Today's episode is a fan favorite.
The audio in the story has been remastered for today's episode.
Today's story is about a woman who goes missing from a psychiatric hospital in 1900.
Now, at first, this story will seem like a pretty ordinary missing persons case.
That is, until you reach the very end.
Let's just say this story has one heck of a plot twist.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do and we upload twice a week.
Once on Monday and once on Thursday.
As well as this very special episode of a new format I'm calling You Can't.
If you're a fan of my YouTube channel, you know that I've told several stories that revolve around places you can't go and people who went there anyways.
And I decided to tell some stories like that here on this podcast, but a little different.
These are stories with some very unique twists like today's.
They aren't going to be the exact same type of stories you're used to hearing on YouTube, but trust me, you will remember these.
And if it seems like people enjoy this particular format, we will continue to add them periodically on this podcast, just to give you even more of the Mr Ballin stories that you love.
So if that's of interest to you, on the next hot summer day, open a can of sardines and pour the juice into the follow button's air intake of their car.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
On the morning of March 11 1900, 43-year-old Carrie Selvidge stared out her bedroom window into the front yard of the building where she lived in Indianapolis, Indiana.
The sun shined bright on her face, but it was surprisingly cold for March and there was a chill in Carrie's room.
She wore a heavy flannel blue dress and slippers, but she still shivered as she stood by the window.
Carrie heard footsteps behind her.
She turned and saw a young woman standing there.
Carrie smiled, exposing her gold filling and several false teeth that she barely even noticed anymore.
The young woman smiled back and then put her hand on Carrie's shoulder.
To someone walking by, this might have looked like two friends enjoying the view outside the window.
But that's not what was happening here.
Because the building where Carrie lived was not her home.
It was the Union State Hospital, a turn-of-the-century sanitarium which today would be called a psychiatric hospital.
Carrie was a patient and the young woman standing with Carrie was a nurse whose job was to keep an eye on Carrie basically all the time.
And Carrie hated it here.
Up until a year ago, Carrie had been a school teacher, saving money and building a life for herself.
But over time, Carrie had become overwhelmed and sad, and she couldn't even explain why.
She felt tired but she struggled to sleep and there were days when she just felt sort of frozen, like she couldn't leave the house.
Doctors couldn't find anything physically wrong with Carrie other than some problems with her vision and her teeth.
So, the doctors did something that was unfortunately pretty common at this time for women.
They diagnosed Carrie with hysteria and told her family to put her in an institution.
That was how Carrie had lost her teaching job and her freedom and ended up living here at Union State.
Now, in Carrie's room, the nurse told her that she had to go check on another patient.
She told Carrie not to go anywhere until she got back.
Carrie nodded and watched the nurse walk out of the room and close the door behind her.
Once Carrie was alone again, she turned back to the window and looked outside.
Her eyesight was terrible so the view was not clear, but she could still make out people down below on the sidewalk walking past her.
They looked like little blurs, but she watched each one for as long as she could.
She felt jealous of these people, out walking by themselves.
Carrie desperately wanted to go somewhere on her own, where nurses and doctors weren't hovering over her every few minutes and telling her what she could and couldn't do.
She pressed her face up against the window, picturing the city she had once known so well.
The streetcar rolling down its tracks, people rushing off to work or students yelling and laughing in the schoolyard.
And as she was having these thoughts, something else suddenly popped into her mind.
She believed there was one particular place where, if she could just get there, she could once again experience the freedom she longed for.
Just then, Carrie turned away from the window and walked over to her door.
She opened the door halfway and leaned her head out, making sure nobody was in the hallway.
Once she was sure the coast was clear, Carrie took a breath, lowered her head and walked out of her room.
About five minutes later, that same nurse came back to Carrie's room and opened the door.
But now, Carrie's room was empty.
The nurse walked over to the closet, opened the door and checked inside, but Carrie wasn't in there either.
The nurse wasn't alarmed.
She was annoyed.
Carrie had run away once before and this nurse knew that if it happened again, she was going to have to explain why she left Carrie alone.
The nurse checked the porch, where she knew Carrie liked to spend time, but it was also empty.
She told herself what must have happened was a doctor came by and took Carrie somewhere.
But when this nurse tracked down all the doctors on the shift, they all said the same thing.
They hadn't seen Carrie all morning.
Now, this nurse was starting to panic.
She worried that Carrie might have tried to walk somewhere on her own and gotten completely lost because of her terrible eyesight.
