The Lighter Side of Northern State Hospital?

While doing my research on Northern State Hospital (NSH), the asylum that was the largest mental health facility in the State of Washington until its closure in 1973, I kept coming across both positive and negative descriptions of the place. As someone who does not like dwelling in shades of grey, this made me uncomfortable at first. But I’m growing accustomed to it now that I’ve written about it a few times. (My first blog post on the subject can be found here.)

There’s no denying that NSH was a complex place. I wanted to 100% hate it. I expected to hate it, because for many it was no better than a prison and a warehouse for inconvenient and unwanted people, and it caused quite a bit of harm and inflicted trauma on people who were already traumatized. As an autistic person, if I had been born much earlier and on this side of the country, I may well have been thrown in there myself. I’m therefore struggling to avoid taking all of this personally.

But the further I dug into this topic, the more I realized that NSH was created with good intentions, at the very least. I mean, who builds such a behemoth simply to throw people in there and torture them, all at great expense and while donning the mask of a decent, responsible, cutting-edge medical facility? Who does that, and to what end? Yes, there has always been an unfortunate desire to hide our mentally ill away, but these institutions were a rather costly solution to that problem.

There is no doubt that the Sedro-Woolley community embraced NSH, because during most of its existence it was the largest employer in the entire county. If you didn’t work there yourself, you knew someone who did. To this day, area residents recall NSH with a great deal of fondness. You’ll never hear them discuss its dark side. To hear them tell it, the place was full of shining, happy people who occasionally acted up or ran away and had to be tracked down. I had to take their stories with a grain of salt. But there were other sources that showed evidence of light as well, so there has to be a modicum of truth to it, doesn’t there?

Just by reading issues of the NSH News, a weekly publication which was written by the residents and printed on site from 1931 to 1970, I could tell that they received quite a few visitors. But one has to wonder how much of the NSH News was a part of the institution’s attempt to whitewash itself. (Did the families of patients receive copies of this publication? I couldn’t determine this.)

For example, I’m sure that the administration of NSH would never have let these inmate reporters write about the staff member who was arrested and subsequently fired for performing acts of sodomy on one of the patients. Nor would they have talked about the chef who was let go because he refused to serve rotten food to the residents, including pork chops with “hair” growing on them. Or how about the attendant who beat a patient so badly that he subsequently died? That attendant was later acquitted because the only witnesses to him kicking the man and stomping on his head were other patients, who were, of course, “crazy” and therefore unreliable. The autopsy showed that the patient had broken ribs and a cracked skull, but after that trial, the cause of death was recorded as epilepsy.

And former employees are certainly not going to pass such awful stories down as fond memories, either. It’s human nature to want to avoid the appearance of complicity in propping up an institution capable of covering up such behavior. (There’s a reason that executioners get to wear masks, or the executed have to wear blindfolds.)

And yet, it would be unfair of me not to mention all the good things I kept reading about. So what follows is a list of positives. Surely some of those things took place. (Please, God, let some of them have taken place.) There was actually a building called the Hub that was a gathering place, and it did have a soda shop and plenty of room for things like dances.

But as you read this list, please keep this in the forefront of your mind: 1) Inmates worked 6 days a week, rain or shine, so they would have had limited time for fun and games. 2) The ones who didn’t work were in locked wards, and they certainly wouldn’t have been given access to things like croquet mallets. 3) How much entertainment would you be in the mood for when you were in a place that called straight jackets “corsets”, and subjected patients to electroshock therapy, chemically induced comas, lobotomies and hydrotherapy?

But perhaps the most damning bit of evidence is that when I went in search of images of the patients engaged in fun activities, the only thing I could find was the one image and the one video that you will see below. Nothing else. Not one single thing. No dances, no parties, no cakes, no races. Was this to protect the patient’s privacy? Apparently not, because I came across dozens of images of patients working. So, where are the plays, the jitterbug classes, the tugs-o-war? If they ever existed, they are lost to time.

So what follows is what may or may not have been the lighter side of NSH.

Some of the groups that reportedly stopped by to entertain them at one time or another:

The A Cappella Choir from Mt. Vernon High School
The “Bellingham Cooties” from the VFW (your guess is as good as mine as to what they did.)
The Skagit Valley Camera Club (They put on a slide show.)
The Sedro-Woolley Grade School Band
The Shell plant and the Gateway Café put on an exhibition softball game.
Boys from Future Farmers of America visited the farm.
Lummi Indians performed tribal songs and dances.
A High School Rock Band rocked out.
The American Bible Society did whatever it is that they do.
Residents from Sedro-Woolley brought the patients Christmas presents, and they always made sure that the 4^th of July parade passed through the campus as well.
Patients who had family or friends or children that still cared about them received visitors, and were sent mail and presents.
At various points in the institution’s history, they were given a peacock, a Hammond organ, and a piano.

