Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. Here's job, there's Jerry.
Speaker 1: Dave's not here, but we're thinking of him. So it's
Speaker 1: short stuff. Let's go.
Speaker 2: Can I start this with an anecdote?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, in the mid nineteen nineties, a young, scrappy, young
Speaker 2: student at Ohio University named Emily Sinobocan did her senior
Speaker 2: telecommunications film project on what was called at the time.
Speaker 2: I don't know what they call it at the time.
Speaker 2: Actually it had a lot of names over the years,
Speaker 2: but the Athens Lunatic Asylum or the Athens Hospital for
Speaker 2: the Insane. Oh wow, right there in Athens, Ohio, where
Speaker 2: my wife went to college. And she said, I tried
Speaker 2: to do a spooky sort of ghosty thing and it
Speaker 2: didn't turn out so great. But that was her senior project.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. I'd love to see that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would do.
Speaker 1: Actually, oh, you haven't.
Speaker 2: No, I don't know if she still has that stuff.
Speaker 2: I should ask.
Speaker 1: Well, she does, and she's willing to let me see it.
Speaker 2: I'd love to It's probably like beta tape or something
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, you said this hospital, the State hospital, had names,
Speaker 1: many names over the years. It started out as the
Speaker 1: Athens Lunatic Asylum when it was opened in eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: four and it ran all the way to nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 1: And when it opened, it was one of those giant, Gothic,
Speaker 1: amazing nineteenth century mental hospitals. And I didn't know this,
Speaker 1: but you know, the US is just populated with these
Speaker 1: and they're starting to tear them down more and more.
Speaker 1: But there was a guy who basically came up with
Speaker 1: the blueprint for these things. His name was doctor Thomas
Speaker 1: Story Kirkbride, and he basically said, hey, you know how
Speaker 1: we keep the mentally ill chained in basements in jails.
Speaker 1: Now we should not do that. We should do the opposite.
Speaker 1: We should build huge hospitals on big, rambling, beautiful grounds
Speaker 1: with lots of sunlight and open air, and we'll at
Speaker 1: the moral treatment of the insane. That's really what we
Speaker 1: should get behind. And he wrote a book called on
Speaker 1: the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane,
Speaker 1: And he literally wrote the book I and changed everything.
Speaker 1: So when you see those amazing old institutes or institutions,
Speaker 1: I should say, they all basically follow this pattern that
Speaker 1: doctor Thomas Kirkbride came up with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've talked about him on another episode for sure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 2: But Emily said that there were and I couldn't find
Speaker 2: pictures of this online. The buildings themselves, this campus is
Speaker 2: amazing looking, this beautiful Victorian buildings. But Emily said that
Speaker 2: there were ponds on the campus that were in the
Speaker 2: shape of playing card suits, and that's the one thing
Speaker 2: she remembers, and really I could Yeah, I couldn't find
Speaker 2: those anywhere, but I imagine she didn't imagine those.
Speaker 1: Sure, that's a weird thing to just suddenly make up
Speaker 1: or you know, get wrong.
Speaker 2: And now that I'm looking at the date, I mean
Speaker 2: this it might have been there, just had been closed
Speaker 2: when she did this. They closed in ninety three. But
Speaker 2: she called it the Ridges, as I remember now because
Speaker 2: that's what it's called now. Yeah, because Ohio University has
Speaker 2: bought that area and now it's part of the school.
Speaker 2: But none of that has to do with our story,
Speaker 2: which is a story of Margaret Shilling, who was a
Speaker 2: fifty three year old woman. At the time, not a
Speaker 2: lot was known about her. She obviously had some sort
Speaker 2: of mental illness that led her there sadly but apparently
Speaker 2: some people say she was about an hour north of there,
Speaker 2: had a husband and a son. But what we do
Speaker 2: know is that she was a good patient and well trusted,
Speaker 2: so much so that she was just sort of allowed
Speaker 2: to roam freely about the grounds and no one really
Speaker 2: worried about her too much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we should say that, like this is one of
Speaker 1: those stories that because little of her was known, but
Speaker 1: her story is so fantastic, lazy have felt totally liberated
Speaker 1: to basically add little details or assume little details or
Speaker 1: something like that. So there's a there's a definite like
Speaker 1: silhouette to this story is we'll see that does seem
Speaker 1: to like hold shape, but it's it's just the little
Speaker 1: details you have to kind of take with a grain
Speaker 1: of salt, essentially. Yeah, but yes, apparently the one thing,
Speaker 1: one of the things that I have seen in a
Speaker 1: lot of places that because she was free to roam
Speaker 1: the grounds, and I don't know if it was just her,
Speaker 1: she was among a special few or something. When she
Speaker 1: didn't show up for breakfast, that didn't raise any alarms. Literally,
Speaker 1: it wasn't until on December one, nineteen seventy eight, that
Speaker 1: she didn't show up for dinner later that evening that
Speaker 1: it literally raised the alarm because they now realized they
Speaker 1: had a patient missing.