And so, not knowing what else to do, the nurse ran to the front desk and said she needed help right away because Carrie Selvidge had disappeared.
At 6 pm that night, so about eight hours after Carrie had stepped out of her room, her younger brother Joseph, walked into the lobby of Union State Hospital.
And it was pure chaos.
Joseph saw doctors, nurses and administrators walking as quickly as they could down one hall and into another, and everybody looked frantic.
But nobody had contacted Joseph, so he did not know what was going on.
He eventually flagged down a nurse and told her he was there to visit his sister.
And that's when the nurse told him.
His sister Carrie was missing.
Joseph felt a pang of fear.
He asked the nurse sharply what she meant.
The nurse was clearly nervous as she explained that Carrie had wandered off.
But she rushed to tell Joseph.
The entire staff believed that Carrie was probably still on the grounds, so there was no real need to worry.
Joseph stared at the nurse with his mouth open.
He was shocked.
But more than that, he was mad.
He had felt terrible for his big sister that she had ended up in this hospital in the first place.
And he hadn't given up hope that she could maybe recover and return to the life that she had been building.
He knew she was unhappy here, and now she was potentially in danger.
Joseph collected himself enough to speak and said to the nurse, go get the police.
Later that night, Detectives Chauncey Manning and Adolph Ashe of the Indianapolis Police Department arrived at Union State Hospital.
Both men wore dark, well-tailored suits and hats.
They were experienced investigators and had worked as partners on a range of cases.
The detectives quickly met with the medical staff, who gave them a rundown of Carrie's known movements.
The detectives also found Carrie's brother, Joseph, standing in a common room by the porch.
He had refused to go home and was insisting that he wanted to be part of the search.
Because no one had actually seen Carrie leave, the detectives decided the first priority was to search the hospital itself, even though staff had already looked.
So, with Joseph and several other hospital employees following them, detectives Manning and Ash checked every patient's room, one by one, including the closets.
Then, after they did not find Carrie, they walked through the common areas and offices, bending down to search behind every piece of furniture.
And when that didn't work, lastly they searched the stairways and took oil lamps up to the attic.
But again, there was no sign of Carrie.
Finally, Detective Manning told Joseph that they couldn't do much more tonight, but he promised that they would resume and expand their search for his sister first thing in the morning.
What they didn't tell Joseph was that if Carrie had truly wandered off the hospital grounds and out into the city, then she was in very serious danger.
Like other major cities, Indianapolis had its share of crime.
Pickpockets and thieves were common, and violence against women was a growing problem.
Kerry would be an easy target.
But beyond that, at this particular moment, the city was also dealing with a truly bizarre rash of crimes.
A gang of grave robbers were digging up bodies and then selling them on the black market to hospitals and universities that use the bodies for medical research.
And in some cases, if a fresh body was required, these gangs would take things into their own hands and actually commit murder in order to provide that body.
On the morning of March 12th, so still less than 24 hours after Carrie had gone missing, Detectives Manning and Ash, along with a group of uniformed police officers, began canvassing the surrounding neighborhood outside of the hospital, hoping they weren't already too late.
And pretty quickly, they began finding witnesses.
A young boy who'd been outside at the time when Carrie had disappeared said he did see a woman in a blue dress just like the one Carrie was wearing running down the street right across from the hospital.
And a woman who lived nearby said she'd also seen the woman wandering down the street a couple blocks away.
Now.
This information didn't make it any clearer where Carrie was right now, but it at least gave the detectives some hope that they were finally on her trail.
So the detectives wanted to get Carrie's image in front of as many people as possible.
But back in 1900, reproducing photographs was not nearly as fast or easy a process as it is today.
However, photography had recently become more affordable for people, and newspapers regularly ran photos along with their articles.
So the detectives met with Kerry's brother Joseph and got photos of Kerry that they could reproduce as cards to show people around the city.
They would also put these photos in the local papers.
In the week following Carrie's disappearance, Manning Ash and their team walked the city, knocked on doors and showed Carrie's picture to everyone.
But nobody else beyond those initial witnesses had seen her.
Two weeks after Carrie's disappearance on March 25th, the detectives still had no real leads, and they were getting desperate.
By now they had searched the hospital and its grounds several times.
They had crisscrossed the city, dragged small ponds and conducted hundreds of interviews.
At this point, they could only think of one other place to look.
The canal that cut through town, that also was not far from the psychiatric hospitals.
