In the early afternoon of December 1, 1978, staff at a psychiatric hospital in southeastern Ohio realized that one of their patients was missing. Margaret Schilling, a woman in her late 40s who had been under the hospital’s care, had wandered off before. But this time, the search that followed turned up nothing, and weeks passed without any trace of her. The building where she vanished was enormous, with more than 200 rooms and entire wings that had been closed and left unheated for years.
Christmas came and went. The new year arrived. It was not until January 12, 1979, that a maintenance worker climbing through a long-abandoned upper ward found her. Schilling had been there the entire time, in a room staff had never thought to check.
She had removed her clothing and folded it neatly beside her. She lay on the bare concrete floor with her arms crossed over her chest, in a space with no heat in the middle of an Ohio winter. The coroner ruled her death a heart failure caused by exposure to extreme cold. But the six weeks that passed between her disappearance and her discovery left something permanent behind.
As her body lay undisturbed, a stain formed on the concrete floor beneath her, taking the unmistakable outline of a human form. Cleaning attempts failed to remove it, and the silhouette is still visible in that room today. The hospital where this occurred began with far better intentions. In 1867, the Ohio legislature created a commission to choose a site in the southeastern part of the state for a new facility for the mentally ill.
The commissioners picked Athens, a modest university town in the hills along the Hocking River. The site they found was a high ridge overlooking the town and river valley, with room to expand in every direction. Construction began on November 5, 1868, and dragged on for nearly six years. The bricks were fired from clay dug from the site itself, and local laborers and tradesmen built walls that stretched for hundreds of feet.
The completed main building ran 853 feet from end to end, longer than two and a half football fields laid in a row. It was built to house 572 patients, a number that dwarfed the population of the town that watched it rise. The design reflected the philosophy of Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, a physician who believed that the building itself could act as medicine.
His approach, called moral treatment, rejected restraint and punishment in favor of structure, routine, purposeful work, and dignity. Hospitals built to his standard became known as Kirkbride buildings, and only three were ever built in Ohio. One was in Dayton, one in Columbus, and one rose on the hillside above Athens. Kirkbride’s most recognizable feature was the bat-wing floor plan, with a central administration building and two long staggered wings extending outward, one for men and one for women.
The staggering let sunlight and fresh air reach nearly every room and kept the most agitated patients farthest from the quiet center. The Athens architect, Levi Scoffield, executed the design in a high Victorian Gothic style, with steep roofs, dark red brick, and towers that made the building look less like a hospital and more like a castle watching over the valley. The grounds were shaped by landscape architect Herman Haerlin, who created ponds, a waterfall, winding paths, farmland, orchards, and gardens, an ambitious vision of a healing landscape. When the doors opened on January 9, 1874, the Athens Lunatic Asylum was considered one of the most humane institutions the state had ever built.
The first superintendent was Dr. Richard Gundry, who oversaw both the end of construction and the hospital’s earliest years before leaving in December 1876. The first two patients admitted were Thomas Armstrong and Daniel Ferno. Armstrong died within months.
Ferno remained at the institution for the rest of his life. One historical account names a 14-year-old girl admitted for epilepsy as the first patient to walk through the doors, though an earlier institutional record credits Armstrong and Ferno with that distinction. Her case is remembered because epilepsy in 1874 was treated not as a neurological disorder but as a sign of possession. During the hospital’s first three years, official reports listed 31 men and 19 women whose insanity was attributed to epilepsy, reflecting how many people with explainable medical conditions were placed in an asylum.
The hospital’s records from its early years reveal how broadly the era defined mental illness. The annual report for 1876 listed postpartum struggles, called puerperal conditions at the time, as a leading cause of admission, accounting for 51 women in the first three years. Menopause, referred to as change of life, accounted for 32 more. Normal menstrual cycles, described as menstrual derangements, accounted for 29.
Men were admitted for reasons including habits considered morally corrosive, alcohol abuse described as intemperance and dissipation, and general ill health. Many people confined under these categories were suffering from ordinary, treatable, or entirely natural conditions. There were genuine moments of progress in the same era. Superintendent Dr.
Richardson ordered that the straitjacket be removed from use with patients, and he introduced the congregate dining system to Ohio, seating patients together in a shared hall rather than isolating them. The hospital also followed Kirkbride’s belief in purposeful labor as therapy. It operated dairy cows, farm fields, an orchard, greenhouses, a boiler plant, and even a carpentry shop. Much of the work was carried out by the patients themselves, an arrangement described as therapeutic but also economically essential for an institution that never had enough funding to hire outside workers.
By the early 1900s, the hospital shifted toward what planners called the cottage system, with smaller dormitory-style buildings scattered across the grounds. Seven cottages were eventually built, along with a tuberculosis ward, a receiving hospital, and a dairy barn. The footprint grew from 141 acres to more than 1,019 acres with 78 buildings. The hospital served Athens County and 14 other southeastern Ohio counties.
By the 1950s, it held about 1,800 patients, more than triple the number Kirkbride had recommended, and it had become the largest employer in Athens. The grounds functioned as a public park, with local families picnicking on the lawns and strolling the paths. For years, one fountain even contained a live alligator, a detail long remembered fondly by local residents. But overcrowding and a national crisis in psychiatric care pushed the institution in a darker direction.
During the 1950s, Dr. Walter Freeman, a neurologist who aggressively promoted the lobotomy, made annual visits to Athens, sometimes reportedly performing more than twenty operations in a single day. His technique was fast, cheap, and required no operating room. Hospital administrators, facing thousands of patients and no realistic path to releasing them, saw the procedure as a way to move people out of the wards.