Speaker 2: That's right, so they called a code round, which meant
Speaker 2: someone as missing. We need to go search this sprawling,
Speaker 2: enormous campus. I think I saw seven hundred thousand square
Speaker 2: feet in total, and I think that might be a
Speaker 2: good place for a cliffhangy break.
Speaker 1: Yes, how much does seven hundred thousand square feet translate
Speaker 1: to an acres?
Speaker 2: All right, So where we left off, there was a
Speaker 2: search being conducted for Margaret Shilling. They looked, they thought, everywhere,
Speaker 2: seemingly turned that place upside down. But one of the
Speaker 2: only places they didn't look is the place where she was,
Speaker 2: which was a fourth floor room on campus. Pretty frustrating
Speaker 2: they couldn't find her. My guess is that I think
Speaker 2: parts of this campus had been shut down over the
Speaker 2: years by this time, and it was in one of
Speaker 2: the buildings that was shut down, because everywhere online I
Speaker 2: saw she was in one of those two magnificent towers upfront.
Speaker 2: But there's no way it could have been that from
Speaker 2: the looks of the room and the windows.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, I didn't know how you knew that, but yes,
Speaker 1: you see everywhere. Everybody's like she was in the tower.
Speaker 1: She was in the tower. The tower was unused and
Speaker 1: it was you could only access it through essentially a
Speaker 1: hidden stairway. And that's why they didn't find her. But
Speaker 1: that's odd that they didn't find her if they searched everywhere.
Speaker 2: You know, well, they clearly didn't search everywhere.
Speaker 1: But they because they couldn't find her. Did you say
Speaker 1: the police were called in? Eventually, no, Okay, So the
Speaker 1: police were called. They start helping to there's like a genuine,
Speaker 1: like bona fide search for Margaret Shilling, and they finally
Speaker 1: just come up empty. And so the police are like,
Speaker 1: I think that you have an escape patient on your hands.
Speaker 1: Let's just call it that. So we can go back
Speaker 1: home because it's cold and over the next few weeks,
Speaker 1: starting from December and into January, Ohio winters can be
Speaker 1: pretty bad, but I get the impression that this was
Speaker 1: not one of the lighter ones, that it was pretty
Speaker 1: pretty rough and over this time, like Margaret Shilling was
Speaker 1: just missing. On January twelfth, nineteen seventy nine, about six
Speaker 1: weeks after she went missing, she was discovered. And I
Speaker 1: don't know how she was discovered if by accident, I
Speaker 1: saw somewhere that somebody noticed a smell and followed it
Speaker 1: and found her body. But however she was found, she
Speaker 1: was no longer alive. She was dead. She was found
Speaker 1: dead somewhere in a room on that campus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it was pretty distressing what comes next, because
Speaker 2: she was found unclosed with her clothes beside her, folded
Speaker 2: very neatly as if I guess she had given up
Speaker 2: or something. Who knows. No one can say for sure,
Speaker 2: but they ruled her death of heart failure, even though
Speaker 2: they're not exactly sure. You know, subfreezing temperatures, no food
Speaker 2: and water, so you know you're not going to survive
Speaker 2: for too long. She would be buried by her family.
Speaker 2: But what is really sort of key to this story
Speaker 2: is this stain on the floor of the outline of
Speaker 2: her body that could not be cleaned off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so if you have a body that decomposes over
Speaker 1: say six weeks, so let's say she died very quickly.
