Northern State Hospital (Northern State Recreation Area)

Visitors and explorers at Northern State Hospital describe shadow figures, footsteps with no source, distant whispers and crying in the old wards; some say they have seen a nurse vanish through a wall, and a little girl is said to wander the building playing with a red ball while a man seems to search for her. The campus was featured in a 2006 Ghost Hunters episode, and a paranormal team that studied the property that year photographed a dark hallway with infrared and found what looked like a pair of bare legs in a patient's gown. The state psychiatric hospital opened in 1912 and closed in the 1970s, with a cemetery of at least 1,500 patients. Today much of the former farm is the Northern State Recreation Area with trails, some buildings are used for other programs and the campus is being redeveloped. The people who lived and died here deserve respect.