A number circulating on haunted-tour websites claims that 54 people were sterilized at a facility in Kansas. That figure is often presented as the total for the location, but it is wrong. The site in question is the Topeka Insane Asylum, later known as Topeka State Hospital, a building constructed by the very patients who were confined inside it. Its 2.
8-acre cemetery holds 1,157 graves and 16 headstones, with people buried at their feet after being sterilized, restrained, and starved. This is not a ghost story version, but the documented version. The hospital opened in 1866, just seven years after Kansas became a state. The Wyandotte Constitution of 1859 required the state to support institutions for the insane, blind, deaf, and mute, so the legislature established the Kansas Insane Asylum in Osawatomie, partly as a reward for the town’s sacrifice during the Civil War.
Within ten years, it was so overcrowded that it could no longer accept new patients. Unlike many institutions in this series, no scandal forced the creation of Topeka’s asylum. No inspector exposed conditions, no reformer published a damning report, and no grand jury intervened. What forced it open was simple arithmetic: Osawatomie was full, and people kept coming.
On March 5, 1875, Governor Thomas Osborn signed a law appropriating $25,000 for a new insane asylum. The law specified that the site had to be within two miles of the Capitol building in Topeka. It also required at least 80 acres of land, which had to be obtained without any cost to the state. Kansas would pay for construction, but not for the land itself.
On June 2, 1875, three trustees from the Osawatomie asylum were appointed commissioners to find the land. George Wyman, Levi Woodard, and William H. Grimes agreed on an 80-acre tract owned by former Kansas Governor James M. Harvey.
The city of Topeka contributed $6,000 and Shawnee County contributed another $6,000. Harvey transferred the land and the state paid nothing for it. The law also dictated the design: a segregated or cottage plan, with a central hospital building surrounded by two-story structures holding 40 patients each. In total, there were to be enough buildings for 300 people.
No building other than the central one could cost more than $25,000. That number, 300, is important to remember. Some sources, including Wikipedia and the Kansas Historical Society, claim the hospital opened in 1872. That is impossible.
The law authorizing it was signed in 1875, bids were opened that July, and construction did not begin until 1877. Plans were drawn by J. G. Haskell of Lawrence, one of the architects of the Kansas State Capitol.
The same hand designed both the State House and the asylum required to sit within two miles of it. The design followed the Kirkbride Plan, developed by Philadelphia psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride, which held that natural light and fresh air could cure mental illness. Long wings allowed sunlight into each ward, while the exterior featured Queen Anne styling to make the building attractive. On June 1, 1879, the first building was completed and the first patient entered.
The hospital’s own biennial reports state that patients who were able to work performed necessary labor around the asylum during the day. Some worked on the farm, some sewed, and some helped construct new buildings. On land the state received for free, under a plan that limited the cost of every building, the residents themselves laid the bricks that held them in. Those bricks outlasted them all.
In 1901, the legislature renamed the Topeka Insane Asylum as Topeka State Hospital. To understand what happened inside, one must first understand how people got there. Until 1919, the only way in was through a court order. Admission required a judicial hearing on a person’s mental condition.
The first superintendent, Dr. B. D. Eastman, believed this was inhumane and told lawmakers that the insane were sick, not criminals.
He was right, and he lost. The policy remained in place for 40 years. When it finally changed, it was not for the patients’ sake. In 1919, the legislature exempted World War I veterans suffering from shell shock or psychological trauma from the insanity trial.
Kansas did not decide the process was degrading. It decided the process was degrading for soldiers. Eastman is considered the most humane figure in these records, yet he still revealed what the facility truly was. Asked about patients he was discharging to make room for newcomers, he said they were healthy enough to work, in institutional language meaning healthy enough to work elsewhere.
Release did not mean recovery. It was a tool for managing bed space. The ideology that replaced moral treatment was not imported from outside. It was taught at a fairground in this very city.
The Fitter Families competition began at the Kansas State Free Fair in Topeka before spreading to other states. Families were examined and scored on heredity as if they were livestock, and they received medals. A physician named Florence Sherbon organized the testing into three tiers: a short test for fairgoers, a longer test for examination centers, and an even more extensive test for families seeking inclusion in the permanent eugenic record. The state was already legislating on the same theory.
