Here’s a little background. Oregon State Hospital is the perfect setting for my creepy paranormal murder mystery. The problem is that the book is set in Portland, but the hospital is actually located in Salem, that being the state capitol.
So basically, here’s the question. Is it possible for a state hospital to be located in a city that is NOT the capitol? Has it ever happened? And if it isn’t a reality, is there any way to make it plausible as a fictional scenario? Could it have “believableness”?
Is it a mental hospital? My mom worked at a state mental hospital when I was a young kid, and it was way out in the boonies of Upper Peninsula Michigan.
There’s an abandoned boy’s reformatory school somewhere in Modoc County California that is close to Oregon and would be a perfect setting for something spooky.
So it could work, yay! And yes, it is a psych facility… half of it is abandoned. There’s a cemetery outside of the largest abandoned building… at the edge of the woods… bordering on the huge mausoleum. Twelve floors, and three of them are under the river. And late at night… during the darkest hours before dawn… footsteps echo down the halls. Tap… tap… tap…
Usually “the” state hospital is the institution you get remanded to when you make a successful insanity plea. It’s not necessarily a single facility, though, and sometimes they farm cases out to other institutions. But, yeah, as to the OP it definitely doesn’t need to be in the capital, although it’s usually relatively close to the (or a) state prison since there may be inmates/patients that go back and forth or staff at the hospital might make “house calls” to inmates in the prison.
Its only a name, to make the name seem formal… “this is definitely run by the state”
The organization of each state is up to each state, so the name may have a more definitive meaning in some states.
There are many hospitals with the name “State Hospital” outside capital cities.
Yup. Traditionally, in the US, public hospitals and simlar facility were established and run by local governments. A “state hospital” was so called because it was established and run by the state government, and the usual reason for this was because it was part of the state-run justice system - it was a hospital to which people could be committed involuntarily by the courts. Hence “state hospital” normally suggests a public psychiatric hospital in the US.
Mom worked at the Newberry State Hospital, now closed. It’d make a great setting for a scary story. Spooked the heck out of me when mom would take me with her when she needed to stop by for some reason on her day off.
Though in theory a state hospital is one owned and run by the state, in practice, the there was nearly always applied to mental hospitals. There was no need for the state to run regular medical hospitals, since any large community established one, but few communities wanted to deal with the mentally ill (at the time the system was set up).
Personally, I think setting murder mystery or horror story in a mental hospital is far too cliched. Find a location that hasn’t been used a thousand times before – especially one that’s incongruous – and you’ll have a far better story.
Good point. Another major cliched institutional setting is boarding schools, especially girls’ boarding schools. Don’t do it unless you’re really good or are writing fanfic-y stuff. Also orphanages, don’t do an orphanage horror story.
If you want an institutional setting, try something a little less cliched. I don’t know, maybe Army barracks?
There’s a so-called “Training Center” nearby that is run by the state. It isn’t quite a hospital, it’s a sort of boarding school slash treatment center for people with major developmental disabilities. There’s a state university about ten minutes away, and there is a synergy between the two institutions. There is (or was) a mentorship/buddies program where college students would work with the training center patients, and the university would hire people who had attended the training center for staff positions, e.g. in custodial service or things like that.
All of this is over a hundred miles from the state capital.
The old Stockton State Hospital has been closed down, but we’re in the process of getting a new one. So California has eight, with a ninth being built. Only one is in Sacramento.
Unfortunately for spookiness, the old one was dismantled long ago and a satellite campus for CSU Stanislaus has been built there. Or is that unfortunate for spookiness?
