Ill Defined and Unknown Cause of Morbidity and Mortality–North Carolina

Broughton Hospital
1000 South Sterling Street
Morganton, North Carolina

A Haunted Southern Book of Days–12 April

This article is a part of an occasional blog series highlighting Southern hauntings or high strangeness associated with specific days. For a complete listing, see “A Haunted Southern Book of Days.”

 

The strange phrase, “Ill Defined and Unknown Cause of Morbidity and Mortality” is typed in all caps on Betty Jo Eller’s death certificate. Essentially, the doctors at Broughton Hospital has no idea why this “petite and attractive” 31-year-old died on April 12, 1962 in her bed at the psychiatric facility. A short time earlier, Miss Eller’s twin sister, Bobbie Jean, had been discovered dead in a different ward. The bodies of these women bore no indication that they had been injured or even murdered, both had apparently passed away at nearly the exact same time, sending doctors into a tizzy to determine the cause.

The two young ladies were born with a stillborn brother, Billie, on August 19, 1930, in the Wilkes County, NC community of Purlear. Their father, Adolphus Worth, presumably was prominent in the community as a Baptist minister, though the family is buried in a Methodist church cemetery. It appears that the twins were diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent time at the hospital previously. When they died, they had only been in the hospital for less than a month after being withdrawn and refusing to eat, classic symptoms of schizophrenia, at home.

Once their nearly simultaneous deaths were discovered, the Associated Press picked up the story which was published in papers across the country.

As with many mental facilities, Broughton Hospital is no stranger to strange tales. It was the second mental institution established in North Carolina after the opening of the state’s first mental hospital in Raleigh. In the early 19th century, the treatment of mental conditions and disorders in this country was primitive to say the least. One of the first advocates for proper and modern care was the Maine-born Dorothea Dix. As a young educator, she was exposed to the harsh conditions imposed on the mentally ill when she visited a jail near Boston to teach a Sunday school class. Writing later, she was horrified to find, “Insane persons confined…in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience!” Within two years, she was addressing the Massachusetts state legislature and achieving success in the male-dominated political realm.

After finding success in Massachusetts, she began traveling the nation advocating for the mentally ill wherever she went. She arrived in Raleigh in 1848 where she began lobbying for a state institution. In North Carolina, she plead for $100,000, half of the state’s budget, to create a hospital there. She faced an uphill battle not unlike the battle she faced elsewhere, but here she found an in for her legislation. In the same hotel where Dix was staying in Raleigh, she discovered the wife of legislator James C. Dobbins who was dying. Dix sat with her, comforting her, and reading from the Bible. When she expressed that she was near death, Dix asked for her husband’s support for her hospital bill.

Following his wife’s death, Dobbins made an impassioned plea for support of the bill in a speech that is considered a “legendary oration” in the state. The bill was overwhelmingly passed and a mental hospital in Raleigh began to take shape. Dix’s efforts were not forgotten when that institution was later named for her.

In 1875, a new hospital was ordered to reach the underserved areas in the western part of the state. The Western North Carolina Insane Asylum opened 29 March 1883 on 283 acres in Morganton. When the main building was found to be insufficient, more buildings were added in quick succession to provide room for a rapidly increasing number of patients. In 1890, the superintendent, Dr. Patrick Livingston Murphy, succeeded in changing the name of the hospital to the State Hospital at Morganton to reduce the stigma of the word “insane.” In 1959, the name was again changed to Broughton Hospital to honor the 60th governor of the state, Governor J. Melville Broughton.

In the latter part of the 20th century, endeavoring to end the abuses and the negligence in the country’s mental institutions, the federal government ordered reforms to the system and Broughton’s population plummeted from several thousand to several hundred.

As with many institutions of its type, Broughton maintains a population of dead residents who remain in spirit. Although many of its stories have not been documented, one of the hospital’s nurses set out to change that. Margaret M. Langley, R. N. collected numerous stories from her fellow employees and staff members and published them in a series of three books. It seems that the old hospital and its sprawling campus provides fertile grounds for paranormal activity. Langley includes her first paranormal experience in her first volume.

