ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Montford is haunted by a tragic event from 76 years ago.
Famed author F. Scott Fitzgerald frequented Asheville in the final years of his life. His wife, Zelda, was treated at Highland Hospital in Asheville for more than a decade. When a fire broke out in 1948, Zelda, along with eight other patients, died. Her spirit is alleged to still wander the grounds of the facility.
The Fitzgeralds
Five years before his masterpiece, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of “The Great Gadsby,” married a fellow socialite, Zelda Sayre, in 1920. Their marriage seems to have been fruitful in the early years, but, as the tides shifted from the splendor of the 1920s to the economic turmoil of the 1930s, their relationship became strained.
Zelda was a lot of things — a Southern belle born to a member of the Alabama Supreme Court, a flapper mingling with the high society of the jazz age and an artist writing short stories for newspapers, painting and authoring a sensationalized autobiography, “Save Me the Waltz.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald spent two summers at the historic Grove Park Inn in Asheville in the late 1930s. He rented two rooms during his stays — one for resting, the other for writing. But writing was not his only motivation for summering in Asheville. He was here visiting his wife.
The iconic roaring ’20s duo coped with the Great Depression in different ways. F. Scott turned to gin and beer; Zelda had a nervous breakdown. According to a nurse who worked at Highland long after Zelda’s death, as reported by NPR, “She was a chronic schizophrenic — that’s what we always understood.” Other hospital staff have suggested she suffered from bipolar disorder.
Zelda’s condition vacillated frequently between being highly creative with her writing and painting and extremely depressive.
For 12 years starting in 1936, Zelda was admitted and released to and from Highland Hospital, a now-defunct psychiatric ward in Asheville owned by Duke University. Her final admittance was in early 1948.
Because Zelda was at the nearby hospital, F. Scott wrote at the Grove Park Inn, although he rarely went to see her, preferring to indulge his appetite for drinking.
F. Scott Fitzgerald died in Hollywood, California, on Dec. 21, 1940, at age 44. His death likely did not help Zelda’s mental state. She continued to be treated intermittently at Highland until her early death seven years later.
Highland Hospital
Highland Hospital, situated on Zillicoa Street in Montford, served patients with mental illnesses.
According to a March 11, 1948, article in The Asheville Times, the central building, which had been built in 1912, contained the women’s ward, food and drug storage rooms and the newest medical facilities on the campus.
When Highland Hospital was donated to Duke University in 1944, it had “12 buildings, 80 patients and 109 workers” with 450 acres of land split between two properties. According to the aforementioned article, the total value of the facility was estimated by Duke at $700,000, roughly $12.5 million today.
The facility was still being run by Dr. Robert S. Caroll, who founded the hospital as a sanitarium in 1904. Caroll continued to run Highland Hospital until giving the facility to Duke. Retiring in the mid-1940s, Caroll had served about 4,000 patients. Dr. Basil T. Bennett assumed the lead position in Caroll’s place.
The historic fire
Highland Hospital went up in a blaze in the final hour of Wednesday, March 10, 1948, burning into the early hours of the following morning.
The Asheville Times reported on March 11 that the “Flames roared up [the] dumb-waiter shaft and burst out into each floor. Stairways were cut off by fire almost immediately.” By the time the firetrucks had rolled in, flames were piercing through the roof.
“The majority of patients escaped down outside stairways,” The Asheville Times reported. Others were “carried down ladders thrown against the outside of the stone and frame building.”
Most patients were aided by locals, with “22 of the 29 patients [delivered] from the inferno” having been helped by the volunteers.
Two Biltmore High School students — Lawrence Mitchell and Kenneth Haynes — were praised for saving four patients. The teens had been attending a Naval Reserve meeting that evening and were on their way home when they saw the flames. The Asheville Times reported that while they were ill from inhaling smoke, “the boys attended classes as usual” the day after.
Precautions that were taken to prevent patients from escaping the facility proved an obstacle for rescue efforts, namely the heavy wire screens dividing bedrooms and chains barring windows from swinging too far open. Nevertheless, firefighters noted how calm and compliant patients were during the rescues.
Of the 22 patients evacuated from the burning building, 20 survived, with a Mrs. Hipps and a Mrs. Kennedy succumbing to asphyxiation later that night. All surviving patients were temporarily rehoused in other buildings on the hospital grounds.
The nine victims of the Highland Hospital fire, according to the March 13, 1948, edition of The Asheville Citizen, were Janice Borocoff, 19, Marthina DeFriece, 20, Jules Doering, 38, Ida Engle, 67, Zelda Fitzgerald, 47, Sarah Neeley Hipps, 49, Virginia Ward James, 28, Ethlyn A. Kennedy, 42, and Oma Womack, 49. Three other patients and numerous rescuers were injured.
More than 40 firefighters were onsite battling the blazing furnace, according to The Asheville Times, dumping untold gallons of water onto the smoldering coals into the following day.
Rumors surrounding the horrific event began circulating immediately, with Dr. Wiley D. Lewis, a physician at Highland, having to clarify for The Asheville Times the morning after that no one had jumped from the building, as some had speculated. Another rumor posited that a disgruntled nurse lit the fire.
