Hundreds of former psychiatric patients’ remains lie in unmarked graves in a muddy plot of land seventy miles north of Seattle.
Those unmarked graves reflect a legacy of neglect over more than a century for the vulnerable people committed to Northern State Hospital, Washington’s abandoned state psychiatric institution.
A multimedia package on the lost patients of Northern State Hospital provided a unique opportunity for The Seattle Times to engage with a specific group: relatives and descendants searching for information about loved ones who had been institutionalized there and were largely lost to history.
Investigative reporter Sydney Brownstone discovered the state had sealed off the hospital’s archival records, even to patients’ families. At her urging, the Washington Attorney General’s Office and state archives decided to release many of them, opening for public viewing documents older than 50 years past a patient’s death.
Brownstone and engagement reporter Taylor Blatchford worked with the state archives to obtain and digitize 53 years of registers containing information about patients who died at Northern State Hospital. They met with community groups, researchers and archivists to build relationships before the story published.
The multimedia package told the story of Northern State in an unprecedented way: as a window into how we got to where we are as a society, with few options to treat and house people with serious mental illnesses.
The package centered on Brownstone’s rich narrative and included a first-person backstory describing her cultural roots that led her to that cemetery and her connection with those whose histories have been erased. The package also included a 25-minute documentary, haunting photo galleries, maps, hand drawings and an interactive graphic of the graveyard.
Seventy people with a connection to the hospital reached out to us about the records through a callout, and dozens shared they had discovered new information about their ancestors in the death registers.
The story was also the basis for a six-episode podcast distributed nationally last month by NPR. A sold-out live event at Seattle’s Public LIbrary this week will feature the podcast and the reporting team.
Brownstone and the team were invited to describe the journey of this project at a history event at the institution on the 50th anniversary of its closing. She was interviewed on local radio stations and continued to connect with relatives of patients, writing new stories about their discoveries in the death logs. Elected representatives vowed to help identify people buried on the hospital’s grounds.
The online presentation and the project won Best of the West awards, and the database of newly released death records earned special recognition from the Washington Coalition for Open Government.
