April 24, 2024 • 13 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. Here's job, there's Jerry.
Dave's not here, but we're thinking of him. So it's
short stuff. Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Can I start this with an anecdote?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
So, in the mid nineteen nineties, a young, scrappy, young
student at Ohio University named Emily Sinobocan 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,
(00:37):
but the Athens Lunatic Asylum or the Athens Hospital for
the Insane. Oh wow, 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.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
That's awesome. I'd love to see that.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, I would do.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Actually, oh, you haven't.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
No, I don't know if she still has that stuff.
I should ask.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Well, she does, and she's willing to let me see it.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I'd love to It's probably like beta tape or something
like that.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
So, yeah, you said this hospital, the State hospital, had names,
many names over the years. It started out as the
Athens Lunatic Asylum when it was opened in eighteen seventy
four and it ran all the way to nineteen ninety three.
And when it opened, it was one of those giant, Gothic,
(01:25):
amazing nineteenth century mental hospitals. And I didn't know this,
but you know, the US is 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 doctor Thomas
Story Kirkbride, and he basically said, hey, you know how
(01:46):
we keep the mentally ill chained in basements 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 at
the moral treatment of the insane. 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,
(02:10):
And he literally wrote the book I and changed everything.
So when you see those amazing old institutes or institutions,
I should say, they all basically follow this pattern that
doctor Thomas Kirkbride came up with.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, we've talked about him on another episode for sure. 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
(02:46):
she remembers, and really I could Yeah, I couldn't find
those anywhere, but I imagine she didn't imagine those.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Sure, that's a weird thing to just suddenly make up
or you know, get wrong.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
And now that I'm looking at the date, I mean
this it might have been there, just had been closed
when she did this. They closed in ninety three. 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 and now it's part of the school.
But none of that has to do with our story,
(03:17):
which is a story of Margaret Shilling, who was a
fifty three 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
(03:39):
know is that she was a good patient and well trusted,
so much so that she was just sort of allowed
to roam freely about the grounds and no one really
worried about her too much.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, we should say that, like this is one of
those stories that because little of her was known, but
her story is so fantastic, lazy 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
(04:10):
silhouette to this story is we'll see 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 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,
(04:32):
she was among a special few or something. When she
didn't show up for breakfast, that didn't raise any alarms. Literally,
it wasn't until on December one, nineteen seventy eight, 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.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
That's right, so they called a code round, which meant
someone as missing. We need to go search this sprawling,
enormous campus. I think I saw seven hundred thousand square
feet in total, and I think that might be a
good place for a cliffhangy break.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yes, how much does seven hundred thousand square feet translate
to an acres?
Speaker 2 (05:41):
All right, So where we left off, there was a
search being conducted for Margaret Shilling. 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 campus. Pretty frustrating
(06:03):
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 upfront.
But there's no way it could have been that from
the looks of the room and the windows.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Okay, yeah, I didn't know how you knew that, but yes,
you see everywhere. Everybody's like she was in the tower.
She was 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.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
You know, well, they clearly didn't search everywhere.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
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 to there's like a genuine,
like bona fide search for Margaret Shilling, 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
(07:04):
home because it's cold and over the next few weeks,
starting from December and into January, Ohio winters can be
pretty bad, but I get the impression that this was
not one of the lighter ones, that it was pretty
pretty rough and over this time, like Margaret Shilling was
just missing. On January twelfth, nineteen seventy nine, about six
(07:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah, and it was pretty distressing what comes next, because
she was found unclosed with her clothes beside her, folded
very neatly as if I guess she had given up
or something. Who knows. No one can say for sure,
but they ruled her death of heart failure, even though
they're not exactly sure. You know, subfreezing temperatures, no food
(08:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah, so if you have a body that decomposes over
say six weeks, so 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
with 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
(08:50):
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 Shillings legend grow very quickly in
addition to her sad story, was that that that that
remnant of her, that silhouette, that outline that she left
it would not come clean despite the several efforts by
(09:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yeah. And you know, you can look up this picture
of the stain and it's it's a very clear picture
of a human body, you know, like any part of
her skin that made contact with that cement floor made
an impression, like a literal impression, and it's you know,
it's just one of those really really creepy things that's
(09:47):
lived on and you know, as kind of a ghost
story kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah, because I mean, like this this was like if
you a college you remember Chuck, like you just love
stories like this. Some 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.
(10:14):
So I can't imagine what that must have done to
the student body. Just freaked them 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 two thousand and seven, some Ohio University biochemists
(10:36):
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 it locked in place.
(11:00):
The adiposcire, which is known as gravewax, which we've talked
about before, which comes from the breakdown of fatty acids.
But this was special at a posts 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
(11:21):
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 water
color outline of the silhouette, and that, as far as
we can tell, is what's still in that concrete today.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
No.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
There was a group called Preservation Works that's dedicated to
preserving Kirkbride hospitals, Kirkbride style hospitals, and they did a
tour as recently as twenty eighteen and suggested like, hey,
by keeping this locked away away from the public, it's
all it's doing is making it seem creepier and weirder
and scandalous, Like maybe you should come up with a
(12:09):
respectful way to get the story across and allow the
public to respectfully, you know, visit it.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Hmm.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
I know that'd be a tough one to pull off,
for sure.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
I'm not sure about that idea.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
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 you know, ghost stories and
campus stories.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, like an indelible mark left
by a decomposed body from a woman who died mysteriously
and a mental institution. It doesn't get It's almost ready made.
It's almost like you made a mad libs for a
ghost story lot, you know. Yeah, uh, you got anything else?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Well, rip Margaret Shilling. And I think since I said
that the short stuff is.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
App stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
H
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. Here's job, there's Jerry.