The fire was so hot that recovery of the bodies could not begin until around 8 a.m. Thursday, only to be halted when the remaining four-story stone walls were deemed in danger of collapse.
The rescuers were hindered by “twisted steel girders spider-webbing the northeast section of the building,” according to the March 13, 1948, volume of The Asheville Citizen. Wrecking crews were called in to remove the collapsing beams and walls before further recoveries could be attempted, according to The Asheville Times coverage on that day.
The Red Cross was mobilized to feed and support firefighters in their recovery efforts. Nurses from nearby hospitals arrived to administer first aid to the injuries patients incurred while fleeing the fire.
Dr. Basil T. Bennett, the medical director of Highland Hospital, told the Asheville Times on March 11 that the fire caused “somewhat in excess of $300,000” in damage, about $4 million in today’s money. Duke University had fully insured the building.
The investigation
County coroner Dr. P.R. Terry announced on March 12 that an inquest would be held to find the cause of the fire that killed nine.
Asheville Police Chief Eric Hall lead the probe after the Associated Press speculated the culprit responsible for previous fires at Duke University’s main hospital in Durham might have also caused the Highland Hospital fire. Hall began denouncing the rumor on March 12, continuing to do so throughout the investigation. Hall said no Highland staff or patients matched the description of the Durham arsonist.
Prominently featured in the investigation was Doris Jane Anderson, a newly hired nurse, who had administered sedatives to four patients on the night of March 10. All four — including Zelda Fitzgerald — died in the fire. The sedatives were, according to Anderson, standard practice for inducing sleep.
Anderson became concerned around 11:30 p.m. after smelling smoke coming from the dumbwaiter on the fourth floor. Anderson and a fellow nurse — Mrs. Dunn — searched for the source. Anderson discovered the fire in the diet kitchen on the third floor. She testified that because she was frightened, she made no attempt to extinguish the fire.
Anderson told investigators she obtained no firefighting training from hospital staff, which was corroborated by Dunn, who had also not received training. Both nurses had only been hired at Highland on March 1, a little more than a week before the disaster.
According to Anderson, as reported in the Mar. 27, 1948, volume of The Asheville Citizen, “…at that time [the fire] was confined to a three-by-five-foot table in the diet kitchen.” By Anderson’s account, she attempted to call a neighboring building, Oak Lodge. After nobody picked up, she phoned the authorities. She made one more call to Highland Hall, then began unlocking doors around the building.
Upon inquiry, Anderson said she did not know how the fire could have started as she had checked the diet kitchen an hour earlier and saw no obvious hazards, claiming no electric components were on the table. Not even the gas stove in that kitchen had been used recently, she testified. Dunn had also checked the kitchen around 10 p.m. and noticed nothing unusual. Ms. Hall, the only other nurse in the building, told The Asheville Times the morning after the tragedy that an electric coffee heater had been on in the diet kitchen before the fire.
The gas stove had a small explosion in the weeks before the fire, although a specific date for the occurrence was not given. Dr. Bennett claimed, “It was such a trivial affair, I don’t remember [the date].” He claimed it was of so little concern that the fire department had not been called.
This timeline was put in question by Fire Chief J.C. Fitzgerald who, as reported in the same article, “…testified [on March 26] that the fire had evidently been burning for 40 to 45 minutes by the time the fire department arrived on the scene at about 11:50 p.m. or within six minutes of receiving the alarm at 11:44 p.m.”
If Hall was correct, the fire would have started about 11:05-11:10 p.m., roughly 20 minutes earlier than when Anderson claimed she found a small fire on the table.
Released on April 2, The Asheville Citizen reported on the conclusion of the investigation. The jury found “‘there was negligence, but not to the extent to be classified as culpable negligence.’” The Asheville Citizen extrapolated from the decision, “…it seemed that a tragedy of errors, most of them human and some of them widely shared, built up the fabric of the Highland disaster.”
Healing and haunting at Highland
Zelda Fitzgerald’s body was recovered from the rubble and buried beside her husband at Old Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Rockville, Maryland. She was survived by her 85-year-old mother, three sisters and daughter.
On Dec. 19, 1948, nine months after the fire, The Asheville Citizen-Times notified its readership that Dr. Bennett had resigned from his post at Highland Hospital to take a position at the Veteran’s Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. In his place, the adopted daughter of Highland’s founder, Dr. Caroll, took up the mantle as director.
According to NPR, the Highland Hospital facility shuttered in 1993 after nearly 90 years of operation. While the other buildings were repurposed or torn down for new construction, the land on which the Central building stood remains empty out of respect for the nine lives lost there.
In 2014, what remained of the Highland Hospital facilities were listed for sale, according to The Asheville Citizen-Times. One of the buildings sold in 2015 for $1.25 million and was converted into Montford Hall at 75 Zillicoa St., a recovery center for teenage boys with substance abuse issues.
According to the haunted website Asheville Terrors, “It is said that the spirit of Zelda is known to be walking around the campus. Zelda was known for taking frequent walks during her many stays at Highland Hospital. A former employee of the facility recalled telling the story of encountering the spirit of Zelda. He claimed that she looked at him and was trying to remember his name.”
Highland Hospital is listed as one of the most haunted places in Asheville by U.S. Ghost Adventures, Asheville Terrors and AVL Today.