0:04

Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. Here's job, there's

0:06

Jerry. Dave's not here, but we're thinking of him.

0:09

So it's short stuff. Let's go.

0:12

Can I start this with an anecdote?

0:14

Yeah.

0:15

So, in the mid nineteen nineties,

0:19

a young, scrappy, young student at

0:21

Ohio University named Emily

0:23

Sinobocan did her senior

0:26

telecommunications film project on

0:30

what was called at the time. I

0:32

don't know what they call it at the time. Actually it

0:35

had a lot of names over the years, but the

0:38

Athens Lunatic Asylum or the Athens

0:40

Hospital for the Insane. Oh wow, right

0:42

there in Athens, Ohio, where my wife went

0:44

to college. And she said, I tried

0:46

to do a spooky sort of ghosty

0:49

thing and it didn't turn out so great.

0:51

But that was her senior project.

0:53

That's awesome. I'd love to see that.

0:55

Yeah, I would do.

0:56

Actually, oh, you haven't.

0:58

No, I don't know if she still has that stuff. I should ask.

1:00

Well, she does, and she's willing to let me see it.

1:02

I'd love to It's probably like beta tape

1:04

or something like that.

1:05

So, yeah,

1:07

you said this hospital,

1:09

the State hospital, had names,

1:12

many names over the years. It started out as the

1:14

Athens Lunatic Asylum when it was opened

1:16

in eighteen seventy four and it

1:19

ran all the way to nineteen ninety three. And

1:22

when it opened, it was one of those giant,

1:24

Gothic, amazing nineteenth

1:27

century mental hospitals. And

1:30

I didn't know this, but you know, the US

1:32

is just populated with these and they're

1:34

starting to tear them down more and more. But

1:37

there was a guy who basically came up

1:39

with the blueprint for these things. His

1:41

name was doctor Thomas Story Kirkbride,

1:44

and he basically said, hey, you know how

1:46

we keep the mentally ill chained

1:48

in basements in jails. Now

1:51

we should not do that. We should do the opposite. We should

1:53

build huge hospitals on big, rambling,

1:55

beautiful grounds with lots of sunlight

1:57

and open air, and we'll

2:00

at the moral treatment of the insane. That's

2:02

really what we should get behind. And he wrote

2:04

a book called on the Construction, Organization,

2:07

and General Arrangements of Hospitals for

2:09

the Insane, And he literally wrote

2:11

the book I and changed everything. So when you see

2:13

those amazing old institutes

2:17

or institutions, I should say, they

2:19

all basically follow this pattern that

2:21

doctor Thomas Kirkbride came up with.

2:24

Yeah, we've talked about him on another episode

2:27

for sure. Yeah, yeah,

2:29

absolutely, But Emily said that there

2:31

were and I couldn't find pictures of this online.

2:34

The buildings themselves, this campus is amazing

2:37

looking, this beautiful Victorian buildings.

2:40

But Emily said that there were ponds on

2:42

the campus that were in the shape of playing

2:44

card suits, and that's the one thing she

2:46

remembers, and really I could Yeah, I couldn't

2:48

find those anywhere, but I

2:50

imagine she didn't imagine

2:52

those.

2:53

Sure, that's a weird thing to just suddenly

2:55

make up or you know, get wrong.

2:57

And now that I'm looking at the date, I mean this it

2:59

might have been there, just had been closed when

3:01

she did this. They closed in ninety three.

3:03

But she called it the Ridges, as

3:06

I remember now because that's what it's called now. Yeah,

3:08

because Ohio University has

3:10

bought that area and now it's

3:13

part of the school. But none

3:15

of that has to do with our story, which

3:17

is a story of Margaret Shilling, who

3:20

was a fifty three year old woman. At

3:24

the time, not a lot was known about

3:26

her. She obviously had some

3:28

sort of mental illness that led

3:30

her there sadly but apparently

3:33

some people say she was about an hour north of there,

3:36

had a husband and a son. But what

3:38

we do know is that she was

3:40

a good patient and well trusted, so

3:43

much so that she was just sort of allowed

3:45

to roam freely about the

3:47

grounds and no one really worried about her too

3:49

much.

