Rebuilding from beyond the grave

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

“I was the biggest skeptic there was,” Gregory said. “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 asking if she could work there part-time: The town desperately needed to bring in tourists.

“I said, ‘What are you doing with St. Ignatius?’ And they said, ‘Nothing. It’s gross.’ 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 delight 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.”

Gregory’s own 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. And when I came back I listened to it. It was a little kid talking to a woman,” she said.

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

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

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

“So, I text the police officer on duty and I said, ‘Can you come up here? I think there’s a kid in the nursing building.’ And we went through the whole thing. Nothing. Nobody,” she said. “The next night, the roofers were here. They’d been roofing at night because it was really hot during the summer. They called me and they said, ‘Val, somebody’s in the nursing building, and it’s a little kid and they yelled ‘Help me.’ … and I never told them the story.”

Guests hoping for similarly spooky or macabre experiences have several options to choose from for exploring the four-story building. Packages range from two-hour day tours to private nighttime investigations for several hundred dollars at stignatiuscolfax.com.

Some areas of the building, worn by time and exposure, have been deemed unsafe to walk in. But 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 are marked with red paper, and some include placards with the names of former residents from after the hospital was transitioned to an assisted care facility.

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 at the time as “finger lady” because she talked to her finger.

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 the red paper.

“They came to my volleyball and basketball games (when I was in high school). 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. Antique hospital beds have been made, and IV stands 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.

Outside of management by Gregory or owners Austin and Laura Storm, a subculture around the hospital has emerged that’s taken on a life, so to speak, 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.

“It was to the ceiling, scary dolls and stuffed animals, and nobody would go in there. And I’d go, ‘OK, I’m going in, and I’m just going to throw them away and clean them out.’ So I did,” Gregory said.

But after she mentioned the room’s history the first time the hospital was featured on a TV show, “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.

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.”

But 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. But St. Ignatius had long since fallen into disrepair.

In 1964, the hospital board decided to relocate, with the last services provided in 1968. 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, putting a pause on its deterioration with 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.

Today, Gregory works with the Storms, leading tours for a percentage of sales and running a gift shop in the hospital with merchandise from Colfax Mercantile, including commemorative St. Ignatius T-shirts.

Local businesses still 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.”

“St. Ignatius saved them; it’s time for them to save us,” she said as the hospital enters its next chapter. “It’s been a great partnership.”

Sun covers health care for Northwest Public Broadcasting, Lewiston Tribune and Moscow-Pullman Daily News. She can be reached at rachel.sun@wsu.edu.