Linda Burfield Hazzard and "Starvation Heights"

The community of Olalla is just across the Puget Sound from Seattle. Olalla means “berry” in the local tribal language, and the area is well known for its strawberries, which are celebrated in festivals during which people enjoy strawberry dishes of every variety. This same community was also once the place where people came to starve for their “health” – and sometimes to their death. All from a self-proclaimed doctor named Linda Burfield Hazzard.

Hazzard turned her Olalla cottage into the “Wilderness Heights Sanitarium”, and from the 1890’s to 1912 she would rent out her attic space to patients who had come to experience her “cure.” She was not a medical doctor, but practiced a form of homeopathy. She wrote a book, titled Fasting for the cure of Disease, in which she declared that her treatment would cure everything from cancer to constipation. The treatment? Patients ate one bowl of tomato or asparagus soup daily, for over forty days. Long walks, enemas, and vigorous massages were also required one or more times a day.

Following this regimen, patients inevitably grew weaker and dangerously thin. They were free to leave wilderness heights if they wanted to, but Hazzard and her fasting cure exerted a kind of power over them as if indoctrinated to a lifestyle they could not leave. Local farmers would watch as Hazzard’s patients went on their daily walks, eventually becoming their daily “crawls” as their energy and health dissipated.

There were handfuls of patients who survived and left Olalla, but many died. How many is not known: Estimates have ranged from two dozen to over forty, possibly even higher. Hazzard seldom filed death certificates with the authorities, and made special arrangements with a discreet funeral home in Seattle for their “burials.” Conveniently for Hazzard, most of the patients who died would leave all their property to her. While almost seemingly coincidental for their uniform decisions, few knew that her husband Sam had been kicked out of the U.S. Army for forgery and embezzlement. Personal theory dictates that it would not have been hard for her husband to forge any signature that would have been necessary to obtain her late patients’ belongings.

In 1911, British heiresses Claire and Dora Williamson came to Wilderness Heights to take the cure. Both lost more than fifty percent of their body weight and while Dora barely survived, Claire was not so lucky. During this time, someone had also embezzled money from the sisters’ bank accounts. The British Consulate took Hazzard to task, filing criminal charges against her, and where she was found guilty of manslaughter. She spent less than two years in prison, living briefly in New Zealand before returning to Olalla in 1920, where she built a larger sanitarium and nursing home. This time, however, local authorities were wise to her antics and made sure that none of her patients experienced the same fate as the Williamsons.

It’s hard to determine whether Linda Hazzard actually set out to murder her patients. When rich people (with no relatives) began to literally sicken from the treatment, Sam and Linda may have assumed that it was best for her business to take over their dying patients’ estates. She may not have understood the full consequences of her actions. And it seemed that she firmly believed in her fasting cure, thinking that people who died from her treatment only died because they were “beyond help.” The proof? In the 1940s when Hazzard herself had become ill, she took her starvation cure and subsequently died from her own homeopathic procedures.

The cottage gained the infamous title as “Starvation Heights,” and over the years since her passing,

the house had changed very little. the family that lived there before it was torn down began to experience some ghostly phenomenon. On one occasion, the woman of the house was in the kitchen cooking dinner. Facing the stove, which was against one wall, she moved back and forth between the counter on her left, and the stove for several minutes without looking back at the door opposite the kitchen which face a bathroom door. When she turned around, she saw that every chair in the kitchen, and a few from the room next door, had been piled up against it.

The woman had been alone in the house at the time, and while such an event could have been fabricated, it’s doubtful that the owner would have any reason, nor would it have been likely that someone would have been able to sneak into the house and arbitrarily move their chairs around.

In the attic of the cottage, where most of her patients were treated, were several low “ledges” where the current family would store small items. A psychic once visiting the site said that she saw the spirits of many of Hazzard’s victims sitting on the ledges too afraid to move. The psychic would burst into tears several times over the course of the visit because of the anguish she felt saturating the walls of the little house.

Three times during 2005-2006, Washington State Paranormal Investigations and Research (WSPIR) visited Starvation Heights, on their website Darren Thompson talks about some of the group’s experiences there.

For the first investigation to the cottage, they broke into three teams, each of which included one psychic. To keep their destination a secret, they blindfolded the psychics and put them into separate cars. Technicians sat next to the psychics during the drive and recorded with a video camera every action and statement made along the way. Two psychics felt as if they were going to a large institution having to do with medicine.When they arrived at the cottage, the teams removed the blindfolds from the psychics and kept them from communicating with each other. Each psychic was to go through the house alone.

One team recorded a video that would start inside their car, then pan to the outside, where the microphone recorded a muffled statement made by a team member. The video then pans back to the inside of the car, where at that moment, the microphone picked up a strange, breathy voice, saying, “help me!” The voice could only have come from inside the car at the time, and no member of the team claimed to have made that noise.

Another WSPIR team recorded pictures and audio outside the house while walking towards a ravine where Hazzard may have hidden her deceased patients’ bodies. Their audio recorder picked up an EVP that said “Are you talking about me now?” The team members did not hear the voice during the time of recording and continued their conversations over the voices. Another EVP capture seemed to be saying, “Take us up” or “Dig us up.”

During the second investigation, WSPIR would learn that the cottage would be torn down once the owners finished their new house up on a different part of the property. Hearing this, quickly organized for a third investigation, during which several members would spend the night there.

During their third and final investigation, one man tried to relax the evening in Hazzards’ former bedroom, the room in which Linda had also died. The man never had psychic experiences before, but he felt during that time as if something spiritual were in touch with him. He went into a trance as the night went on, and answered simple questions from the team with rumbles of “yes” or “no” from deep within his chest. as if they were communicating with Linda Hazzard, who was still in the house. From the questions asked she refused to leave and was refusing to let anyone demolish the dwelling. Her spirit was powerless to stop the demolition. The family living in the cottage did indeed move, and the cottage was leveled.

Was this last communication the result of investigators’ prodigious imaginations or a final attempt by the former owner to interact with the world of the living? The cottage that was once Starvation Heights is now gone, but it isn’t known if the spirits detected there – whether they were those of Hazzard or her unlucky patients – left with its demolition. It seems that we’ll just have to remain hungry for an answer.

 

For those curious about the Washington State Paranormal Investigations and Research investigation, a website is still actively maintained and this particular investigation with pictures and EVP’s can be found here: http://www.wspir.com/0405.htm