St Mary’s Art Center

September 29, 1962. Far far away from downtown, down on R Street, stands this building. Cushman called it a “suburban house”, and I guess to his eyes it looked like a residence, just like many other buildings in Virginia City. But in actuality, this was the St. Mary Louise Hospital, tending to patients for over 60 years.

In 1876 (yes, right after the Great Fire) Louise Mackay, wife of Comstock king John Mackay, donated this land near Six Mile Canyon to the Sisters of Charity. The Sisters, along with Bishop Patrick Manogue of Reno, built a large hospital on the land and spent the next two decades nursing injured miners back to health. In 1897, the Sisters left and the county government took over. At the same time, Virginia City’s only other hospital burnt to the ground, so this became the county hospital. By 1940 Virginia City didn’t have a large enough population to justify having its own hospital, so the county ceased operations and the building was abandoned.

June 19, 2004. A couple of years after Cushman visited, things started to look brighter for the old hospital. Father Meinecke, a pastor from St. Mary’s in the Mountains Church in VC, pushed for the county to transform the abandoned building into a community art center. His wish was granted, and for four decades now this brick building has enjoyed renovations and invited art students into its halls. The old public wards have been refurbished into private bedrooms, and every summer students come to Virginia City to stay and learn about art.

A few residents of the old St. Mary’s Hospital have refused to leave, though. Many visitors have claimed to see a nun dressed in white still roaming the halls and peering out the windows. Is this one of the Sisters of Charity, still keeping watch over the hospital over a hundred years later? Other ghost hunters have visited St. Mary’s and taken video or sound recordings, and they claim the white nun is not the only resident still hanging around the hospital. There are other spirits there, ones not nearly as pleasant-seeming as the nun. Maybe some of the miners and unsavory characters who were treated or died at the hospital have decided to come back. Maybe one of them was peering out a broken window in 1962 and watched as a man named Charles Cushman snapped a photograph, got back in his car, and drove away.