The 1903 Kansas marriage prohibition law made it a crime to marry anyone considered unfit, punishable by up to $1,000 in fines or three years in prison. Women over 45 were exempted on the grounds that they could no longer bear children. The pressure came not only from the public but from inside the institution itself. In 1922, eugenics expert Harry Laughlin published his correspondence with the heads of Kansas institutions, and a common complaint ran through all of them: they wanted the courts out of the process.
Dr. L. R. Sellers, who ran the Larned State Hospital, objected that a superintendent had to present his case before a jury drawn, in his words, from stable employees or loafers around the courthouse.
Men like Sellers did not want oversight. They wanted signatures inside the hospital. Little of the daily routine survives in records. What remains are a few physical details, and they are enough.
Patients were placed in hard wooden rocking chairs lined up along the halls and left there all day. Hydrotherapy meant high-pressure water jets, wrapping patients in ice-cold towels, and strapping them into bathtubs for hours or even days at a time. That was the treatment. Now consider that number from the 1875 law: 300.
That was the designated capacity. 40 patients per building. On June 1, 1879, the population was one. By 1900, the federal census recorded 1,036 men and 264 women, over 1,300 people, more than four times the capacity it was built for.
By then it employed staff across 33 occupations. It was no longer a hospital. It was a city behind a fence. The state knew.
In 1909, the Kansas legislature had to allocate money to counties to care for indigent, mentally unbalanced people who could not be admitted due to lack of space. The state was paying local governments to hold people for whom it had no room, an official acknowledgment of overcrowding. The number peaked in 1951 at 1,741 patients, 5. 8 times the designated capacity, 42 years after the state documented its own overflow.
Those extra people slept in corridors built to connect wards, in rooms meant for 40, even on top of the rocking chairs. Then came the decline. By June 1959, the residential population was 1,173, and the hospital’s own biennial report recorded a further drop to 1,100 the following year. The average adult population fell 12% in a single fiscal year.
That might sound like progress, but the cause tells a different story. Admissions rose 5% that same year. And in 1958, half of the psychiatric staff left the state, citing low pay and overwork. The mechanism of harm at Topeka State Hospital was not a chair or a machine.
It was a form. In 1913, the Kansas legislature passed the state’s first sterilization law: an act to prevent procreation of habitual criminals, imbeciles, epileptics, morons, and insane persons. It directed every institution in Kansas to examine all its residents against these categories. The law was not very effective.
Under the 1913 act, recommendations had to go to district court, with no provision for hearings or appeals. It was too unwieldy to use. The state’s own Board of Control clarified the matter in its 1916 report, calling the law ineffective due to its cost and legal complications. In 1917, the legislature removed the judicial process.
If you were a patient, you had not committed a crime. Even if you had, it no longer mattered, because the question was not what you had done but what you might pass on. You were examined without being told for what. A recommendation was written about you.
You were notified that a hearing would occur, but it was not held in a court and no judge presided. Three officials sat on it: the chief medical officer of your institution, the governing board of your institution, and the secretary of the state board of health. Two of the three were employees of the institution that held you. You were allowed to speak.
You could argue in your own defense. Then the board decided, and the board’s decision was final. There was no avenue of appeal. In 1923, the legislature amended the law again, adding a clause that reveals the entire matter in a few words: after the operation is performed, no member of the examining board, nor any person participating, shall be liable to any civil or criminal action.
The state wrote itself a shield of immunity. It then built a precedent. In 1928, one year after the U. S.
Supreme Court decided Buck v. Bell, the Kansas Supreme Court upheld the state’s law in State against Shaffer. Justice Russo Angelus Burch wrote that such reproduction could be prevented in the interest of the greater public good. The statistics become murky from here.
Harry Laughlin, the statistician of the American eugenics movement, recorded in 1922 that, at least early on, most sterilizations in Kansas were performed at Topeka State Hospital. One published account counts 516 operations at this hospital between 1917 and 1936, a figure that depends on a single secondary source. When the practice ended in 1961, the total across Kansas was about 3,032. The records contain no equipment, no manufacturer, no cost, no timeline, no surgeon’s logbook.
No document found identifies a single person sterilized at Topeka State Hospital by name. The state kept the law. The state did not keep track of the people. What ended this place was smaller than one might expect.
