Fan Favorite - "You Can't Leave That Way"

0:00Today's episode is a fan favorite. The audio and 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 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.

0:41If 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.

1:14So, 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.

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2:45On the morning of March 11th, 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.

3:23To 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 schoolteacher, saving money and building a life for herself. But over time, Carrie had become overwhelmed and sad, and she couldn't even explain why.

4:04She 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.

4:39She 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.

5:18She 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, her 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.

5:56Once she was sure the coast was clear, Carrie took a breath, lowered her head, and walked out of her room.

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7:39About 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.

8:22They 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.

8:46At 6 p.m. 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.

9:24The 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.

10:06Later 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 Kerry's known movements. The detectives also found Kerry'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.

10:48So, 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.

11:24What they didn't tell Joseph was that if Carrie had truly wandered off the hospital grounds and out into the city than 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. Carrie 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.

12:17On 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.

12:52Now, 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 Carrie's brother, Joseph, and got photos of Carrie that they could reproduce as cards to show people around the city.

13:29They 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.

13:52Two 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 hospital. 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.

14:32So 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.

14:50As 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 Carey was out there somewhere.

15:32And 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.

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17:06Fast 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.

17:43This 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.

18:23The 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 Selvage, the same Carrie Selvage who had disappeared from the psychiatric hospital a couple years ago.

19:04Her 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.

19:45A 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.

20:32They 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.

21:09And 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.

21:48He 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 Ghoul's face.

22:25Rufus said he was sure because members of the grave robbing gang he was a part of had murdered her.

22:33At 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.

23:12And 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 Selvage'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.