In mid-October, the Ghostly Club took a spooky, lantern tour of Western State Hospital’s infamous cemetery and farm. See some the haunted highlights after the jump.

A Brief Dark History Of Western State Hospital’s Cemetery

Western State Hospital’s old patient cemetery hides on the edge of Fort Steilacoom Park in Lakewood, next to a collection of dog parks. From 1876 to 1953, more than 3,000 people were buried here while they were patients at the state asylum. Their graves were marked with numbers instead of names, a quiet way to hide families from the stigma of mental illness. These poor souls were more than a line in a ledger. They were mothers and fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, veterans, and children who lived, worked, and died on the hospital grounds.

Some of those burials were in tidy rows. Others were not. Early accounts talk about patient remains placed in mass graves with little or no marking at all, their resting places swallowed by brush and time. When I walk that hill, I think about the ones we almost lost completely. I picture a little Native girl among them, one of the unnamed children the plaque hints at, her whole story reduced to a small numbered marker half-buried in moss. It’s hard not to feel how casually people with mental illness were discarded here for decades in Washington.

That story is finally being challenged. Volunteers with the Grave Concerns Association and their partners at the hospital spent years mapping the cemetery and matching those old numbers to real patient records, then raising money to install proper headstones. State and local leaders now talk openly about this “heart-breaking past,” and they point to the cemetery and its anonymous burials as something Washington must learn from, not hide. The hospital’s master plan and city documents now treat the cemetery as a historic site, and there’s a marker on the hill that names what happened: people were buried under numbers because of stigma. It doesn’t erase the harm. But every time a number becomes a name, one more forgotten patient is pulled a little closer to the dignity they were denied in life.

Haunted Highlights From The Lantern Tour

Back in October, The Ghostly Activities Club (or Ghostly Club for short) took a little adventure to one of our favorite haunts, the old Western State Hospital cemetery and farm. Officially, it’s Fort Steilacoom Park, but everyone calls it after the hospital. Pretty Gritty Tours put on the event. Chris, the guide and owner, took us (and 20 other spooky-seekers) round the cemetery and farm grounds. He’d stop to tell us all the grim, dark, macabre history of the former asylum.

Amy and I learned something new: This slab was the old embalming/mortuary building, and the hole was where the blood would drain. Ick.

Chris took us around to the mass grave, an Indian girl’s headstone, and told the tales of a veteran left to rot there. At the monument, we learned about Chief Leschi’s fate and the corrupt Governor Stevens nasty shenanigans (no spoilers). I’m glad Chris didn’t shy away from the grim stuff that happened at the hospital.

The most interesting stop happened at the Men’s Barracks. Well, we stopped at a hill that led up to the men’s building. It’s all ruins now. Anyway, creepy tales ensued, and the group capped it off by the former chimney of the building … that rests along a dark, scary trail that goes back to the parking lot.

Overall, the lantern tour mixed dark history, ghost stories, and other strangeness. The night time adventure just made it all the more spooky. If you’re interested, I think Pretty Gritty Tours does it once a year. So check their calendar for upcoming dates.

By the way, the Ghostly Club does endorse the tour. We had a great time!

Note: Amy and Jake paid for the tour with their own money, so there’s no expectation of a positive review for the tour operator.

Sources

Lakewood Historical Society. “Western State Hospital Cemetery Marker.” Lakewood Historical Society, 21 Feb. 2015, www.lakewoodhistorical.org/news/details.php?newsid=40. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.

Gruener, Posey. “Western State Hospital’s Numbered Graves Get Names, Thanks to These Volunteers.” KNKX Public Radio, 25 Apr. 2020, www.knkx.org/other-news/2020-04-25/western-state-hospitals-numbered-graves-get-names-thanks-to-these-volunteers. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.

Johnson, Eric. “Eric’s Heroes: The Anonymous Graves of Western State Hospital.” KOMO News, 17 Nov. 2021, komonews.com/news/erics-heroes/erics-heroes-the-anonymous-graves-of-western-state-hospital. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.

Merryman, Kathleen. “Patients’ Graves Get Markers.” The Spokesman-Review, 26 Apr. 2009, www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/apr/26/patients-graves-get-markers. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.

“Title Info: Western State Hospital Historic Patient Cemetery.” Washington State Archives: Digital Archives, Washington Secretary of State, 2011, digitalarchives.wa.gov/Collections/TitleInfo/1236. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.

“Western State Hospital Historical Cemetery, 1876–1953.” The Historical Marker Database (HMdb.org), www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=28029. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.

“Fort Steilacoom Park.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Steilacoom_Park. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.

“Western State Hospital and Fort Steilacoom Park.” Washington Our Home, 20 Mar. 2012, washingtonourhome.com/western-state-hospital-and-fort-steilacoom-park. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.

Western State Hospital Master Plan. Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, 15 Dec. 2021, www.dshs.wa.gov/sites/default/files/FFA/capital/MasterPlan/WesternStateHospital/WSH%20MP-Masterplan%20Report-2021-1215.pdf. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.

Inslee, Jay. “A New Western State Hospital Breaks Ground, and a Promise Is Kept.” Washington State Governor’s Office (Medium), 17 Oct. 2024, medium.com/wagovernor/a-new-western-state-hospital-breaks-ground-and-a-promise-is-kept-b0807f48bd69. Accessed 28 Nov. 2025.

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Thanks for reading Ghostly Activities. If you took this tour, let us know what you thought (or if you had a ghostly encounter) in the comments below.