It was not a riot, an attack, or a court order. No photographer shamed Kansas the way Life magazine shamed other states. And it was not the sterilizations, which quietly ended in 1961 and were repealed in 1965, barely noticed. What ended Topeka State Hospital was two patients left off a list.
In 1988, the Health Care Financing Administration determined that state officials had omitted two patients during an inspection of the hospital. The state appealed and lost. Medicare and Medicaid supplied about 70% of the hospital’s budget, and roughly $420,000 per month in funding was cut off. Two names missing from a form.
There are individual stories buried in this record. In 1887, a man named Boston Corbett was committed here after being declared insane. Twenty-two years earlier, he had fired the shot that killed John Wilkes Booth. For a time he had been America’s most famous soldier.
He remained inside for about a year before escaping in 1888; nothing more is known of his fate. In April 1987, a patient named Kenneth Waddell was transferred from the Larned Security Hospital. He had been found not guilty by reason of insanity on charges of aggravated battery and had been institutionalized since age six. A Danish immigrant named John Crabb is often described as having been found fully cured in 1951 after nearly 20 years.
This could not be verified. The story appears on ghost-site websites and Wikipedia, but no documentary evidence supports it. No newspaper or court record mentions it. One patient’s entire hospital record is public, though her name is not.
Time magazine called her Mrs. X. She was 55 when admitted in 1932. She believed her husband was poisoning her toothbrush with formaldehyde and had tried to kill her.
After a year, hospital authorities wrote that she was somewhat better but still delusional. Four years later, they said she should be observed much longer before release was considered. In 1941, an examining committee declared her an incurably insane person. She was still there eight years after that.
Then Kansas began reform efforts, and Mrs. X was placed under a 29-year-old psychiatrist named James M. Mott Jr. Dr.
Mott was responsible for 367 patients. He had 61 attendants, no nurses, and no case workers. He could give her half an hour per week, just 30 minutes, for a woman the state had given up on eight years earlier. After five months, her delusions began to lift.
She went to the city center with a companion and was amazed by the new red and green traffic lights, unfamiliar to the world she had known. She applied for a job and gave Dr. Mott as a reference. In October 1949, after 17 years inside, she was released on parole at age 72.
The following January, she was discharged as recovered, and local doctors offered her work. Mott published her case and posed a question to his own profession: what does real deterioration mean? She recovered through attention, just half an hour a week, and we do not even know her name. The financial history of Topeka State Hospital reveals something unusual.
There was no system of inmate leasing, no contract shops, no goods, no buyers. The institution does not appear to have sold anything. Instead, there is an accounting of what the state refused to spend. The land cost the state nothing because the law required it.
The $12,000 came from the city and county. Every building had a $25,000 cap. The hospital’s own labor included patients who built new structures, worked the farm, and sewed without pay. Then the state kept adding.
In 1881, it spent $13,000 on nearly another hundred acres. In 1907, it spent $12,000 on a pavilion for 20 women with tuberculosis, $70,000 for two women’s cottages, and $50,000 for additional men’s housing. By 1910, Topeka State Hospital’s property and equipment were valued at one million dollars. Just one year earlier, in 1909, the state was paying counties to hold patients it could not accommodate.
Real money arrived only after reports. In October 1948, following a governor’s panel report, the legislature doubled appropriations for the state’s mental hospitals. Some of it went to hiring and training staff. Some of it bought paint.
The brown walls were repainted in bright pastels. By fiscal 1959, salaries and wages alone exceeded $2. 5 million, and the hospital’s total budget, including construction, topped $6 million. Two million went to a new patient treatment unit.
The report proudly noted that the new power plant would require 14 fewer employees than before. Today, the land earns nothing. No tours, no tickets, no gift shop, no paid ghost walks. Every other ruin in this series eventually became a commodity.
This one did not because there was no ruin left to sell. As for the number 54, it appears on sites like World Abandoned and US Ghost Adventures, citing mysterious sterilizations at Topeka State Hospital. The figure actually comes from researcher Julius Paul, who, while compiling state records for the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, found records of 54 sterilizations in Kansas before 1921. That was the combined total for all institutions in the state during those early years of the 1913 law.
