Description: Dilapidated and falling into disuse in its twilight, the former Fairwater Hospital stood four stories tall and housed over two hundred rooms capable of keeping almost five hundred patients along with a fourth floor chapel. The front of the building showcased several balconies up to a balustrade roof. Over the years, weather and the elements took a severe toll on the stability of the structure, which was eventually largely boarded up and confined to private property. The only part of the grounds that exists is the Old Bradley House, the home of the hospital owner, now home to the local chamber of commerce.

Ghostly Manifestations: On June 13, 1964, Jonathan Charles Bartlett, an orderly for the local hospital in the quiet seaport town of Fairwater, California went on an insane motiveless rampage. Using a high-powered hunting rifle to kill twelve doctors, nurses and patents and fatally injure another ten within twenty-seven minutes before he was finally forced to the floor and unarmed. Aided by his usually quiet girlfriend, Patricia Ann Bradley, the daughter of the hospital administrator, Bartlett screamed out in court, “Got me a score of twelve. That’s one more than Starkweather!” (A reference to Charles Starkweather who in Late January 1958 killed eleven people as he fled Lincoln, Nebraska in his escape to Wyoming.) Found fully aware of his actions, Bartlett was later executed in the electric chair.

For almost thirty years, the natives of the quiet town have struggled to forget the ghastly and needless crime that ripped many of their loved ones from them. The hospital where the horrible events occurred, however, can’t forget and to this day the locals swear the old hospital is haunted by victims of the crime are still trying to flee their awful fate. Witnesses have seen lights wandering through the deserted hospital and grounds as well as heard the screams of people afraid of death. No one has the courage to put their fears to rest by letting them know they are already dead.

Until 1979 when the old place was finally closed down, hospital staff often reported on shadows that lurked through the place. Nurses would feel they were being followed after hours, but never saw anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there. Pitiful crying sometimes echoed up the stairway and one doctor wondered why he heard gunshots resonating through the place. A patient who woke up in the middle of the night saw a woman gasping for breath in a nearby bed. She called for a nurse, but she just revealed that there was no one in the next bed.

After the old hospital closed down, the building took on the more appropriate image of a haunted house as the once trimmed and meticulously tended trees grew wild and obscured the old building. From as far as five blocks away, as many as thirty-seven people reported watching bright lights vanishing and appearing in the windows in the shadow of the empty building. It looked as if more than a few people were wandering through the place with flashlights. Sheriff Walt Perry took several men to the location to chase off the would-be ghost-hunters as he had done so several times before, but this time as he arrived he failed to locate a single person in the place. He publicly announced that it was just traffic lights reflecting off the place. However, even at that time, vandals had already shattered most of the windows.

The Bradley House on the property has even experienced poltergeist phenomenon. Patricia Bradley had retired here after her incarceration and she often screamed out on the middle of the night that Johnny returned to visit her often. When he did, the whole place would shake and objects would fly around or crash to the floor. Her mother would reportedly charge through the house with the same rifle that Bartlett had used on his victims. During one poltergeist attack, she sensed a shadow behind her and blew out the wall to try and kill it. At one point, she even called local psychic Frank Bannister screaming at the top of her voice to come at once to the house to remove Johnny’s spirit.

For several months in 1996, a few witnesses reported seeing a fleeting black shape rushing from the property around the hospital, vanishing into town and then returning back into the vicinity of the Bradley House. Several people experienced fatal inexplicable heart attacks after seeing the grim specter. A local tabloid reported that Patricia had succeeded in bringing Johnny back from the dead, but then the deaths stopped and all appearances of the dark entity vanished. A few hours after snapping mentally and killing her own mother, Patricia wandered into the hospital basement and dropped from a heart attack of her own.

To this day, Fairwater Hospital still induces feelings of dread in all who visit the location. Local psychic and paranormal investigator Frank Bannister himself reports that he senses and detects the place memories left behind from the murders.

History: Fairwater was founded in 1850 on the heels of the 1849 Gold Rush, but after the gold petered off, it became an artist colony for those inspired by the oceanic view and a haven for the wealthy. The hospital was built in 1855 in the area on what was a prime piece of real estate to handle the medical needs of everyone in a hundred mile radius and its location contributed greatly to the prosperity of the town. The history of both town and hospital was uneventful until Bartlett’s bloody rampage in 1964. Sent to the electric hair, Johnny’s accomplice, Patricia Bradley was arrested as only an accessory after the fact and served twenty-seven years of her life sentence before she was finally granted a conditional release. After her death, the authorities uncovered a stack of Ouija boards in her house.

The newer updated hospital was built and completed in 1975, but the old hospital remained deserted until 2008. In 1999, representatives from the TV Series “Scariest Places on Earth” looked into the possibility of running a feature on its ghosts but were turned down by city councilmen deciding on its fate. Publicly, they claimed the decision to not feature the house was based on the dangerous floors in the old house. During the time it was empty, vandals set fire to part of the structure trying to force the ghosts to appear. The damage caused the third, fourth and part of the fifth floors to collapse which destroyed any plans for a renovation of the property. In 2008, the structure was purchased by the city from heirs of the Sinclair family and demolished, the ruins carted away over a three weeks. Relic hunters and souvenir hunters carted off much of anything of value during that time. The Fairwater Library and Public Park on the location was finished in 2012.

Identity of Ghosts: According to Bannister, he could no longer sense any presence of the ghosts of Bartlett or even Bradley in the hospital in 1998. However, he did sense the presence of numerous place memories re-enacting the same horrible events over and over in the place as well as a few harmless spirits of the deceased hospital staff as well as a few much older phantoms not connected to the murders such as a black man with an afro who collapsed in the place during the Seventies, a college student who died from an accidental drug overdose in the Fifties and a judge from the pioneer days who fell from the infection from a bullet wound. In 2012, psychic Dawn Rochner visited the location and described "confusion, anxiety and mixed levels of restlessness from numerous souls unaware of what had happened."

Source/Comments: The Frighteners (1996) - Hauntings based on the Danvers Mental Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts and the Goldfield Hotel in Goldfield, Nevada.