In 1900 very few women were taught how to swim, so Manning and Ash thought Carrie might have wandered near the canal and with her limited vision and potentially with her inability to swim, she could have not seen the water fallen in and drowned.
So the detectives had city workers drain the entire canal and then, after it was drained, they led a group of volunteers through the mud looking for Carrie's body.
But after hours and hours of searching, they hadn't found any sign of her.
As more weeks passed with no new leads or evidence, the search began to lose momentum.
Carrie's brother Joseph, had started his own campaign going to different newspapers and asking them to keep putting photos of Carrie front and center.
Through his efforts, thousands of people had seen Carey's photograph, which was a shocking level of publicity for the year 1900.
Carey's face was by now well-known across the city.
But despite all this, by April of 1900 so about a month after Carey's disappearance the newspapers and detectives moved on and Carey's case went cold.
Joseph and his family never stopped believing that Carrie was out there somewhere.
And so every so often, over the next several months, they would put an article in the paper with a message to Carrie in it, promising that if she came out of hiding she wouldn't have to go back to the hospital.
She could come home instead.
But Carrie never did.
Fast forward two years to a day, in September of 1902, inside of an operating theater at a hospital right near the one Carrie had disappeared from.
A medical student wove through the crowd to a front row seat in the theater, which gave him a clear view of the operating room right below.
The student felt his heart speed up because in the center of the operating room he saw a table covered with a bright white sheet and he knew that underneath that sheet there was a dead body.
He and his fellow medical students had come to the operating theater today to watch a skilled surgeon dissect a real human corpse.
This demonstration was, at the time, one of the only ways that doctors in training could gain a better understanding of human anatomy.
And it was considered a huge privilege for them to get to witness something like this.
The sound of footsteps echoed from below, and immediately the audience fell silent.
The student saw the surgeon approach the operating table and he listened closely as the surgeon explained what they could all expect to see during this demonstration.
Then the student watched as the surgeon stepped up to the operating table and removed the white sheet, revealing the pale face of the corpse, underneath with a gold tooth glinting from its open mouth.
The student had expected to feel amazement when he saw the body, But instead he felt an unsettling wave of deja vu.
Something about the corpse's face looked familiar to him, but he just couldn't place it.
Then, suddenly, it just came to him, and he yelled it out without even meaning to.
It's the missing woman, he shouted.
Some of his classmates laughed uncomfortably, thinking maybe he was making a very bad joke.
But the surgeon called for quiet and asked the student what he was talking about.
The student stood up and said he would recognize that face anywhere.
The woman on the table was Carrie Selvidge, the same Carrie Selvidge who had disappeared from the psychiatric hospital a couple years ago.
Her photograph had been plastered all over the city.
Suddenly, all the other students in the operating theater all began talking at once as they leaned forward to get a better look.
They all remembered the missing woman, whose brother had given what felt like 50 interviews.
And they agreed.
The corpse on the table looked just like Carrie, down to the gold tooth.
Eventually the surgeon called out to the students to quiet down and clear out of the operating theater.
The surgeon had no idea if the med student was right, but he was not about to continue with this demonstration until he checked.
A few hours later, Detectives Manning and Ash stood in the operating theater with the surgeon, Carrie's brother Joseph and Carrie's dentist.
All the men stared at the body on the table, and they all had the same reaction.
It could be Carrie, but they weren't sure.
The medical school had not kept great records on when it actually acquired these bodies.
This particular one was slightly decomposed and had been frozen for a long time.
The dentist eventually spoke up and said the gold filling was the same kind he'd used for Carrie and it was in the exact same spot in her mouth.
At this, detectives Manning and Ash walked away from the table and huddled together in a corner to whisper to each other, occasionally taking a look back to make sure nobody, especially not Joseph, was listening.
They did this because what they were discussing was incredibly upsetting.
Manning and Ash knew that medical schools and hospitals had a hard time acquiring dead bodies for research through legal means, so these institutions often turned to the black market and grave robbers for their supply.
In fact, during the initial investigation, they had worried that Carrie might have been the victim of grave robbers, who were known to occasionally commit murder in order to increase their supply of dead bodies.
Now the detectives knew they were going to have to step into this dark, bizarre world of grave robbers to get answers.
And there was one man in particular they were going to have to talk to.
His name was Rufus Cantrell, but the media and the police called him the King of Ghouls.
Rufus Cantrell was actually already in jail, so it was easy for Manning and Ash to find him.
