The Crazy House Up on the Hill

7/24/2024

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
The cemetery is located off a dirt road on a wooded hillside. The grounds are overgrown, which seems to be the case even when the hospital was active. The cracked identical stones are marked only with an "M" or an "F", and a number. These numbers range through the hundreds to four full digits. These were the patients that died in the hospital that went unclaimed by their family.

Female Nurses at Dixmont c.early 1900s

Dixmont State Hospital, was founded in 1848 and began as the Insane Department of the Western Pennsylvania Hospital in Pittsburgh.

Dorothea Dix an activist, and known as the "voice of the mad" secured the funds for the hospital and personally selected the site where the hospital would move to. The land, 7 miles outside of Pittsburgh was purchased in 1858, and groundbreaking took place on July 19, 1859 with the laying of the cornerstone for Reed Hall. Completed in 1862 the asylum was located on a wooded bluff overlooking the Ohio River, and spread over a 407 acre campus.

The Department of the Insane in the Western Pennsylvania Hospital of Pittsburgh was built to be a self-sufficient institution, to care for those suffering from mental illness and diseases of the brain. It had its own farmlands which included livestock, a post office and a station on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Besides the hospital staff, butchers, barbers, dentists and a private security force were employed there.

Male nurses at Dixmont c.1880-1890s

It opened with 113 patients, but soon inmates from almshouses and jails were shipped to the asylum.

It was renamed the Western Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane at Dixmont to honor the memory of Dorothea Dix (1802-1887), who not only advocated for the mentally ill, but in 1861 was appointed superintendent of army nurses during the Civil War.

By 1900, it housed 1,200 patients twice as many as the facilities were meant to hold. The Dixmont Hospital was legally separated from the Western Pennsylvania Hospital in 1907, when it was individually incorporated as the Dixmont Hospital for the Insane.

The overcrowding became so severe that in 1911, a Pittsburgh newspaper announced the hospital was not accepting new patients. The story warned that upon arrival they would be placed on a train and shipped elsewhere.

Reservoir/water treatment plant, smokestack, and boiler building

It was primarily state appropriations that enabled the hospital to expand its facilities, and care for an increasing number of mentally ill persons over the first nine decades of its existence. The facility also suffered from financial issues, which began during the Great Depression.

In 1945, it was taken over by the Department of Public Welfare. From that date onward, it operated under the name Dixmont State Hospital until it closed in July 1984.

The Dixmont campus contained over 80 structures. Many of the unused and obsolete buildings were demolished in 1967. These included many of the buildings which had housed personnel and equipment that allowed the hospital to be self-sufficient. Behind the Hutchinson building was the Rosenzweig House, an old white house that originally was home to the hospital's superintendents, but was later used as the security office. Near the service entrance on Ohio River Boulevard was the boiler building, reservoir/water treatment building, coal storage building, laundry building, and the iconic smoke stack. A sewage treatment plant was located adjacent to Tom's Run and still remains today.

Dixmont State Hospital Cemetery memorial

What was left of the buildings were demolished in 2006 after being left derelict for over 20 years, however there is one part of the hospital that cannot be sold or repurposed, which is the hospital's cemetery.

There are over 1,300 graves including war veterans, who were interred there from 1863 to 1937. Even the dead pets belonging to superintendents found a spot in the graveyard, however unlike the patients their headstones are etched with a name. Most of the patients were buried in wicker coffins and pine boxes. The graves were dug in straight lines, but today, the lines aren't so straight. They have slowly been sliding just as the rest of hospital has been subject to the laws of gravity.

The burial records at Dixmont show the first burial occurred May 26, 1863, and the last on March 8, 1937. It's not clear where patients were buried between 1937 and the hospital’s closure in 1984. When notices for families to claim relatives' bodies went unanswered, as did those saying that patients were well and ready to be released, they were interred in this graveyard.

Joseph Steffy Tombstone (Source - FindaGrave)

Present day Joseph Steffy's headstone stands out as the only one with a name. He died June 1, 1881 at age 40. Steffy might have been a Civil War veteran, earning him the honor of a marker. The cemetery could contain two Civil War graves belonging to Confederate soldiers who were brought north on prison trains bound for Elmira, N.Y., and off-loaded in Pittsburgh because of illness. It's unknown if their families ever knew what happened to them.

Another who is interred at Dixmont is Minnie Adams, whose tombstone only bears the numbers "948". Her sad story is more well known due to the circumstances that brought her to Dixmont.

