Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Sad, Strange Tale of Margaret Schilling

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Not too much is known about Margaret Schilling. She was the kind of person whose memory might have been lost to time had she not left behind an indelible reminder of her. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You can't fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode of NPR's Throughline, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started. Where it really started. To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's through line on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. Here's Josh, here's Chuck, there's Jerry, Dave's not here but we're thinking of him. So it's short stuff. Let's go.

Can I start this with an anecdote? Yeah. So in the mid-1990s, a young, scrappy young student at Ohio University named Emily Sinabokin did her senior telecommunications film project on what was called at the time, I don't know what they call it at the time actually. It had a lot of names over the years, but the Athens Lunatic Asylum or the Athens Hospital for the Insane. Right there in Athens, Ohio, where my wife went to college and she said, I tried to do a spooky sort of ghosty thing and it didn't turn out so great, but that was her senior project. That's awesome. I'd love to see that.

Yeah, I would too actually. Oh, you haven't? No, I don't know if she still has that stuff. I should ask her. Well, she does and she's willing to let me see it. I'd love to. It's probably like beta tape or something like that. So, good luck. Right. So yeah, you said this hospital, the state hospital had many names over the years. It started out as the Athens Lunatic Asylum

when it was opened in 1874, and it ran all the way to 1993. And when it opened, it was one of those giant, Gothic, amazing 19th century mental hospitals. And I didn't know this, but the US has just populated with these and they're starting to tear them down more and more. But there was a guy who basically came up

with the blueprint for these things. His name was Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride. And he basically said, hey, you know how we keep the mentally ill chained in basements and in jails now? We should not do that. We should do the opposite. We should build huge hospitals on big rambling, beautiful grounds with lots of sunlight and open air.

And we'll call it the moral treatment of the insane. And that's really what we should get behind. And he wrote a book called on the construction organization and general arrangements of hospitals for the insane. And he literally wrote the book on this and changed everything. So when you see those amazing old institutes or institutions, I should say, they all basically

follow this pattern that Dr. Thomas Kirkbride came up with. Yeah, we've talked about him on another episode for sure. Really? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But Emily said that there were, and I couldn't find pictures of this online, the buildings themselves, this campus is amazing looking, this beautiful Victorian buildings, but Emily said that there were ponds on the campus that were in the shape of playing card suits,

and that's the one thing she remembers. Really? Yeah, I couldn't find those anywhere, but I imagine she didn't imagine those. Sure, that's a weird thing to just suddenly make up or get wrong. And now that I'm looking at the date, I mean, it might have either just had been closed when she did this, it would have closed in 93,

but she called it the ridges as I remember now, because that's what it's called now. Yeah. Because Ohio University has bought that area now as it's part of the school. But none of that has to do with our story, which is the story of Margaret Schilling, who was a 53-year-old woman at the time. Not a lot was known about her. She obviously had some sort of mental illness that led her there, sadly, but apparently

some people say she was about an hour north of there, had a husband and a son. But what we do know is that she was a good patient and well-trusted, so much so that, you know, she was just sort of allowed to roam freely about the grounds and no one really worried about her too much. Yeah, we should say that, like, this is one of those stories that, because little of her was known known but her story is so fantastic lazy

writers have felt totally Liberated to basically add little details or assume little details or something like that. So there's a there's a definite like Silhouette to this story as we'll see that that does seem to like hold shape but it's it's just the little details you have to kind of take with a grain of salt essentially yeah but yes apparently the one thing one one of the things that I have seen in a lot of places that because she was free to roam the grounds and I don't know if it was just her she was among a special few or or something. When she didn't show up for breakfast, that didn't raise any alarms, literally.

It wasn't until on December 1, 1978, that she didn't show up for dinner later that evening that it literally raised the alarm because they now realized they had a patient missing. That's right. So they called a code round, which meant someone is missing. We need to go search this sprawling enormous campus. I think I saw 700,000 square feet in total. I saw that too. And I think that might be a good place for a cliffhanging break.

Yes. How much does 700,000 square feet translate to in acres? Hehehe fully understand the moment we're living in without knowing where we've been. On every episode of NPR's Throughline, we take a story from the news and go back in time to where it started, where it really started. To answer one important question, how did we get here? Find NPR's Throughline on the iHeartRadio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. Broken Season 2. This podcast explores complex concepts of identity, resilience, erasure, and genocide. Table for Two Season 2. Think of the show as a deconstructed Oscar party in podcast form. Each episode takes place over the romance of a meal and feels like you're seated next to a different guest at that dinner. Hear these podcasts and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, so where we left off there was a search being conducted for Margaret Schilling. They looked, they thought everywhere, seemingly turned that place upside down, but one of the only places they didn't look is the place where she was,

which was a fourth floor room on the campus. Pretty frustrating they couldn't find her. My guess is that I think parts of this campus had been shut down over the years by this time, and it was in one of the buildings that was shut down because Everywhere online I saw she was in one of those two Magnificent towers up front, but there's no way it could have been that from the looks of the room and the windows Okay. Yeah, I didn't know how you knew that but yes, you see everywhere everybody's like she was in the tower She's in the tower the tower was unused and it was You could only access it through essentially a hidden stairway and that's why they didn't find her. But that's odd that they didn't find her