In just a few hours after they had stood over the corpse in the operating theater, they walked into an office in the jail and sat down at a table across from the man they thought could break their case open for them.
Now, Rufus had a reputation for being violent and sort of unhinged, so the detectives were surprised that he was in a very relaxed, almost jovial mood when they met him.
He told Manning and Ash that he would help them in any way he could.
Manning was suspicious of this level of cooperation, but he still told Rufus all about the dead woman in the operating theater, doing his best to describe the woman's appearance and her teeth.
Rufus nodded along as Manning spoke and then, when Manning was done, Rufus said he knew exactly who the detective was talking about.
That was the woman who'd gone missing from the psychiatric hospital over two years ago.
Manning looked at Rufus skeptically and asked how he could be so sure.
And then he watched as a wide unsettling smile spread across the king of ghouls' face.
Rufus said he was sure because members of the grave-robbing gang he was a part of had murdered her.
At this, Manning and Ash just stood there, staring in shock at the grave robber in front of them.
The detectives had come here expecting a very confrontational interview, not an immediate and creepily cheerful confession.
They actually didn't even know what to say.
So, after a moment of silence, Rufus just kept on talking.
He said he personally had not had anything to do with the murder.
All he knew was that his band of grave robbers had spotted a woman in a blue dress wandering along a country road and decided she was an easy target.
And they had been right.
They had attacked her and then dragged her to a house they worked out of in the city.
And once they got there, they clubbed her to death.
And then put out the word in their network that they had a fresh body for sale.
Rufus said that was when he had found out about this, around the time they were actually trying to sell the body.
He said that all he had done was actually help arrange the sale of Carrie Selvidge's body to the hospital and then, after her body had been sold, it would sit frozen for two full years until finally today, it had been scheduled for dissection.
Detectives Manning and Ash left the jail feeling a bit blindsided.
They knew there were countless reasons not to trust Rufus.
He was already in jail for one thing and probably thought that talking to detectives, especially about a case they were really interested in, might get him out.
And then there was the fact that this guy Rufus, had literally sold dead bodies on the black market and he was possibly a total psychopath.
But the murder scenario Rufus had outlined was something the detectives themselves had considered.
And in the weeks following that interview, the detectives actually had Rufus lead them, along with Carrie's brother Joseph, to the house where Rufus claimed the murder took place, and there they would find a club as well as pieces of women's clothing.
So, although Manning and Ash still remained skeptical of Rufus's story, the King of Ghouls had given them just enough evidence to finally close the case.
Carrie Selvidge was officially declared dead.
But there was just one problem, and that was that Carrie's brother Joseph absolutely refused to believe it.
Now, Joseph didn't have a good alternate theory about what happened to his sister, but the grave robber story made no sense to him.
Carrie had bad eyesight and she was generally nervous and unhappy, but she wasn't stupid.
She'd grown up in the city and knew not to wander alone at night down country roads.
Plus, he knew Rufus had gotten a lighter sentence in return for his story and cooperation.
So how true could it really be?
And also part of Joseph, just wanted to believe that his sister had escaped the hospital and found the freedom she so desperately wanted, and was now off, living happily and choosing not to let anyone find her.
And Joseph would hold on to this belief for a long time, until on April 26th 1920, so over 20 years after Carrie's disappearance.
On that day, Joseph got an urgent and confusing telephone call from the police at his home.
An officer said he'd heard from a construction company that was working on a building in town.
It was an orphanage that they were converting to an automobile repair shop, and this construction crew had found something that Joseph just needed to see.
Joseph ended the call and headed straight to the building, having no idea what he was about to find.
Once outside the orphanage, Joseph walked past several construction workers and then stepped inside the building.
Right away.
He heard somebody call his name and he looked over to see a man with thinning white hair walking towards him.
Joseph squinted, looked at the man's face, and then suddenly he recognized him.
It was Detective Manning.
Now Joseph felt a jolt of adrenaline.
Whatever this was, it had to be about his sister.
Joseph asked Manning if Detective Ash was here too.
But Manning just shook his head and said no, Ash had passed away a few years earlier.
Before the two men could really talk, they were joined by a member of the construction crew who handed the Meech a flashlight and gestured for them to follow him.
As Joseph walked through the building, he could see that the construction crew had already made a lot of progress.
But it still looked like parts of the building hadn't changed in decades.
And it was one of these old, untouched areas of the building where this crew member led Joseph and Manning.
