Ghost Hunting: The Hot Lake Sanitarium

Hot Lake was my single favorite part of the trip. Eric was the one who'd first told us about it. He'd glimpsed it one day while he was driving past with a van full of kids, and he'd always been keen to explore it. When we started putting the trip together, I noticed that the place was just a few miles away from Baker City, so we added it on to the trip.

We got up in the morning, gingerly checked out the motel-- we were still kinda sore from the hike--and headed north along Oregon-203 towards Medical Springs, where Eric recalled seeing the sanitarium. We passed Medical Springs without seeing any sign of the place, so we went into the town of Union to seek directions. Union was very nice; broad avenued and Victorian-ish and probably ironically named. It looked like the kind of place that mine management would build to put adequate distance between them and their workers.

The Union museum was closed for lunch, so we asked a couple on the sidewalk about the sanitarium. They directed us to Hot Lake, which is slightly north of Union. We headed out, following their directions, and within fifteen minutes we were disembarking to explore this beautiful red-brick ruin.

In the first third of the century, Hot Lake was a real destination-- "The Mayo Clinic of the West," it was dubbed by its main man, Dr. William T. Phy. Immersion in its hot springs was guaranteed to sooth everything from arthritis to hemmorhoids. Trains arrived twice daily from Portland. The place had its own dairy and vegetable operations, as well as a luxury hotel. It was quite an operation.

The site has passed through dozens of hands since its heyday, and has been dubiously reincarnated as a hotel and a country bar, but now it's fully abandoned.

Then. The complex included a hotel--that's the large building on the left. The hot spring is on the right.	Now. This is the hospital portion of the sanitarium.	A huge outbuilding of uncertain vintage to the south of the main hospital. This was posted conspicuously with NO TRESPASSING signs, so we didn't investigate it.
You could buy it if you wanted. Alas, I bet there isn't much you could salvage of the building. The roof is completely shot and it's rotted to bits inside. About the only thing that still looked solid was the brick facade.	The remains of the front balcony.	The centre of the back of the building. The main staircase is in that cylindrical projection.
We weren't the only ones checking out Hot Lake on that Sunday. Three women and a man were there ahead of us; we thought they might be the owners of the property or caretakers or something, so we eyed them warily. It turned out that the women were strippers and the guy was a photographer, and they were looking for a place to do a shoot. They didn't cop to this; they just snuck off into the hot spring bunker and peeled. Eric spied them at one point and radioed that he was watching a striptease. (we were carrying walkie-talkies, so we could call for help if we got in trouble. it was a big site.) "Sure, right, get real," I radioed back. Later, Jerry confirmed Eric's sighting. Ever since then, I've been regularly punching "hot lake sanitarium" nude into google. No hits, alas.
The strippers' car.	Someone brought this bigass roll of electrical wire out here for some reason we could not discern. I think it's a remnant of the last attempted redevelopment.	The ivy continues to thrive.
Collapsed buildings around the northwest (back) corner. I think these were kitchen and laundry and other support facilities.	The southernmost wing, viewed from the back.	The north side of the building, viewed from the hot spring facilities.
This concrete pad and reed-filled swimming pool are not original equipment. They were added in a recent redevelopment. The air here reeked of sulphur.	There was a small pumphouse on the corner of the pad. Jerry got this shot just before angering a swarm of wasps. He got away without being stung, luckily, but he sure was dancing for a second.	We didn't tell Eric this, but if that diving board gave way, he was walking home. I don't want to think about what he'd smell like if he'd gotten a brimstone baptism...
The vent is directly over the spring--we could see the heat wiggles above it. Victoria surmised that the board was placed there to serve as an altar. You'd figure this particular crack above hell would be an awesome place for some junior Satanist to petition his Dark Lord.	An old cold storage, for the pre-refrigeration santiarium. In the day, they had a complete dairy operation here, along with a bunch of vegetable gardens.
Of course, we weren't content to just take external shots...
Here's the main entrance. The unseen corners of this area were piled high with pamphlets for nearby tourist destinations. The last redeveloper (the country bar one, I think) did not clean up after himself.	Not sure if the reception desk was original equipment; it looks old enough, I guess.	The main staircase, looking up from the first floor.
If you didn't want to take the stairs, you could use the elevator.	The elevator hardware looks sturdy enough...	...don't you think?
There were a l-o-t of bathroom fixtures lying around this place. And some very new-looking tile, too.	Some kind of service room--a pantry or staff room, we think.	The Pink Room. This room's paint is unique to Hot Lake, although in other respects it's typical of the guest rooms in the place. Hot Lake could accomodate hundreds of patients in private rooms and wards.
One of those endless hallways that you only find in old schools and hospitals..	We always moved around cautiously, careful of the creaking floor. The footing was made all the more nerve-wracking by the largely intact gray carpet, which concealed potential man-traps.	"Five meters? That's right on top of us!"
The Green Room.	Note the sunlight. That ain't from a skylight, it's from a part of the roof that's disintegrated.	A cheery room for covalescing. I think the machine in the foreground is a dishwasher.
Victoria talks to the strippers. At this point, we thought they were just tourists like us.	A pleasant admonition in the third floor stairwell.	Holy crap, what the hell is that shadow? The sunlight's coming in from the window, so it can't be throwing it... and there's nothing between the flash and the floor, otherwise it'd be in the picture. Have we found our ghost? No. We haven't. It's one of the strippers. A print I have of the picture shows her features clearly.
Jerry snipes Victoria and I in the cupola. We had to radio each other for about ten minutes to set up this shot--Hot Lake gave me vertigo like mad.	This looks like one of the wing hallways on the second or third floor.	Some kind of nice airy get-together room -- perhaps Dr. Phy's office. I was surprised at how little graffiti there was in this place.
We found a few neat artifacts too.
Some kind of power supply--for the x-ray machine, maybe? We read that Hot Lake had one of those cool x-ray machines where you stand between a source and a flourescing screen so that doctor can view your innards in real time. Not bad, if you don't mind getting nuked by x-rays.	An incubator. You can't see it here, but there's a tiny, unrotted mattress inside of it.	An autoclave in a little room off the surgery theatre. We neglected to shoot the surgery theatre, so I'll have to tell you about it: it was a big room on the third floor with a cement floor that sloped to a drain and a four-person sealed observation room.
Pipes behind the surgery room. These might have carried gas. Mmm, ether.	Not sure what this is, but don't it make you pine for the days when science stuff came in hardwood boxes?	I wonder if this is a decompression chamber? Probably not.

We toured Hot Lake for three hours, then went into Union to have a look at their museum, which was excellent--it had an entire case full of instruments from Hot Lake, a number of interesting and professional cowboy and mining exhibits, some astounding mining-era costume displays, and tons and tons of documents. We stayed for an hour, and I wish I'd had a day, just to cherry-pick through their files for Hot Lake info.

Then, sadly, it was time to head for home. We wound up making one more stop, about a hundred miles out of Portland, and there we saw something I did not expect...

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