if they searched everywhere, you know? Well, they clearly didn't search everywhere. But they, because they couldn't find her, did you say the police were called in eventually? No. Okay, so the police were called. They start helping too. There's like a genuine like bonafide search for Margaret Schilling and they

finally just come up empty. And so the police are like, I think that you have an escape patient on your hands. Let's just call it that so we can go back home because it's cold. And over the next few weeks, starting from December and into January, um, Ohio winters can be pretty bad, but I get the impression that this was not one of the lighter ones, that it was pretty rough. And over this time, like Margaret Schilling was just missing, on January 12th, 1979, about six weeks after she went missing, she was discovered. And I don't know how she was discovered. If by accident, I saw somewhere that somebody noticed a smell and followed it and found her body,

but however she was found, she was no longer alive. She was dead. She was found dead somewhere in a room on that campus. Yeah, and it was pretty distressing what comes next because she was found unclothed with her clothes beside her folded very neatly as if I guess she had just given up or something. Who knows? No one can say for sure. But they ruled her death a heart failure even though they're not exactly sure, you know, sub-freezing temperatures, no food and water. So, you know, you're not going to survive for too long. She would be buried by her family, but what is really sort of key to this story is

this stain on the floor of the outline of her body that could not be cleaned off. Yeah. So if you have a body that decomposes over, say, six weeks, let's say she died very quickly, and even though there were sub-freezing temperatures, that room that she was found in had a lot of windows that were exposed to bright sunlight. So clearly her body was exposed to enough heat from the sun that it allowed decomposition to take place. And under any circumstance that somebody's going to leave some residue behind them, gross as it is, after six weeks. The thing is, the thing that made Margaret Schilling's

legend grow very quickly, in addition to her sad story, was that that remnant of her, that silhouette, that outline that she left, it would not come clean despite the several efforts by the maintenance crew to remove it. And so if you have a woman who died mysteriously alone in a mental hospital, who left a stain behind that won't come clean, her legend's going to grow pretty quickly.

Yeah. And you can look up this picture of the stain and it's a very clear picture of a human body. You know, like any part of her skin that made contact with the cement floor made an impression, like a literal impression. And it's just one of those really, really creepy things that's lived on and, you know, as kind of a ghost story kind of thing. Yeah, because I mean, like this was like, if you go to college, you remember Chuck, like you just love stories like this. So like remember the ghost that you saw in Athens, Georgia in the middle of the road.

Like when you're in college, it's prime time for that kind of thing. There was literally a stain left by a woman who died mysteriously on campus there, like right there. So I can't imagine what that must have done to the student body. Just freaked him out on the daily, I would guess. But the fact that it wouldn't come clean,

it was just a mystery forever. Like clearly she had cursed this hospital. That was probably the biggest explanation for it. But in 2007, some Ohio University biochemists did a study of the stain to figure out exactly what was going on. And they came to some pretty pretty standard conclusions that still are just fascinating, but it seems to have been the attempts to clean it had the opposite effect. They actually locked it in place in that concrete floor. They used some sort of acid, I think, to clean this off.

And it locked in place the adipose here, which is known as grave wax, which we've talked about before, which comes from the breakdown of fatty acids. But this was special adipose here in that the sodium ions in it, in this grave wax, interacted with the concrete and were replaced by calcium ions from the concrete so it was like Unusual grave wax and then when they added these acidic cleaners to clean it off It actually locked it into the concrete created a white silhouette Outlined with a darker kind of smudgy almost watercolor Outline of the silhouette.

And that, as far as we can tell, is what's still in that concrete today. Yeah, what I'm curious about is if that room, obviously that's closed down, like they use a lot of that campus for stuff today as the ridges, but there's no way like they let people in there. No, there was a group called Preservation Works that's dedicated to preserving Kirkbride hospitals, Kirkbride hospitals, Kirkbride style hospitals. And they did a tour recently, it's 2018,

and suggested like, hey, by keeping this locked away, away from the public, all it's doing is making it seem creepier and weirder and scandalous. Like maybe you should come up with a respectful way to get the story across and allow the public to respectfully, you know, visit it. Hmm. I don't know. That'd be a tough one to pull off for sure.

Yeah, I'm not sure about that idea. Yeah. But I mean, what the alternative is just, you know, college students breaking in and touching it and dying afterward. That's the legend. Oh, Emily hadn't heard of this one in particular, which I thought was interesting because she did say that there obviously were all kinds of ghost stories and campus stories. Yeah, for sure. I mean, like an indelible mark left by a decomposed body from a woman who died mysteriously in a mental institution.

It's almost ready-made. It's almost like you made a Mad Libs for a ghost story plot, you know? Yeah. You got anything else? I got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, RIP Margaret Schilling, and I think since I said that, the short stuff is out.

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