3:50

Yeah, we should say that, like this

3:52

is one of those stories that because

3:54

little of her was known, but her story

3:56

is so fantastic, lazy

4:00

have felt totally liberated

4:02

to basically add little details

4:04

or assume little details or something

4:07

like that. So there's a there's a definite

4:09

like silhouette to this

4:11

story is we'll see that does

4:14

seem to like hold shape, but it's

4:18

it's just the little details you have to kind of

4:20

take with a grain of salt, essentially. Yeah,

4:22

but yes, apparently the one

4:24

thing, one of the things that I have seen in

4:26

a lot of places that because

4:29

she was free to roam the grounds, and

4:31

I don't know if it was just her, she was among

4:33

a special few or something. When

4:36

she didn't show up for breakfast, that didn't

4:38

raise any alarms. Literally, it

4:40

wasn't until on December one, nineteen

4:43

seventy eight, that she didn't show up for dinner

4:46

later that evening that it literally

4:48

raised the alarm because they

4:50

now realized they had a patient missing.

4:53

That's right, so they called a code round,

4:55

which meant someone as missing. We

4:57

need to go search this sprawling,

5:00

enormous campus. I think I saw

5:03

seven hundred thousand square feet in total,

5:06

and I think that might be a good place

5:08

for a cliffhangy break.

5:10

Yes, how much does seven hundred

5:12

thousand square feet translate to an acres?

5:41

All right, So where we left off, there was a

5:43

search being conducted for Margaret Shilling.

5:46

They looked, they thought, everywhere, seemingly

5:49

turned that place upside down. But one

5:52

of the only places they didn't look is

5:54

the place where she was, which

5:57

was a fourth floor room on

6:00

campus.

6:02

Pretty frustrating they couldn't find her. My guess

6:04

is that I think parts of this campus

6:06

had been shut down over the years by

6:10

this time, and it was in one of the buildings

6:12

that was shut down, because everywhere

6:15

online I saw she was in one of those two magnificent

6:17

towers upfront. But there's no

6:19

way it could have been that from the looks of the room

6:22

and the windows.

6:23

Okay, yeah, I didn't know how

6:25

you knew that, but yes, you see everywhere. Everybody's

6:28

like she was in the tower. She was in the tower. The tower

6:30

was unused and it was you

6:32

could only access it through essentially a hidden

6:34

stairway. And that's why they didn't find

6:36

her. But that's odd that they didn't find

6:38

her if they searched everywhere.

6:40

You know, well, they clearly didn't

6:42

search everywhere.

6:43

But they because they couldn't

6:45

find her. Did you say the police were called

6:47

in? Eventually, no,

6:50

Okay, So the police were called. They start

6:52

helping to there's like a genuine, like bona

6:54

fide search for Margaret Shilling, and

6:57

they finally just come up empty. And

6:59

so the police are like, I think that you

7:01

have an escape patient on your hands. Let's

7:03

just call it that. So we can go back home because it's cold

7:06

and over the next few weeks, starting from December

7:08

and into January, Ohio

7:11

winters can be pretty bad, but

7:13

I get the impression that this was not one

7:15

of the lighter ones, that it was pretty

7:18

pretty rough and

7:21

over this time, like Margaret Shilling was

7:23

just missing. On January

7:26

twelfth, nineteen seventy nine, about

7:28

six weeks after she went missing, she

7:31

was discovered. And I don't know

7:33

how she was discovered if

7:35

by accident, I saw somewhere that

7:38

somebody noticed a smell and followed

7:40

it and found her body. But however

7:42

she was found, she was no longer

7:44

alive. She was dead. She was found dead somewhere

7:47

in a room on that campus.

7:49

Yeah, and it was pretty distressing what

7:52

comes next, because she was found unclosed

7:55

with her clothes beside her, folded very neatly

7:58

as if I guess she had given up or

8:00

something. Who knows. No one can

8:02

say for sure, but they ruled her death of heart failure,

8:05

even though they're not exactly sure.

8:08

You know, subfreezing temperatures, no food

8:10

and water, so you know you're not going to survive

8:12

for too long. She would be buried

8:14

by her family. But what is really

8:17

sort of key to this story is this

8:20

stain on the floor of the outline

8:22

of her body that could

8:24

not be cleaned off.

8:26

Yeah, so if you have a body that decomposes

8:29

over say six weeks, so let's say she

8:31

died very quickly. And even though there were sub freezing

8:33

temperatures, that room that she

8:36

was found in had a lot of windows

8:38

with that were exposed to bright sunlight. So

8:41

clearly her body was exposed to enough

8:44

heat from the sun that it allowed

8:46

decomposition to take place, and under

8:49

any circumstance that somebody's

8:51

going to leave some residue behind

8:53

them, gross as it is after six weeks.