Speaker 1: And even though there were sub freezing temperatures, that room
Speaker 1: that she was found in had a lot of windows
Speaker 1: with that were exposed to bright sunlight. So clearly her
Speaker 1: body was exposed to enough heat from the sun that
Speaker 1: it allowed decomposition to take place, and under any circumstance
Speaker 1: that somebody's going to leave some residue behind them, gross
Speaker 1: as it is after six weeks. The thing is the
Speaker 1: thing that made Margaret Shillings legend grow very quickly in
Speaker 1: addition to her sad story, was that that that that
Speaker 1: remnant of her, that silhouette, that outline that she left
Speaker 1: it would not come clean despite the several efforts by
Speaker 1: the maintenance crew to remove it. And so if you
Speaker 1: have a woman who died mysteriously alone in a mental
Speaker 1: hospital who left a stain behind that won't come clean,
Speaker 1: her legend's going to grow pretty quickly.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And you know, you can look up this picture
Speaker 2: of the stain and it's it's a very clear picture
Speaker 2: of a human body, you know, like any part of
Speaker 2: her skin that made contact with that cement floor made
Speaker 2: an impression, like a literal impression, and it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's just one of those really really creepy things that's
Speaker 2: lived on and you know, as kind of a ghost
Speaker 2: story kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I mean, like this this was like if
Speaker 1: you a college you remember Chuck, like you just love
Speaker 1: stories like this. Some like remember the ghost that you
Speaker 1: saw in Athens, Georgia in the middle of the road,
Speaker 1: Like when you're in college, it's prime time for that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. There was literally a stain left by
Speaker 1: a woman who died mysteriously on campus there like right there.
Speaker 1: So I can't imagine what that must have done to
Speaker 1: the student body. Just freaked them out on the daily,
Speaker 1: I would guess, But the fact that it wouldn't come clean,
Speaker 1: it was just a mystery forever, Like clearly she had
Speaker 1: cursed this hospital. That was probably the biggest explanation for it.
Speaker 1: But in two thousand and seven, some Ohio University biochemists
Speaker 1: did a study of the stain to figure out exactly
Speaker 1: what was going on, and they came to some pretty
Speaker 1: pretty standard conclusions that still are just fascinating, But it
Speaker 1: seems to have been the attempts to clean it had
Speaker 1: the opposite effect. They actually locked it in place in
Speaker 1: that concrete floor. They used some sort of acid I
Speaker 1: think to clean this off, and it it locked in place.
Speaker 1: The adiposcire, which is known as gravewax, which we've talked
Speaker 1: about before, which comes from the breakdown of fatty acids.
Speaker 1: But this was special at a posts here in that
Speaker 1: the sodium ions in it, in this grave wax interacted
Speaker 1: with the concrete and were replaced by calcium ions from
Speaker 1: the concrete, so it was like unusual grave wax. And
Speaker 1: then when they added these acidic cleaners to clean it off,
Speaker 1: it actually locked it into the concrete, created a white
Speaker 1: silhouette outlined with a darker kind of smudgy, almost water
Speaker 1: color outline of the silhouette, and that, as far as
Speaker 1: we can tell, is what's still in that concrete today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what I'm curious about is if that room. Obviously
Speaker 2: that's closed down, like they use a lot of that
Speaker 2: campus for stuff today as the ridges, but there's no
Speaker 2: way like they let people in there.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: There was a group called Preservation Works that's dedicated to
Speaker 1: preserving Kirkbride hospitals, Kirkbride style hospitals, and they did a
Speaker 1: tour as recently as twenty eighteen and suggested like, hey,
Speaker 1: by keeping this locked away away from the public, it's
Speaker 1: all it's doing is making it seem creepier and weirder
Speaker 1: and scandalous, Like maybe you should come up with a
Speaker 1: respectful way to get the story across and allow the
Speaker 1: public to respectfully, you know, visit it.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
Speaker 1: I know that'd be a tough one to pull off,
Speaker 1: for sure.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure about that idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean what the alternative is just you know,
Speaker 1: college students breaking in and touching it and dying afterward.
Speaker 1: That's the legend.
Speaker 2: Oh, Emily hadn't heard of this one in particular, which
Speaker 2: I thought was interesting because she did say that there
Speaker 2: obviously were all kinds of you know, ghost stories and
Speaker 2: campus stories.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I mean, like an indelible mark left
Speaker 1: by a decomposed body from a woman who died mysteriously
Speaker 1: and a mental institution. It doesn't get It's almost ready made.
Speaker 1: It's almost like you made a mad libs for a
Speaker 1: ghost story lot, you know. Yeah, uh, you got anything else?
Speaker 2: I got nothing else?
Speaker 1: Well, rip Margaret Shilling. And I think since I said
Speaker 1: that the short stuff is.
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