose to visit. My therapist had told me about this place during one of my many rants about how misunderstood I am due to my autism. We were discussing the stigma one takes on with that diagnosis, and how that stigma came about.

Not so long ago, when very little was known about those of us on the spectrum. We were all lumped in with schizophrenics. In the early days, that could very well mean institutionalization. That made for some very strange psychiatric bedfellows. It shows just how misunderstood we are. They had to put us somewhere on the mental health map, so why not there?

I’d like to say that society has made great strides in understanding the spectrum, but we have so far to go that it sometimes leaves me in despair. Autistic people are expected to conform to a neurotypical world, with mixed results, to this very day. We are still considered weird. We’re still bullied in school. We are still not accommodated in the workplace to the extent that less than 40 percent of us are able to hold full time jobs. Thanks in part to Hollywood, we are still thought of as emotionless robots, when in fact, if anything, we feel more deeply and strongly than those of you who are considered “normal”. We just don’t show it in a neurotypical way.

My therapist mentioned NSH, I think, as a way to illustrate just how bad things used to be for people on the spectrum. Change is slow and difficult. It’s like attempting to turn the Titanic in order to avoid the iceberg. It’s all but impossible to avoid drifting in the wrong direction. And that drift is what rankles me.

For the most part, we are no longer institutionalized. But that doesn’t mean autistics are accepted, understood, or accommodated. It doesn’t mean that we are embraced by society. I doubt I’ll see that happen anytime in my lifetime. Maybe, 150 years from now, we’ll reach those goals, if only we’d stop taking two societal steps backward with such annoying frequency. But change is possible. It’s something to hope for, when I’ve got the energy to feel hopeful.

Meanwhile, at the very least, I can thank my lucky stars that I was never locked up. I have that to hold onto. And standing there, on the grounds of NSH, I realized that that was quite a lot.

Let me begin sharing my visit with you by saying that I quickly realized that I had nothing to fear. While many of the buildings remain, the institution, in all its complexity, with all its horrors and genuinely good intentions, is a thing of the past. Now the property is owned by the Port of Skagit, and some of the buildings house the Cascade Job Corps and a drug treatment facility. The rest of the buildings have been razed or are abandoned and neglected.

This has always been a place of good and evil, light and dark, beauty and ugliness. If you talk to the residents of Sedro-Woolley who are old enough to remember NSH, you will probably hear a great deal of nostalgia in their voices. It was, after all, the primary employer in the county during its entire existence.

They might tell you that, yes, they themselves had held patients down during electroshock therapy, but they can justify their actions by explaining that that was considered cutting-edge treatment at the time. And a few of the patients, anyway, seemed to be helped by it, just as a few were helped by getting lobotomies. They will tell you that the patients felt like family, even as they tell funny stories about having to track down runaways. They’ll remind you that the patients had a newsletter, and participated in dances and classes and sporting events, and celebrated birthdays and holidays and many other things that really do sound like quite a bit of fun, and then they’ll mention in passing that, as children, the place scared them because they could hear the screams and the crying.

To tell the story of NSH, in all its complexity, will take more than one blog post, dear reader. Since it’s a subject that fascinates me, rest assured that those posts will be forthcoming. But for now, I hope you understand why I felt so nervous when I passed the gatehouse and entered this campus. For me, this place is much more than a curiosity that has found its way onto the National Register of Historic Places.

As NSH unfolded itself to me during my hours of wandering, the nervousness was replaced by a complex stew of emotions. I felt awe and anger and admiration and horror by turns. And all of that was coated with a thick layer of sadness.

But when I arrived, my first impression was that the grounds and buildings were absolutely beautiful. In fact, much of the land surrounding the main cluster of buildings is now part of the Northern State Recreation area. It could have been a gorgeous university campus or a resort if history had veered off in another direction. It would be a lovely place for a picnic, weather permitting. I half expected to see deer scattered across the lawn, calmly grazing.

The Olmstead brothers, the sons of Frederick Law Olmstead, the man who designed Central Park in New York City, were responsible for the landscape design of NSH. Perhaps the fact that their father spent the last 5 years of his life in an asylum on the east coast (due to his dementia) and had died there only 5 years previously, caused them to take even greater care with the landscape design.

NSH was to be an open campus with multiple buildings, not one of those giant, haunted-castle-like, sprawlingly horrific edifices on the east coast which most people think of when they hear the word asylum. There would be views of the mountains. There would be trees and streams. There would be many places for the less violent patients to enjoy the out-of-doors.