It was never a figure for Topeka alone. The count runs in the opposite direction. After Buck v. Bell, the rate surged, with more than 300 in the state between 1925 and 1928, nearly 2,000 between 1932 and 1942, and roughly 3,332 in total.
According to Laughlin’s own book, most of the early cases occurred here. The number 54 is no exaggeration. It is likely only one-tenth of what this hospital actually performed. Even the real number is not the worst part.
The worst part is that of the 516 people counted, not one name is known. One more correction remains, and it is the most costly. Topeka is famous for psychiatry, but not for this hospital. The Menninger Clinic was founded privately in the same city in 1925, and the Menninger Foundation became one of the most respected training institutions in American psychiatry.
People routinely confuse the two. Every article about this facility draws comments from readers insisting that Topeka’s hospital was world-class. The two institutions stood only a few miles apart. In 1948, the state of Kansas had to ask the famous clinic across town for help repairing its own hospital.
In June 1991, a budget decision closed the AWOL unit at Topeka State Hospital. Officials Robert Harter and George Vega decided to shut it down without prior notice to the public. It was an adult forensic ward, segregated from the rest of the hospital because it housed high-risk patients. The reason was money.
Dr. Maney Lee, director of mental health services, warned both men in writing that the unit was built so that, in his words, “my mother” would not mix with murderers, and that any phased closure should be careful and slow. On June 21, 1991, Vega authorized the acting superintendent to close it as fast as possible. Kenneth Waddell was moved to a general patients’ ward.
According to the federal appeals court that later reviewed the case, Waddell raped and assaulted a female patient there. He was moved again, not to a safer ward but to another general ward called Bowen South, where a music and activities therapist named Stephanie Urig worked. She was 30 years old, married to Greg, and had two small children, Benjamin and Anna. On Sunday, February 23, 1992, Urig and another therapist, Robin Figgs, took a group of patients including Waddell to a matinee.
They returned around 4:30. Waddell had given Stephanie his coin collection for safekeeping and asked for it back. Around 6:00 p. m.
, her husband called Robin Figgs looking for her. Her car was still there, and her coat was still there. That night she was found in a bathroom stall, arranged as if she were using the bathroom. She had been strangled by hand and sexually assaulted.
Four days later, Waddell confessed. That December, he was sentenced to life in prison. Her family sued the administrators who had closed the ward. On August 30, 1995, the Tenth Circuit ruled against the family.
The court wrote that her murder was not the result of reckless or unconscionable conduct. Closing the ward was a reasonable combination of social, political, and economic circumstances, which is true. That is precisely the problem. Topeka State Hospital closed on May 17, 1997, on the recommendation of the state closure commission.
The legislature decided to close one of its three mental hospitals because community care seemed more effective and, mainly, cheaper. Winfield closed the following year. The building sat empty for 13 years. Asbestos, lead paint, floors, and ceilings all collapsed.
On June 1, 2010, a demolition ball brought down the main building. The rest followed. Some accounts say the concrete foundation was also broken up so that no trace of where the hospital stood would remain. What stands there now is Hummer Sports Park, with a 6,000-seat football stadium, a 2,000-seat soccer stadium, an eight-lane track, and an Olympic-length pool.
Next to it is a senior housing project called Connect 55 Plus, with views of the Capitol dome, which under the 1875 law had to be within two miles. The Osawatomie hospital, which this facility was built to relieve, is still operating more than 160 years later, though federal inspectors revoked its certification in 2015 and it admits far fewer patients now. The Larned hospital, which opened in 1914, also operates today, holding legally committed persons and those the state has designated as sex offenders. Winfield, where people were being cut before Kansas even had a law, closed in 1998 and later reopened as a correctional center.
Osawatomie kept its name. Larned kept its function. Winfield became a prison. Topeka became a football field.
The state kept the law, kept the appropriations, and preserved the biennial reports in bound volumes. It preserved the name of every doctor who ran the facility. It did not keep the patients. The 2.
8 acres in the northeast corner were never built on. The original case files were destroyed, and diagnosis records are sealed, but the cemetery register survives, noting where each person lies, measured from the eastern boundary. Stephen Adams, who died in 1885, lies 242 feet 4 inches away.
Kansas cannot tell you what happened to him, but it can tell you precisely how far he is from the fence.