public

Heavily Investigated

Walk the grounds at dusk and you might spot her — a little girl bouncing a red ball through the crumbling corridors, a man close behind, forever searching. They're the most-reported presences at Northern State, but they're far from alone. People speak of cold pockets of air that appear from nowhere, of being touched by hands that aren't there, of screams threading through the trees after dark. In the old nurses' dormitory, figures linger in windows. The tunnels beneath the campus — they say the moaning never fully stops.

Opened in 1912 to relieve overcrowding at Western State Hospital, Northern State was designed by the Olmsted Brothers as a humane, self-sustaining therapeutic colony — 1,100 acres of farmland, a dairy, a crematorium, and, eventually, a cemetery holding hundreds of patients buried under numbered markers. Lobotomies were performed on-site in the late 1940s; forced sterilizations were state law until 1942. It closed in 1973. Today it's a recreation area, a Job Corps campus, and a National Register historic site — which is one way to tidy up a century of suffering.