8:55

The thing is the thing that made Margaret Shillings

8:58

legend grow very quickly in

9:00

addition to her sad story, was that that

9:02

that that remnant of her,

9:04

that silhouette, that outline that she

9:07

left it would not come clean despite

9:10

the several efforts by the maintenance

9:12

crew to remove it. And so

9:14

if you have a woman who died mysteriously

9:17

alone in a mental hospital who

9:21

left a stain behind that won't come

9:23

clean, her legend's going to grow pretty

9:25

quickly.

9:26

Yeah. And you know, you can look up this picture of the stain

9:28

and it's it's a

9:31

very clear picture of a human

9:33

body, you know, like any

9:35

part of her skin

9:38

that made contact with that cement

9:40

floor made an impression, like

9:42

a literal impression, and it's you know,

9:44

it's just one of those really really creepy things

9:46

that's lived on and you

9:49

know, as kind of a ghost story kind

9:51

of thing.

9:51

Yeah, because I mean, like this this was like if

9:53

you a college you remember Chuck, like you

9:56

just love stories like this. Some like remember

9:58

the ghost that you saw in

10:00

Athens, Georgia in

10:03

the middle of the road, Like when you're

10:05

in college, it's prime time for that kind of thing. There

10:07

was literally a stain left

10:10

by a woman who died mysteriously on

10:12

campus there like right there. So

10:14

I can't imagine what that must

10:16

have done to the student body. Just freaked

10:18

them out on the daily, I would guess, But

10:21

the fact that it wouldn't come clean, it was just

10:23

a mystery forever, Like clearly she had

10:25

cursed this hospital.

10:28

That was probably the biggest explanation

10:30

for it. But in two thousand and seven, some

10:32

Ohio University biochemists

10:36

did a study of the stain to

10:38

figure out exactly what was going on, and they came

10:40

to some pretty pretty

10:42

standard conclusions that still are just

10:44

fascinating, But it seems to have been the

10:47

attempts to clean it had the

10:49

opposite effect. They actually locked it

10:51

in place in that concrete floor. They

10:54

used some sort of acid I think to clean

10:56

this off, and it

10:58

it locked in place. The adiposcire,

11:01

which is known as gravewax, which we've talked

11:03

about before, which comes from the breakdown

11:05

of fatty acids. But this was special at

11:08

a posts here in that the

11:10

sodium ions in it, in this

11:12

grave wax interacted with

11:15

the concrete and were replaced

11:17

by calcium ions from the concrete, so it was

11:19

like unusual grave wax.

11:21

And then when they added these acidic

11:24

cleaners to clean it off, it actually locked it

11:26

into the concrete, created a white

11:28

silhouette outlined with a darker

11:30

kind of smudgy, almost water

11:33

color outline of the silhouette,

11:35

and that, as far as we can tell, is what's still

11:37

in that concrete today.

11:39

Yeah, what I'm curious about is if that room.

11:41

Obviously that's closed down, like they use a lot

11:43

of that campus for stuff today as the ridges,

11:46

but there's no way like they let

11:48

people in there.

11:49

No.

11:49

There was a group called Preservation Works

11:51

that's dedicated to preserving Kirkbride

11:54

hospitals, Kirkbride style hospitals,

11:57

and they did a tour as recently as twenty eighteen

11:59

and suggested like, hey, by keeping this

12:01

locked away away from the public, it's all

12:03

it's doing is making it seem creepier and weirder

12:06

and scandalous, Like maybe

12:08

you should come up with a respectful way

12:10

to get the story across and allow the public

12:13

to respectfully, you know, visit

12:15

it.

12:16

Hmm.

12:17

I know that'd be a tough one to pull off, for sure.

12:20

I'm not sure about that idea.

12:22

Yeah, but I mean what the alternative is just

12:24

you know, college students breaking in and touching it

12:26

and dying afterward. That's the legend.

12:29

Oh, Emily hadn't

12:31

heard of this one in particular, which I thought was interesting

12:33

because she did say that there obviously

12:35

were all kinds of you know, ghost stories and campus

12:38

stories.

12:38

Yeah, for sure. I mean, like an indelible

12:40

mark left by a decomposed body

12:43

from a woman who died mysteriously and a

12:45

mental institution. It doesn't get It's

12:47

almost ready made. It's almost like you made a mad

12:49

libs for a ghost story lot,

12:51

you know. Yeah, uh, you

12:54

got anything else?

12:55

I got nothing else?

12:56

Well, rip Margaret Shilling. And

12:58

I think since I said that the short stuff is.

13:01

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