The Elevator to the Morgue at Old St Joseph’s Hospital

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Every old hospital collects stories, but the ones attached to the old St Joseph’s Hospital tend to circle back to the same short list: an elevator that travelled to the morgue with nobody in it, a call button ringing from a room with no patient, and laughter in the basement. The building is in North Dakota, it opened its doors in 1911, and it stopped treating patients in 2014. What follows is the record on one side and the staff anecdotes on the other, kept apart on purpose.

Quick Orientation

• What it was: a Catholic general hospital, established in 1911.
• Who ran it: the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross, a Swiss order, who took up the work in 1912 and managed the hospital until 1987.
• When it closed: 2014, once a new medical facility opened nearby.
• Status now: a decommissioned hospital building, not a visitor attraction.
• Why people talk about it: generations of employees describing the same handful of incidents in the same handful of places.

Swiss Sisters and a Century of Bedside Work

The hospital was established in 1911, and in 1912 the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross arrived from Switzerland to run it. That is a long way to travel to nurse strangers on the northern plains, and it set the character of the institution for the next seventy five years. The sisters managed the hospital until 1987, when day to day control passed out of their hands. In that time the building grew, added departments, and became the place where a large share of the surrounding community was born, treated and, inevitably, died.

Its closure in 2014 was not a collapse or a scandal. A new, modern medical facility opened nearby, and patients and staff moved into it. The old hospital was left behind the way most superseded hospitals are: emptied of equipment, full of corridors that no longer lead anywhere useful.

The Culture of Not Talking About It

One detail matters more than any single ghost story here. As a Catholic institution, St Joseph’s discouraged talk of the inexplicable. Staff who saw something odd learned it was not a subject for the nurses’ station, let alone for administration. That has two consequences for anyone assessing the place today. First, almost nothing was documented at the time, so there is no incident log, no investigation file, no contemporaneous written account to check. Second, the stories that survive did so by word of mouth among employees, passed from one shift to the next over decades. They are consistent, which is interesting. They are also unverifiable, which is the honest bottom line.

The Elevator, the Basement and a Bell From an Empty Room

The reported activity clusters in a few specific parts of the building rather than spreading evenly through it.

• The elevator. Staff described a lift that would travel to the morgue on its own, with nobody having called it and nobody inside.
• The morgue itself. In that cold room, doors were reported swinging open with no one near them.
• The basement. Laughter with no source and footsteps in corridors that were checked and found empty.
• The cafeteria. Moaning and whispering reported when the room was closed and unoccupied.
• A third floor room. The nurse call button in one particular room is said to have rung repeatedly while the room stood empty. Staff came to associate it with a patient who had died there.

None of that is evidence of anything beyond the fact that people who worked long nights in a large old building reported unsettling things in the same locations for years. Empty hospitals are noisy, mechanical places, and old lifts and call systems fail in exactly these directions. Both explanations can sit on the page at once.

The Patient Who Checked Himself Out

One story stands apart from the ambient noise because it involves a face and a conversation. As the staff version goes, a man who had died in his sleep afterwards appeared at the nurses’ station and went through the motions of checking himself out. The employee who dealt with him only learned later that the patient was already dead.

There is no name attached, no date, and no record to test it against. It is a discharge story, the sort of thing hospital workers tell each other, and it has the shape of folklore: the routine bureaucratic act performed by someone who cannot perform it. Treat it as the hospital’s signature legend rather than as an event.

Seeing the Old St Joseph’s Hospital Today

This is a closed hospital, not a museum. There are no advertised ghost tours, no visitor centre and no public access to the basement, the morgue or the third floor corridor where the call bell is said to have rung. The building’s interest to a traveller is largely from the outside and from the history: a Swiss nursing order sent halfway around the world in 1912, a hospital that served its community for over a century, and a set of employee stories that outlasted the institution that suppressed them.

If you go, stay on public ground, respect any posted signage, and check locally on the building’s current use and ownership before you plan anything more than a look from the street. Trespassing in a derelict medical building is dangerous and illegal, and the stories are not worth a charge.

See St Josephs Hospital for Yourself

Sources

• Mayor James Froelich
• North Dakota centennial blue book, 1889-1989
• 2025 U.S. Gazetteer Files (Census (official))
• 2020 Census Qualifying Urban Areas and Final Criteria Clarifications (Federalregister (official))
• Zip Code Lookup
• Wikipedia: Mandan, North Dakota

Address: 30 West 7th Street

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