You’d think that the buildings, designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, would look rather strange in the midst of all that Pacific Northwest lush and damp beauty, but actually, they were the perfect choice. As I looked at them, I thought that they were so pretty that anyone would love to explore them.

Unless, of course, you were a patient being dragged in there anytime between 1909 and 1973.

I have so much to tell you, dear reader! But for now, to whet your appetite, I’ll leave you with this disturbing little list. During my research, I came across many descriptions of the patients who lived at NSH. Some of these were official diagnoses, even the most improbable sounding ones such as “not wanting to be touched.” Others were the way the doctors or nurses described these people in their notes. I’ve only just scratched the surface of my deep dig into NSH, but this list, on its own, will tell you much about the place itself, and the way we have viewed mental health in the past, and why it is still so stigmatized to this day.

As you read this list, think about how many of these labels could have been placed upon you at one time or another. And while you’re at it, appreciate and fight to preserve the rights that women have obtained since this hospital’s demise, because the vast majority of the inmates in this place were women placed there against their will. And many of them never left.

Also consider this. For much of NSH’ history, only 25 percent of the patients ever saw a psychiatrist. They managed to get that number up to 50 percent in the 1960’s. They seemed quite proud of that fact. I find that scary. If you got thrown in there for some random, sketchy reason, you may never have gotten the opportunity to prove them wrong. And the more desperate and angry you became, the crazier you’d have looked. What a nightmare.

The many reasons you could wind up at NSH included the following (in no particular order):

• Sunstroke.
• Huntington’s Chorea (which would mean you were strapped down in your bed).
• Mildly Neurotic.
• Criminally Insane.
• Epilepsy (which got you placed in the violent ward for some reason).
• Mental Retardation.
• Arthritis.
• Postpartum Depression/Psychosis.
• Misplaced Grandiose Ideation.
• Delusions.
• Fits of despair.
• The Chronic Harmless.
• Psychosis.
• Mental Deficiency.
• Deaf.
• Dementia.
• Drug addiction.
• Paranoia.
• Obsessed with food.
• Married, but never wanting contact with husband.
• Men returning from War.
• Melancholia.
• Immigrants who could not communicate well enough in English.
• Small breakdown after her husband left her.
• Troubled juveniles.
• Children with what was most likely ADD.
• Tourette’s Syndrome.
• Aggression.
• Depression.
• The Quiet Senile (who were often placed in the semi-violent wards).
• Elderly.
• Post-menopausal women (sent there by their husbands).
• Alcoholism.
• Exposure.
• Financial problems.
• Love affairs.
• Morphine.
• Religion.
• Syphilis.
• Worry.
• Committed violent crime.
• Unknown.

There is a possibility that some of the following diagnoses may actually be describing patients that were on the autism spectrum:

• Schizophrenia.
• Retardation after being born “normal”.
• Mutism.
• Acting out anger.
• Not wanting to be touched.
• Temper Outbursts.
• Hereditary mental issues.

But by far the most disturbing story I came across, Dear Reader, was that of a 15-year-old girl who was raped, became pregnant, and was forced to marry the rapist. The husband then gave her syphilis and her mind deteriorated. He had her committed with the diagnosis of psychosis with mental deficiency. She died of tuberculosis at NSH when she was 33 years old. When her body wasn’t claimed, she was cremated. The location of her ashes has been lost to time.

Stay tuned, Dear Readers. The things I’ll be telling you will curl your toes. You can find my next blog post on the subject here. May history never repeat itself.

Sources for all my NSH posts:

• Documentary: Northern State Hospital and the quest for answers
• Ghost Hunters S03E13 – Northern State Hospital & Underground Tunnels
• Northern State Hospital Galleries
• Wikipedia-Northern State Hospital
• Sedro-Woolley Museum, where you can also get: 1) Northern State Hospital Guidebook by A. Muia, 2)Northern State Hospital Calendar, 2025, 3) An Era of Chage: Memories of Northern State Hospital by Ardella Harris Douglas
• The lost patients of Washington’s abandoned psychiatric Hospital, by Sydney Brownstone, Seattle Times
• This creepy Asylum in Washington is Still Standing and Still Disturbing by Nikki Cleveland
• Northern State Ghost Town- Washington Trails Association
• www.northernstatehospital.org
• Friends of Northern State Hospital Facebook Group
• Northern State Hospital Cemetery Facebook Page
• Find-a-Grave