At the house that has been dubbed “Starvation Heights” in Olalla, Washington, seven identical evergreen trees stand on the spot where seven bodies are supposed to be buried. Vanilla bottles that the good doctor’s husband drank to get drunk during this time of Prohibition lay littered and broken in the woods behind the house. Cutlery, they say, is moved from the kitchen’s cabinets to sit in the center of the kitchen room by the people who starved to death here. The myths and the facts about this place swirl together until you can’t tell who are the ghosts and who are the real people, just like you couldn’t tell then.
Doctor Linda Burfield Hazzard was an anomaly among physicians. First, she was a woman, but she also claimed that she had a revolutionary cure for all types of diseases. Fasting. Hazzard claimed that fasting, or specifically tailoring one’s diet to the limitations of one’s body, could cure all types of disease. Most doctors of this era called fasting cures quackery. She believed that other men in the field of science were too linked to giving drugs or other popular remedies, rather than letting the body heal itself, her own method.
Hazzard provided tailored eating regimes at her home, which she called “Wilderness Heights.” Her method was supposed to rid the body of its toxins. Hazzard’s patients, who stayed at her sanitarium for weeks or months, would only be given tomato, asparagus and orange juice. From the beginning, Hazzard’s methods were criticized, or in her words “persecuted.”
More than 40 patients died of starvation or other related causes under her care. Autopsies were performed on their bodies. When Hazzard autopsied the bodies herself, her patients always died from their diseases. When other doctors autopsied the bodies, however, they always died from starvation.
Many outside the sanitarium tried to explain why these patients stayed even when they were near death, but could only postulate that it was Hazzard’s charisma or black magic.
In 1911, two British heiresses, Dora and Claire Williamson, came to America for Hazzard’s treatment. Hazzard seized the opportunity of the sisters’ wealth to build the starvation sanitarium of her dreams. Claire would never return home, dying under Hazzard’s care at final weight of 50 pounds. Hazzard notated Claire’s cause of death as cirrhosis and stole her rings and dresses.
After Claire’s death, Hazzard told a weak Dora that her dead sister wanted her to remain permanently at Hazzard’s home. Dora resisted Hazzard, but was severely starved, as well, and could not care for herself. Hazzard applied for guardianship for Dora. Later, at her trial, the prosecution team would say that Hazzard wanted to keep Dora under her care so that she, Hazzard, would gain control of the sisters’ estate.
Hazzard was called to trial in Port Orchard, Washington on charges of manslaughter in Claire’s death. The prosecution proved that Hazzard had written Claire’s will, as well as the last entry in Claire’s diary. With ample evidence to prove her guilty, Hazzard was convicted of manslaughter in 1912 and sentenced to the state penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Hazzard served two years, but was released with a full pardon from the governor in 1915. In 1920, she came back to Olalla, built a huge sanitarium and continued practicing her starvation practices. Perhaps she got the ultimate comeuppance for her wrongdoings when she died of a starvation diet in 1938.