She was born in 1891, one of several children in an impoverished household. Her parents were illiterate, and her mother died when Minnie was six years old from a strange fever. The children were not sent to school and instead worked on the family farm. When she was nine years old she lived with grandmother, father and four brothers. In 1901 she lost a younger brother, and the following years her grandmother died, leaving her the only female in the household.

Minnie Adams is brought to Dixmont c.1912

Minnie's story came to the public's attention in 1912 when the local newspapers wrote stories about the "Wild Girl of Brush Valley Township". She was seen by the neighbors in the area wandering in the woods barely dressed.

Authorities came to her home and found her inside a room with the door nailed shut. Her father said she had cut off her hair with a butcher knife, and that he locked her away because he was afraid of her. Minnie was also described as mute since she would not speak to anyone. She was taken to Dixmont and died on April 7, 1918 from tuberculosis when she was 27 years old. Her father had died the previous year.

Minnie's death coincided with an influx of soldiers returning from World War I with what called shell shock. The already overcrowded hospital had to line the hallways with beds in order to accommodate all the patients. Unlike her parents and her siblings who were buried in Brush Valley Lutheran Cemetery, Minnie was relegated to a Dixmont grave with only a number as a memorial.

Not only the patients found their last resting place at Dixmont, but the staff as well. In 1907, Nurse Mary Barley, 25, was struck and instantly killed by an express train at the Dixmont station. She was originally from Morganton, North Carolina but was not taken home for burial.

The death of Samuel Wallace at Dixmont c.1896

Death also visited the patients at Dixmont not through disease or maltreatment, but through the hands of other inmates.

In 1896, Henry Hinebaugh and Samuel Wallace were considered "harmless patients" and allowed to share a room. On the night of August 29, Hinebaugh took a zinc basin and crushed Wallace's skull while he slept. He had been sent to Dixmont in 1895, however Hinebaugh was no stranger to violence. In 1878, he attacked John Cameron by hitting him on the head with a stone. He was arrested and charged with assault and battery and sentenced to one month in jail. It's unknown what eventually landed him in Dixmont, but most probably it was his propensity for violence.

Wallace's murder triggered discourse over the overcrowded conditions at Dixmont, which had put both men together in one room.

There is no record of Wallace's burial at Dixmont, however Hinebaugh died the following year, age 47, and was buried in the hospital cemetery.

Jonathan Jamison a Civil War veteran died in 1888 while an inmate at Dixmont

In 1867, Annie Ballou considered an incurable patient escaped from her 4th floor room after she used a hairpin to remove the wooden strip from the window. She opened the iron grating 10 inches, tied towels together and fastened one end to a waterpipe, with the intent of reaching the ground. She didn't calculate the distance and after forcing herself through the opening, fell to the ground below. She had no broken bones, but died from what was believed were internal injuries. If she was buried at Dixmont, it was not recorded.

There were others who came to the hospital, and their story is a mystery. Jonathan Jamison (Jemison) was born in 1841, in Ireland. He ended his days at Dixmont in 1888 at the age of 47, however in 1880 he was living at home with his wife and children. What happened in those years that brought Jamison to Dixmont? He served in the 63rd and 105th Pennsylvania Volunteers, and was wounded in battle on three occasions by the time he was honorably discharged in 1865. Perhaps it was his experiences during the war that eventually stole his sanity.

The Dixmont Hospital in later years when it was in ruins and vandalized

As of 2006, the hospital had been demolished, even though the Kirkbride building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The precarious nature of the hill that it rested on proved to be a challenge for developers who hoped to build a Walmart on the site.

Eventually it ended in an engineering disaster. The demolition and clearing of the parcel atop the hill caused a massive landslide in September 2006, which dumped 500,000 cubic yards of soil, rock and debris onto Route 65, closing it to traffic for some time. One year later, Walmart finally abandoned the plans to develop the site and it remains as an empty lot. As of 2012, the site was stabilized but developers confirmed that construction cannot take place there for several years.

From the beginning the hospital had a reputation for being haunted. The 1862 hospital was haunted by many entities, notably a male spirit who was said to guard the morgue area and frighten away intruders. During modern times, prior to its demolition when it was occasionally used as a film shoot there were instances when doors on the morgue drawers would slam shut by themselves. Doors that were still on their hinges would also slam shut even on windless days and nights. There was another building which had a warm, fetid-smelling breeze coming out of the front entrance of the structure.

Now that there is only a memory of the Dixmont Asylum, have these restless spirits been set free, or have they instead moved on to the cemetery, where they were unsuccessfully laid to rest?