Northern State Hospital, Sedro-Woolley: History, Ghosts and Visiting

Northern State Hospital spreads across the valley floor just east of Sedro-Woolley, on the North Cascades Highway. Its Spanish Revival wards still stand among Olmsted-designed lawns, and its old dairy barns and cannery sit at the edge of open pasture.

Locals have called it the Northern State ghost town for years, and its reputation as one of Washington’s most haunted places has grown with every abandoned-building photo posted online. This guide sets out what really happened here, the ghost stories people tell, and how to visit the parts that are open, legally and respectfully.

History of Northern State Hospital

By the early 1900s Western State Hospital at Steilacoom was badly overcrowded, and public criticism pushed Washington to build a second institution in the north of the state. Construction began in 1909. The first patients arrived in 1911 or 1912, depending on the source, many of them transferred from Western State.

It was planned as a self-sustaining, therapeutic colony. The Olmsted Brothers, the firm founded by the designer of New York’s Central Park, laid out the grounds, roads and farm, and the architects Saunders and Lawton designed the buildings, in a Spanish Revival style. By 1914 the hospital held more than 1,000 acres, with a reservoir, lumber mill, quarry, steam plant, orchard, greenhouse, cannery, bakery and one of the best dairy herds in the state, all worked by patients as part of their treatment.

People were committed for conditions we would treat very differently today, including alcoholism and epilepsy, and some lived there for the rest of their lives. By the 1950s Northern State held around 2,200 to 2,700 patients, more than it was built for. Like other state hospitals of the era, it used treatments now seen as harsh, and ghost writers often list electroshock, insulin comas and lobotomies; we found no reliable count of how often each was used here.

Attitudes changed in the 1960s and 1970s, and the state moved patients out of large institutions. The last patients left on August 16, 1973. Parts of the campus later housed a Job Corps center and drug treatment programs. The site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010, and the Port of Skagit now owns the main campus, which it is turning into a business center called SWIFT.

The hospital cemetery holds the remains of more than 1,500 people, and volunteer estimates run as high as 1,800. Burials took place from 1911 until a 1952 state law ended burials at institutions. About a quarter of the dead were never claimed by their families. Their markers carry only initials and patient numbers, many sank into the wet ground, and volunteers have spent years uncovering stones and matching numbers to names.

Ghost stories of Northern State

The nurse and the wheelchair

The story repeated most often is of a nurse in an old-fashioned uniform pushing a patient in a wheelchair along the paths, who disappears when approached. It appears in TV round-ups of Washington’s haunted places, though no one has put a name or date to it.

Shadows, screams and voices

Visitors describe shadow figures at the windows of the empty wards, screams and voices from inside, and crying. Online accounts add footsteps and dragging sounds from the old service tunnels, now sealed, a woman in a white gown at a third-floor window and lights in buildings with no power.

Local ghost hunters who have tried to investigate admit the site is a poor place for it: there are hikers and drones by day, a highway nearby and the trails close at dusk. Most of these stories have no source beyond the person telling them.

The boy in the orchard

One legend tells of a young patient who wandered into the orchard and was never found, and of a small figure seen running between the trees. We found no record of a missing child, so treat it as folklore.

A word from local historians

Author Mary McGoffin, whose aunt was a patient and who interviewed nurses, doctors and families for her book Under the Red Roof, told KING 5 she does not want ghosts to be the hospital’s legacy. KING 5’s report asks visitors to look for signs of the lives that were lived here. The cemetery, above all, is a place to read names, not to hunt.

Where to look

• The dairy barns: where patients worked the farm; look for a drawing in the barn floor by an unknown artist.
• The wards: seen from the trails and the historic driving route; stay outside the fences.
• The cannery and milking shed: along the loop trail.
• The cemetery: just off the campus, with numbered markers and a memorial plaque.

Visiting Northern State Recreation Area

From Burlington, drive about seven miles east on State Route 20, turn north on Helmick Road, and after about a third of a mile turn left into the Northern State Recreation Area parking lot. There is no entry fee listed. Phone signal and map apps can be unreliable, so save directions before you go.

Skagit County Parks manages the trails, which make an easy five-mile loop through pastures and forest lanes past barns, the milking shed and the cannery. Dogs are welcome on a leash. A newer historic driving and walking route passes the old wards.

The occupied buildings on the main campus are off-limits, and many of the empty ones are fenced and unsafe. Trespassing is not just illegal; it puts the site’s future at risk. Visit in daylight, keep to the trails and leave the cemetery exactly as you found it.

• Visiting Recreation area trails open in daylight; occupied and fenced buildings are off-limits
• Ghost hunting No: the trails close at dusk and the buildings are off-limits

Tips for your visit

• Go in fall for the colors and quieter trails.
• Photograph the cemetery markers rather than making rubbings; the stones are fragile.
• Read Mary McGoffin’s Under the Red Roof before you go.
• Pair the trip with the Mount Baker Theatre in Bellingham.
• Never enter fenced or occupied buildings.

More haunted places nearby

• Mount Baker Theatre and haunted Washington: Bellingham’s haunted theater and the rest of our Washington guide
• Haunted places in Seattle: Kells, Pike Place Market and the Underground
• Rosario Resort, Orcas Island: a haunted mansion resort a ferry ride away
• Haunted places in Washington

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the official website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as staff, visitors and investigators tell them, and we say where records contradict a story.

• KING 5: Northern State Hospital history and trails
• Washington Trails Association: Northern State Ghost Town
• The Cultural Landscape Foundation: Northern State Hospital
• Asylum Projects: Northern State Hospital
• Atlas Obscura: The Northern State mental hospital cemetery
• Wikipedia: Northern State Hospital
• Ghostly Activities: The dark history of Northern State Hospital
• Cox Media (WFTV/KIRO): Washington state hauntings