Some patients were described as cured and did return home, but between two and five percent died as a direct result of the operation. Many survivors suffered severe and permanent emotional and cognitive damage, harm that hospital records of the era rarely accounted for. The broader medical community eventually turned against the lobotomy. Freeman lost the right to practice the procedure after a patient’s death in the late 1960s.
At the same time, new psychotropic medications introduced in the 1950s offered doctors a genuine alternative to invasive, permanent procedures, and the era of the lobotomy came to an end. In 1977, the hospital became the center of a case that made legal history. A young man named Billy Milligan was charged with armed robberies, kidnapping, and sexual offenses committed against women at Ohio State University. Psychologists evaluating him diagnosed dissociative identity disorder, then commonly known as multiple personality disorder, which they concluded he had suffered since childhood.
His attorneys argued that the crimes were committed not by Milligan himself but by other distinct personalities sharing his mind, and that he could not be held criminally responsible. A Franklin County judge accepted the argument. Milligan was found not guilty by reason of insanity, the first person in American history to successfully use a multiple personality disorder diagnosis as a criminal defense. Rather than prison, Milligan was committed to psychiatric care, and the Athens hospital became the primary site where he spent much of the following years.
His case was chronicled in a best-selling book by author Daniel Keyes, securing his story as a fixture in psychiatric and true crime literature. During his time in care, Milligan also took up painting, and some of his artwork survives today. By the late 1970s, the hospital’s patient population had fallen sharply as the deinstitutionalization movement gathered nationwide momentum. But the physical footprint had not shrunk to match.
Entire wards stood empty, and whole wings of the original building had fallen out of active use, with doors left unlocked and hallways unheated because there was no longer any reason to heat rooms nobody was supposed to enter. This was the reality behind Margaret Schilling’s disappearance. What led her into one of the disused upper wards that day has never been established with certainty. What is known is that a patient population once in the thousands had been reduced to a fraction, while the building itself remained exactly as large as it had always been.
The staff searched the wards patients occupied and searched parts of the grounds, but the property was too large, and nobody had reason to suspect she had made her way into the abandoned sections. She was found on January 12, 1979, in a room on the top floor of a ward that had not been in active use for years. Her clothing was folded neatly beside her, an action that has drawn speculation for decades, though the reasoning behind it died with her. The official cause of death was heart failure brought on by prolonged exposure to extreme cold.
The stain left on the concrete floor became the most enduring feature of the case. For decades it existed largely as local legend, passed along in ghost stories and campus rumors. In 2008, Ohio University researcher Glenn Jackson conducted forensic testing on the mark. His analysis confirmed that the discoloration resulted from a chemical interaction between residue from Schilling’s decomposing body and a cleaning agent applied to the floor.
Jackson noted one detail that even careful forensic analysis could not fully explain: the stain’s unusually clean, body-shaped outline. Ordinary cleaning after a death would typically produce a much more irregular, scattered mark, not the precise human silhouette still visible today. By the 1980s, the nationwide shift away from centralized psychiatric institutions had reduced Athens to fewer than 200 patients. Entire buildings stood essentially empty.
In the late 1980s, the state decided to close the historic hospital. A newer, dramatically smaller facility was constructed nearby, and in 1993, the final patients were transferred there. After nearly 120 years of continuous operation, the doors that opened with such hope in 1874 closed for good. That same year, the state transferred ownership of the complex to Ohio University in a land swap with the Department of Mental Health.
A community contest in the 1980s had already given the property the name it carries today: The Ridges. Ohio University renovated the original Kirkbride structure and surrounding buildings, converting them into classrooms, offices, and storage. The central administration building became the Kennedy Museum of Art. The old dairy barn was converted into a nonprofit arts center.
Not every structure survived. The old tuberculosis ward, isolated on its own hill, had become a magnet for unauthorized exploration, and its walls were lined with asbestos. In 2013, Ohio University demolished it. The most meaningful restoration effort involved the hospital’s cemeteries.
Scattered across the property are three burial grounds containing the remains of 1,930 people, the vast majority of them patients who died at the hospital and were never claimed by family. Seven hundred women and 959 men lie beneath markers bearing only numbers rather than names. By the 1980s, with the state no longer maintaining the grounds, the cemeteries had fallen into serious disrepair, with stones toppled and reclaimed by weeds. Starting in 2000, the Athens chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness took on restoration as a volunteer project.
Volunteers repaired headstones, cleared overgrown plots, and researched the identities of the people buried there. Among their most significant discoveries were the identities of 80 military veterans buried at the site. These men served in conflicts from the Mexican War through World War I, and they spent their final years inside an institution that gave them no formal ceremony in death. Today, students walk to class through hallways that once held patients.
Visitors to the Kennedy Museum of Art stand in rooms that once served as a superintendent’s private quarters. Student tour guides lead groups through the old wards, telling stories about ghosts and stains and vanished patients. On Memorial Day each year, volunteers gather at the Pine Forest Cemetery to honor the 80 veterans buried there. The story of the Athens Lunatic Asylum resists a simple ending.
It began with real compassion built on progressive theories of care, grew to reflect every contradiction and failure of the system around it, and allowed a vulnerable woman to disappear for six weeks inside the very place meant to protect her. It survived long enough to be reclaimed, restored, and reconsidered. Its cemeteries are tended by volunteers who refused to let 1,930 people be remembered only as numbers on broken stones.
The building still stands, and Margaret Schilling’s name is remembered not as a myth for tours, but as a warning about what happens when an institution stops seeing the person behind the diagnosis.