While working in Ward 27 South, the geriatric division, with an LPN, Langley stopped at the ward’s nurse’s station. At this time, the ward was a large room with twenty-five beds arranged around the nurse’s station all separated by curtains. A hallway connected this ward with an adjacent ward. As the nurse and LPN talked, Langley looked down the hallway and stopped mid-sentence. The LPN looked up and down the hallway where Langley was staring. “In the middle of the hallway a large cloud of mist floated.” Stunned, the pair watched “the mist fade away and disappear.” While a large patient bathroom was located just off that hallway, no one was in it and the mist did not appear to be shower steam.

A travel nurse related a haunting story to Langley: Some years ago, an unstable patient in one of the Broughton buildings located near “the highway” found their way into a stairwell where they hanged themselves in one of the windows. Presumably, this is one of the buildings near NC Highway 18. For years thereafter, drivers have seen the image of a woman hanging in the window; the sight sometimes causing accidents. These accidents occurred so frequently that hospital officials boarded up the window.

Throughout the hospital’s grounds spirits are active everywhere. In the employee’s cafeteria building, staff members have had their names called when they were alone. One staff member reported working in the cafeteria shortly before her shift started. As she cleaned tables and chairs, she began to hear the sounds of a piano playing and the doors opening and closing. Freaked out, she retreated to the employee smoking shack until her shift started and she was no longer alone.

In the early 2010s, a new modern building was added to the hospital grounds. Two construction workers told Langley stories of hearing the screams of a woman as they worked. One worker was working in the utility tunnels underneath the building when he began to hear this sustained screaming. Frightened, he asked a co-worker to help him check out the noise. They checked all of the tunnel where they were authorized to go with no avail. No one else was found there. Another worker on the top of the building heard the screams of a woman while he was welding; screams that were loud enough to be heard through all his welding gear.

In 1962, the Eller sisters were admitted to Broughton. The doctors seemed to have determined that one of the sisters was dominating the other. One of them would begin starving herself, influencing and forcing the other to do the same thing. Just a day before their unexpected deaths, the sisters were separated. Bobbie Jean remained in Ward 8, while Betty Jo was moved to Ward 12. Around 1 AM, a CNA was making rounds when she discovered that Bobbie Jean was dead. The doctor who was summoned, quickly sent someone to check on her sister in Ward 12. Betty Jo was found in the repose of death.

Both young ladies were known to be mischievous and staff in both wards have suggested that the pair may be behind the paranormal activity taking place there. In Ward 8, where Bobbie Jean passed away, staff and patients have witnessed a small blue orb of light hovering outside the dayroom windows. Two patients reported seeing the light outside their windows playing among the branches of the trees before disappearing. Another patient felt someone touching her and one night was pushed out of bed by an unseen force. The same patient had something play with her anklet, pulling it and allowing it to snap back. On Ward 12, staff members, including Ms. Langley, were unnerved by a feeling of being watched. Hopefully, the sisters are finding fun in their phantasmic hijinks.

Broughton’s sister hospital is Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro which I have also covered here.

Sources

• Anthony, Robert G., Jr. and Ruth E. Homrighaus. “Psychiatric Hospitals.” org. 2006.
• Broughton Hospital. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed 19 January 2024.
• Connelly, Bill. “Identical twins had similar illnesses, unexplained affinity.” Winston-Salem Journal. 14 April 1962.
• Langley, Margaret M. Haunted Broughton More Tales from the Graveyard Shift. CreateSpace Publishing, 2010.
• Langley, Margaret M. Haunted Broughton Book III, History and Horror. CreateSpace Publishing, 2016.
• Langley, Margaret M. Haunted Broughton Tales from the Graveyard Shift. CreateSpace Publishing, 2009.
• North Carolina State Board of Health, Office of Vital Records. Certificate of Death for Betty Jo Eller. 12 April 1962.
• Smiley, David L. “Dorothea Dix.” 1 January 1996.
• “Twins may have ‘willed to die.’” Winston-Salem Journal. 14 April 1962.
• “Wilkes Baptist Minister Dies.” Greensboro Daily News. 8 November 1966.