Dave's not here, but we're thinking of him. So it's
short stuff. Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Can I start this with an anecdote?
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
So, in the mid nineteen nineties, a young, scrappy, young
student at Ohio University named Emily Sinobocan 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,
(00:37):
but the Athens Lunatic Asylum or the Athens Hospital for
the Insane. Oh wow, 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.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
That's awesome. I'd love to see that.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, I would do.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Actually, oh, you haven't.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
No, I don't know if she still has that stuff.
I should ask.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Well, she does, and she's willing to let me see it.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I'd love to It's probably like beta tape or something
like that.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
So, yeah, you said this hospital, the State hospital, had names,
many names over the years. It started out as the
Athens Lunatic Asylum when it was opened in eighteen seventy
four and it ran all the way to nineteen ninety three.
And when it opened, it was one of those giant, Gothic,
(01:25):
amazing nineteenth century mental hospitals. And I didn't know this,
but you know, the US is 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 doctor Thomas
Story Kirkbride, and he basically said, hey, you know how
(01:46):
we keep the mentally ill chained in basements 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 at
the moral treatment of the insane. 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,
(02:10):
And he literally wrote the book I and changed everything.
So when you see those amazing old institutes or institutions,
I should say, they all basically follow this pattern that
doctor Thomas Kirkbride came up with.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, we've talked about him on another episode for sure. 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
(02:46):
she remembers, and really I could Yeah, I couldn't find
those anywhere, but I imagine she didn't imagine those.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Sure, that's a weird thing to just suddenly make up
or you know, get wrong.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
And now that I'm looking at the date, I mean
this it might have been there, just had been closed
when she did this. They closed in ninety three. 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 and now it's part of the school.
But none of that has to do with our story,
(03:17):
which is a story of Margaret Shilling, who was a
fifty three 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
(03:39):
know is that she was a good patient and well trusted,
so much so that she was just sort of allowed
to roam freely about the grounds and no one really
worried about her too much.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, we should say that, like this is one of
those stories that because little of her was known, but
her story is so fantastic, lazy 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
(04:10):
silhouette to this story is we'll see 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 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,
(04:32):
she was among a special few or something. When she
didn't show up for breakfast, that didn't raise any alarms. Literally,
it wasn't until on December one, nineteen seventy eight, 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.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
That's right, so they called a code round, which meant
someone as missing. We need to go search this sprawling,
enormous campus. I think I saw seven hundred thousand square
feet in total, and I think that might be a
good place for a cliffhangy break.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yes, how much does seven hundred thousand square feet translate
to an acres?
Speaker 2 (05:41):
All right, So where we left off, there was a
search being conducted for Margaret Shilling. 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 campus. Pretty frustrating
(06:03):
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 upfront.
But there's no way it could have been that from
the looks of the room and the windows.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
Okay, yeah, I didn't know how you knew that, but yes,
you see everywhere. Everybody's like she was in the tower.
She was 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.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
You know, well, they clearly didn't search everywhere.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
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 to there's like a genuine,
like bona fide search for Margaret Shilling, 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
(07:04):
home because it's cold and over the next few weeks,
starting from December and into January, Ohio winters can be
pretty bad, but I get the impression that this was
not one of the lighter ones, that it was pretty
pretty rough and over this time, like Margaret Shilling was
just missing. On January twelfth, nineteen seventy nine, about six
(07:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah, and it was pretty distressing what comes next, because
she was found unclosed with her clothes beside her, folded
very neatly as if I guess she had given up
or something. Who knows. No one can say for sure,
but they ruled her death of heart failure, even though
they're not exactly sure. You know, subfreezing temperatures, no food
(08:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Yeah, so if you have a body that decomposes over
say six weeks, so 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
with 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
(08:50):
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 Shillings legend grow very quickly in
addition to her sad story, was that that that that
remnant of her, that silhouette, that outline that she left
it would not come clean despite the several efforts by
(09:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yeah. And you know, you can look up this picture
of the stain and it's it's a very clear picture
of a human body, you know, like any part of
her skin that made contact with that cement floor made
an impression, like a literal impression, and it's you know,
it's just one of those really really creepy things that's
(09:47):
lived on and you know, as kind of a ghost
story kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah, because I mean, like this this was like if
you a college you remember Chuck, like you just love
stories like this. Some 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.
(10:14):
So I can't imagine what that must have done to
the student body. Just freaked them 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 two thousand and seven, some Ohio University biochemists
(10:36):
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 it locked in place.
(11:00):
The adiposcire, which is known as gravewax, which we've talked
about before, which comes from the breakdown of fatty acids.
But this was special at a posts 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
(11:21):
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 water
color outline of the silhouette, and that, as far as
we can tell, is what's still in that concrete today.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
No.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
There was a group called Preservation Works that's dedicated to
preserving Kirkbride hospitals, Kirkbride style hospitals, and they did a
tour as recently as twenty eighteen and suggested like, hey,
by keeping this locked away away from the public, it's
all it's doing is making it seem creepier and weirder
and scandalous, Like maybe you should come up with a
(12:09):
respectful way to get the story across and allow the
public to respectfully, you know, visit it.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Hmm.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
I know that'd be a tough one to pull off,
for sure.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
I'm not sure about that idea.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
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 you know, ghost stories and
campus stories.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, like an indelible mark left
by a decomposed body from a woman who died mysteriously
and a mental institution. It doesn't get It's almost ready made.
It's almost like you made a mad libs for a
ghost story lot, you know. Yeah, uh, you got anything else?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Well, rip Margaret Shilling. And I think since I said
that the short stuff is.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
App stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
H
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