And when they got there, the crew member pointed to an old stairwell set against a wall, signaling for Joseph to climb up the stairs.
Joseph hesitated, but only for a second.
Then he took a deep breath and slowly walked up the steps.
When he reached the top, he found himself standing in a dark, narrow hallway with a low ceiling that made him feel totally claustrophobic.
Joseph bent down, but it still felt like the ceiling was pressing in on him.
And as he walked down this hallway, shining his flashlight from side to side, it almost looked like the walls were closing in.
Joseph felt his chest tightening.
This place was cramped and pitch black and, even though he knew it was ridiculous, he had this feeling like he could get stuck here.
But finally, his light caught something at the end of the hallway.
It was a small door built into the wall ahead of him and it looked just big enough for him to fit through.
Joseph reached the end of the hall and caught his breath.
Then he opened the door and squeezed through.
He stumbled forward and found himself inside of a cold, damp room that was only about four feet by six feet.
But unlike the hallway, it wasn't dark and stuffy.
Instead, sunlight flooded this room through two windows.
It was bright and the air was fresh.
Joseph flipped off his flashlight and began turning in a slow circle, surveying the room.
And halfway through the circle, he froze.
At this moment, Joseph knew he had been right for decades.
That grave robber, the king of ghouls, Rufus Cantrell, had lied.
The body on that table in the operating theater had not been his sister's.
Because, leaning against the wall inside of the small room, Joseph saw the skeletal remains of a woman with tattered pieces of a blue flannel dress clinging to her bones and two old slippers lying at her feet.
Joseph turned away from the skeleton towards the window.
Through it, he could see almost the entire city.
And Joseph started crying.
Because now he understood that, as much as he'd wanted to believe it, his sister Carrie had never escaped and found her freedom.
Because it would turn out that the orphanage that Joseph had come to, where he climbed the old stairwell and found his sister's body, had once been the Union State Hospital, the psychiatric institution where Carrie had been committed.
The hospital had shut down not long after Carrie disappeared and the building had been used for several different things in the years that followed.
And now, the construction crew that was converting it into an automobile repair shop had discovered this old staircase by accident.
And that staircase led to a tiny hidden room that was located up above the attic and that had windows to the outside.
Joseph and the detectives had searched the hospital attic on the day Carrie went missing, but they hadn't noticed the staircase.
So they didn't know that Carrie had actually been right there, just above them the whole time.
The official report on Carrie's death would later conclude that her terrible eyesight had led her to become lost and wind up in this room and not know how to get out again, and then she froze to death.
But as always, Joseph did not accept the official statement.
In fact, he would spend years coming up with theories of his own.
But there was one theory that couldn't be ignored.
And that was that.
Maybe Carrie didn't get confused and stuck inside the room because she couldn't see.
Maybe when she crawled into that secret room, she had known exactly what she was doing.
Because Carrie had almost certainly been alive throughout the entire search of the hospital.
Staff, police, and her own brother had been just feet away.
But she never once called out or made any noise.
So maybe Carrie had just decided to sit there quietly looking out the window and across the city where she'd once been free.
And when night fell and she felt that bitter cold coming on, she chose to stay in that room, the only place she knew where she could be on her own and where nobody would tell her what she could and couldn't do.
On April 30th 1920, four days after the discovery of her remains, Carrie Selvidge was buried next to her mother and finally laid to rest.
As for the two witnesses who said they had seen Carrie basically right after she had gone missing, running down the street had simply been mistaken.
And the dead woman who had been on the operating table at the Westside Medical Clinic was never identified.
A quick note about our stories.
They are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.
The Mr Ballin Podcast Strange Dark and Mysterious Stories is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr Ballin.
Our head of writing is Evan Allen.
Our head of production is Zach Levitt.
Produced by Jeremy Bone.
Research and fact-checking by Shelley Hsu, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway and Camille Callahan.
Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear.
Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Lacascio, Jordan Stidham, and Cole Lacascio.
Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain.
Production coordination by Samantha Collins.
Production support by Antonio Minata and Delaina Corley.
Artwork by Jessica Clogsden-Kiner.
Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin podcast.
If you enjoyed today's story and you wanna hear more like it, go ahead and check out our YouTube channel, just called Mr Ballin, where we have hundreds more stories, a lot like this one, but most of them are not available on this podcast.
They're only available on that YouTube channel, which again is just called Mr. Ballin.
So that's gonna do it.
I really appreciate your support.
Until next time, see ya.
