Opinion by Ric Attig of the Oregonian editorial board, April 11 2009 The walls of the decrepit state hospital come tumbling down The ghosts were gone when I walked through the J Building at the Oregon State Hospital for the last time Wednesday. The walls were stripped to the studs. The floors were bare. The […]
From Time Magazine, January 9 2009 Californian photographer David Maisel has spent years shooting the blighted landscapes around America’s copper mines. No surprise, then, that in 2005 he was immediately intrigued when he read a small news item describing the efforts of the Oregon State Hospital to move the cremated remains of thousands of psychiatric […]
Opinion by Paul Fattig, from the Medford Tribune, August 24, 2008 The news that the old Cuckoo’s Nest will be torn down this fall leaves me feeling a bit melancholy. It’s not the physical destruction of the 125-year-old main building of the Oregon State Hospital in Salem that I find depressing. Indeed, I applaud razing […]
From the Oregonian, August 17 2008 “Eva York died in a bathtub in 1896 at the Oregon Asylum for the Insane. After an inquest, which absolved the hospital staff of any blame, no one claimed her corpse, so she was buried in the asylum cemetery and forgotten. Eighteen years later Eva’s remains were exhumed, cremated, […]
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