And here is a list of some of the other positive events I read about which, in fairness, would have been worth the effort, as happy residents would probably have been docile residents:

Once a month, each ward celebrated Birthday Cake Day, to recognize all the birthdays that fell on that particular month.
They also held a Jewish service monthly, and a weekly Catholic confession.
Along with the coffee and snacks, there were movies and dances at the Hub.
All the wards got fresh flowers and plants that were supplied by their own greenhouse.
They had access to library books and jigsaw puzzles.
They formed a baseball team. (This one is definitely true, at least, as evidenced by the images below.)
At Easter, there were sacks of candy and Easter eggs, and they had a hat making contest.
Occasionally the ladies would put on a fashion show.
The patients enjoyed witnessing the spring sheep shearing.
There were checker tournaments.
In 1941 a speaker system was installed so that the inmates could hear music and news.
In 1955 they brought in a Victrola and records for use in Ward A.
In 1960, the women no longer had to wear the sack dresses that were made on site. They could wear their own clothing, and they had cosmetics and a beauty shop. At the same time, wards were no longer segregated by gender.
They knitted slippers from garden twine.
There was a donkey bullfight event.
They would have races of various types, including relay races.
The patients put on a best suntan competition at least once.
There was a tug o’ war, kitchen vs. laundry, but I could find no word as to which group won.
There were dance classes, and they’d then put on performances. There were also Jitterbug lessons and square dancing.
Once TV became common, each ward had a TV.
There were Halloween dances where everyone got to dress up in costumes.
The NSH variety show was a big hit.
There were short story and French classes.
They played bingo, shuffleboard, bowling, ring toss, pool, croquet, darts (wow!), and cards.
They put on plays, and they created a choir.
In the basement of the Hub, there was a store where you could buy candy, tobacco, fruit, and patient’s handicrafts. There was also a post office and soda shop down there. (This I’m fairly certain was true.)
Most of the buildings had courtyards or sun rooms or air courts where the patients could safely get fresh air, and while some wards were locked, others were open and the patients could come and go. (I saw the air courts with my own eyes.)
Some patients could go on walks and do calisthenics.

It was reported that there were even occasional outings for small groups. I have no idea how small the groups were or how often these outings occurred.

The rock club would go on rock hunting excursions.
The NSH orchestra went to the CCC camp to entertain the workers.
They had a berry picking competition.
Some patients got to visit Lookout Tower on Devil’s Mountain. (I could not locate this place. They may have meant Devil’s Tower or Devil’s Head Lookout Tower.)
(This one fascinates me. I wish I could learn more about it.) In 1938 a 92-year-old veteran/inmate traveled by train to the Civil War Reunion at Gettysburg.
In 1941, two male patients got to visit the Washington State Fair.
In 1963, some patients went to Seattle to visit Woodland Park Zoo, the Monorail, and the Space Needle just two years after it was built.

I have read more than one employee account that there was a real family feeling between staff and patients, and that the nurses really cared for the patients. I have to admit, though, that even if 25 percent of the above took place, it’s clear that some of the staff, at least, made an effort to improve the lives of the patients. That has to count for something.

In contrast, I’ve only read two patients accounts saying something similar with regard to a family feeling, and one followed that up by saying that things used to be much, much worse. Those patients had just gotten out, and I’m sure they’d have said anything to seem well adjusted to avoid going back in, so it’s hard to determine how sincere their statements may have been.

My next blog post on NSH will share the horrors that took place, and there were many. Sadly, these are more easily verifiable. They often show up in official NSH reports as well as in stories written and published by the press. Perhaps they, too, should be taken with a tiny grain of salt, because sensationalism sells. But the weight of the evidence toward the negative is much heavier than toward the positive. We have photos of the straight jackets and the bathtubs and the bars on the windows. We don’t have photos of the checker boards or the costumes or the shuffleboard discs.

The folklore surrounding NSH is full of contradictions. Maybe that’s why I am so fascinated by the place. Somewhere within those contradictions lies the truth, and that truth is the very definition of what it is to be human, warts and all.

Until we own both the light and the dark of humanity, we’ll never be able to move forward. And the last thing on earth we should do is go backward, if my next NSH post is what backward looks like.

Video Clips of the NSH Baseball team in action. The crowd doesn’t seem very animated…

Sources for all my NSH posts:

The View from a Drawbridge

The random musings of an autistic bridgetender with entirely too much time on her hands.