Hospital Where "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" Was Filmed to Be Torn Down

The Associated Press reports that Oregon State Hospital, the mental institution where the 1975 movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was filmed, will be torn down. Most of the main building will be torn down and replaced, starting this fall.

In recent years, Oregon State Hospital has struggled with a slew of troubles including crumbling floors and ceilings, overcrowding, outbreaks of scabies and stomach flu, sexual abuse of children by staff members, and patient-on-patient assaults.

While politicians had been talking for years about the need to replace the hospital, discussion did not become serious until a group of legislators made a grim discovery during a tour in 2004 of the cremated remains of 3,600 mental patients in corroding copper canisters in a storage room.

"Nobody said anything to anybody," said Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney, who dubbed the chamber "the room of lost souls."

The remains belonged to patients who died at the hospital from the late 1880s to the mid-1970s, during which time mental illness was so stigmatized that many patients were all but abandoned by their families in institutions.

Courtney added, "It just created such an emotional momentum for replacing the hospital."

While Cuckoo's Nest was filmed at Oregon State Hospital, neither the movie nor the 1962 Ken Kesey novel on which it was based makes any specific references to the hospital. In his novel, Kesey drew on his experiences working at a veterans hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., and set his satirical story at an unnamed institution in Oregon.