Former Sisters of Mercy Hospital, Now St. Joe's Plaza
Dickinson, ND
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
St. Joe's Plaza tenants set their own prices. The seasonal Haunted Hospital charges roughly $20 for adults and $5 for children when operating in October.
Access
Limited Access
Multi-story former hospital building, hallways and stairs
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1912 · Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross · Adaptive Reuse · Western North Dakota Healthcare History
Residents of Dickinson, in the rolling country of southwestern North Dakota, first organized for a centralized hospital in 1910. Bishop Vincent Wehrle of the Diocese of Bismarck answered the request by recruiting six women from Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross congregations in Switzerland. The sisters arrived by train in 1912, scrubbed the three-story shell of a building, and opened St. Joseph's Hospital nine days later.
The sisters operated the hospital for the next seventy-five years. The building was expanded several times during the twentieth century, with new wings added to keep pace with the growing oil-and-agriculture economy of the western North Dakota plains. In 1926 the hospital was the site of an unresolved medical episode in which five hospital workers, including Sister Secundia, died one after another. Pathologists ultimately attributed the deaths to encephalitis, but the cluster was the subject of extended investigation and entered local memory as the mystery of the dying nuns.
The Sisters of Mercy turned over operations in 1987. The institution was later folded into Catholic Health Initiatives as CHI St. Joseph's Health, then renamed CHI St. Alexius Health in April 2016. The new CHI St. Alexius Dickinson medical center opened on Fairway Street in 2014, and the original 1912 hospital was retired from medical use.
The historic building has since been adaptively reused as St. Joe's Plaza, a multi-tenant complex housing local restaurants, offices, and small businesses. Volunteers have also operated a seasonal Halloween walkthrough on the upper floors as a fundraiser for the building's continued preservation.
Sources
The reports collected from former St. Joseph's staff form one of the more cohesive bodies of paranormal accounts in North Dakota. Several reports center on the morgue elevator. The car connects only to the basement-level morgue and to the floors above, and its doors can be activated only from inside the morgue itself; staff repeatedly described it opening on its own at night and traveling between floors with no occupants.
Near the cafeteria, employees reported a low, sustained moaning sound at quiet hours, with no identifiable mechanical source. On the third floor, the original nurse call system was reported to register calls from rooms that were unoccupied or being held vacant. In the older administrative wing in the basement, staff described the laughter and running footsteps of children, even though the wing was nominally adult workspace.
Most of these reports were collected during the building's final decades as an active hospital. With the move to the new medical center in 2014, the bulk of the patient care left the building, and the active body of reports tapered. Some current St. Joe's Plaza tenants and the volunteer team behind the seasonal Haunted Hospital have described continued unexplained sounds, particularly on the upper floors, but the formal record has not been actively maintained.
The original 1912 St. Joseph's Hospital building has been adaptively reused as St. Joe's Plaza, housing local restaurants, offices, and small businesses. Visitors can walk the public corridors and patronize the tenant businesses during normal business hours.
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