Old St. Joseph's Hospital

St. Joseph’s Hospital served Dickinson, North Dakota, and the surrounding region for more than a century, and the employees who worked its long nights left behind stories of an elevator that went to the morgue on its own and a call button that rang from an empty room. The building at 30 Seventh St. W., which once housed St. Joseph’s Hospital, now serves as St. Joe’s Plaza, a multi-tenant commercial building.

Bishop Vincent Wehrle of Bismarck oversaw the original 40-room building, which most accounts date to 1911, though a Dickinson Press photo caption says it was built in 1912. The first patient was admitted April 4, 1912. Wehrle recruited six Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross from near Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, to staff the hospital. They disembarked from the ship Lapland on March 19, 1912, and reached Dickinson on March 22. The building had no electricity, no elevator, and no medical equipment.

Over its lifetime, thousands of patients, doctors, and nurses passed through.

A dark chapter unfolded in February 1926 when five Sisters at St. Joseph’s died within seven days. Dr. H.M. Banks of the University of North Dakota attributed the deaths to encephalitis; contemporary reports pointed to poisonous gas from wood stain used in construction as an alternate suspect. The women exhibited respiratory paralysis while patients elsewhere and construction workers appeared unaffected. Nearly a century later, the exact cause remained unresolved. The five sisters were buried together at St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Dickinson.

While the hospital was in operation, administrators discouraged staff from discussing paranormal experiences. The Catholic organization behind the old hospital viewed recounting ghost stories as uncomfortable and potentially empowering to negative spiritual forces. Almost nothing was documented at the time; the stories that survived reached later generations through word of mouth among employees.

The reported phenomena cluster around specific areas. Employees described an elevator that would travel to the morgue on its own, with nobody having called it or ridden inside. In the morgue, doors were reported swinging open unassisted, which is unsettling because the morgue doors required an access key to open. The basement produced unsourced laughter and footsteps in corridors found empty. Closed rooms in the cafeteria generated moaning and whispers. A third-floor nurse call button associated with a deceased patient was said to ring repeatedly while the room stood empty.

One story stands apart because it involves a face and a conversation. Around his third night there, at about 10 p.m., he came out of his room fully dressed, went up to the nurse at the nurses’ station, and told her, “Well, I have had enough, I am getting out of here, I am going to go ahead and leave.” She let him go. About ten minutes later, another nurse found he had died in his bed. No name, date, or record exists to verify the account.

Hospital operations later moved to a new medical center on Fairway Street, now part of CHI St. Alexius Health Dickinson; accounts differ on the year, with most saying 2014 and one Dickinson Press passage saying 2015. The former building was repurposed as St. Joe’s Plaza, a multi-tenant commercial property housing local businesses whose hallways still suggest its medical past.