A hallway in an old hospital is pictured. The end of the hallway is dark.

Ghosts stir town business

By Rachel Sun October 31, 2024

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Val Gregory said she was never a believer in ghost stories. However, that changed after she started giving tours at St. Ignatius Hospital in Colfax, Washington nine years ago.

“I was the biggest skeptic there was,” said Gregory, who runs the tours. “Now I’ve heard and seen things that I go, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ ”

She started working at St. Ignatius in 2015 after retiring from a job in fundraising at Washington State University. Gregory said she remembers getting a call from the city of Colfax asking if she could work there part-time.

The town desperately needed to bring in tourists, she said. She suggested selling tickets for ghost tours at the hospital.

A wheelchair sits in a room marked by ghost hunting shows for having “high levels” of ghost activity at St. Ignatius. (Credit: Rachel Sun / NWPB)

“We came in, and then within a month we had it up and running,” Gregory said. “We sold out every single ticket within eight hours for the entire month of October.’”

The hospital has since had more than 42,000 visitors, she said, including international guests from places like Nova Scotia, Finland and Germany. Potentially haunted hospitals, she said, are a rare scare for ghost-hunting aficionados.

“Lots of YouTubers, lots of TV shows, lots of podcasts,” she said. “People love hospitals. So, as soon as we opened up, the first group I called was the Travel Channel. They’ve sent three groups out. So ‘Ghost Adventures’ has been here, ‘Ghost Hunters’ has been here and ‘Paranormal Lockdown’ has been here.”

A view from a sun room at St. Ignatius hospital. (Credit: Rachel Sun / NWPB)

Gregory’s stories over the past nine years are numerous. Recently, she said, she thought she heard voices in what was once a kitchen.

“So, I went in and put my phone down and then went back to the gift shop. When I came back, I listened to it. It was a little kid talking to a woman,” she said.

Audio from Gregory’s recording. (Courtesy of Val Gregory) (Runtime 0:16)

The hospital also is equipped with motion-activated cameras, which Gregory said have been triggered when no one was there. On other occasions, she said she heard movement but the cameras wouldn’t come on.

“Lately, we’ve been hearing screams,” she said.

During the summer, Gregory said, she was sure she heard a young child yelling ‘help me” from the nursing building adjacent to the hospital.

She called the police, but they found nothing. The next day, she said, the roofers also heard a child yelling “help me.”

“I never told them the story,” she said.

One of the bedrooms at St. Ignatius Hospital marked by ghost hunting shows as having “high levels” of ghost activity. (Credit: Rachel Sun / NWPB)

Guests hoping for similarly spooky or macabre experiences have several options to choose from when exploring the four story building.

Packages are available for purchase to explore the hospital, located at 1009 S Mill St. in Colfax, range from two-hour day tours to private nighttime investigations for several hundred dollars.

Some areas of the building, worn by time and exposure, have been deemed unsafe to walk in. However, much of the old hospital remains accessible, including patient rooms, an operating room, a tuberculosis porch, a laboratory, a birth center and the emergency room.

Areas where higher levels of apparent ghost activity have been recorded by ghost hunters are marked with a piece of red paper outside the rooms.

Some include placards with the names of former residents who lived in the assisted care facility after the hospital was decommissioned.

Several of those former residents are people she saw in the community as a high school student, Gregory said.

The hospital’s most famous ghost, Rose, was a woman with schizophrenia, known to Gregory and other community members as “finger lady” because she talked to her finger.

Gregory said another resident, Donald, was a man with Tourette syndrome who was given the job of signing for mail deliveries. His room, located near the hospital entrance, is one of several marked with red paper.

Gregory said both Donald and Rose had attended Gregory’s high school volleyball and basketball games.

A monitor, used during ghost hunts at St. Ignatius Hospital, shows various rooms and hallways throughout the building. (Credit: Rachel Sun / NWPB)

“So, you know, when I talk about Donald, I knew Donald. I knew Rose,” she said. “They really were part of our community and an important part of our community.”

Inside the hospital, cracked, peeling paint, broken windows and scattered antique wheelchairs add to a sense of eeriness.

Gregory and the building’s owners, Austin and Laura Storm, added touches to help visitors imagine what the spaces might have looked like years ago.

Antique hospital beds have been made up and IV stands are set up next to them. Other rooms include old bits of mail, papers and newspaper clippings related to the hospital, or antique laboratory equipment and glass jars.

Visitors bring their own scary dolls to one room in St. Ignatius that was previously used to store toys when the building was used as an assisted care facility for people with developmental disabilities. (Credit: Rachel Sun / NWPB)

Outside of management by Gregory or the Storms, a subculture around the hospital has emerged that’s taken on a life of its own. St. Ignatius isn’t just a place people go to find ghosts. Guests sometimes bring their own eerie mementos.

Early on, Gregory said, she cleaned out one room that was filled with dolls and stuffed animals from the time when the hospital was a home for developmentally disabled people.

However, after she mentioned the room’s history on the hospital’s first TV appearance, “Paranormal Lockdown,” guests started bringing dolls to replace what had been there.

“People bring them. Those aren’t from us. They just show up. And the other day, there’s three more in there. I went in there last night and I go, ‘Those dolls were not here yesterday,’” she said.

An antique bed has been made, with an IV stand set next to it, to recreate what the hospital rooms at St. Ignatius would have looked like when the hospital was running. (Credit: Rachel Sun / NWPB)

When the tours started, Gregory said, the space was being rented from its previous owner. Volunteers with the Colfax Chamber of Commerce helped get paid tours running, and money went back to the city for storefront grants and building cleanups to entice new renters.

“Then we started an incubator program downtown,” she said. “In one year, from St. Ignatius’ money, we opened 17 new businesses in downtown Colfax.”

However, the real goal, Gregory said, was to find a buyer to save the historic building.

St. Ignatius, built by Mother Joseph Pariseau in 1893, served as the county’s main hospital for decades before it closed. Many area residents, including Gregory, were born there.

At the time it was built, its operating room was considered state of the art and its laboratory one of the best in the state, she said.

However, updated requirements eventually left the building out of compliance for hospital services, and the last patients were seen at St. Ignatius in 1968.

A hallway in St. Ignatius Hospital. (Credit: Rachel Sun / NWPB)

After being used as an assisted-care facility for people with developmental disabilities, the building was closed in 2000. Gregory said young people would sometimes break in, and a hole in the roof caused the floor to sag.

In 2015, the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation added it to its list of most endangered historic places.

The Storms bought the building in 2021 and have since added a roof to the main building, mainly funded by tours, and have plans for further structural improvements down the line.

The long-term plan for the space includes restoring it to be used as a historic event venue and hotel.

Local businesses support the haunted hospital that helped revitalize downtown, she said. Some have stickers in their windows from a campaign a few years ago in partnership with St. Ignatius that read, “Ghost towns happen when you don’t shop local.”