Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald 75 Years -- March 10, 2023

Washington Times, 11-March-1923

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, novelist, dancer, painter and playwright, died 75 years ago today, on 10-March-1945. She was the widow of novelist F Scott Fitzgerald. She had lived for some time in Highland Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Asheville, North Carolina, being treated for what may have been what we now call bipolar disorder. The building caught fire and nine patients, including Zelda Fitzgerald, died. Sometimes I think about her last moments, locked in a room on the fifth floor of a burning building. 

Washington Times, 11-March-1923

Nine Patients Die as Fire Sweeps

Mental Hospital at Asheville

Screaming Women Trapped on Upper Floors;

Scott Fitzgerald's Widow Among Victims

By the Associated Press

ASHEVILLE, N. C., Mar. 11. -- Nine women patients perished here early today in the blazing inferno of a mental hospital fire.

Seven of the victims were trapped helplessly on upper floors of the four-story central building of the Highland Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Dr. B. T. Bennett, medical director, reported.

Two others were evacuated by firemen who dashed into the fiery structure, but they died soon afterward.

The hospital released the following names of the dead:
Mrs. A. T. Hipps of Asheville, Mrs. W. B. Kennedy of Kinston, N. C.; Mrs. Ida Engel of Clayton, Mo.; Mrs. Julius Doering of Johnson City, Tenn.: Mrs. J. R. Borochoff of Rome, Ga.; Miss Marthina De Friece of Bristol, Tenn.; Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald of Montgomery, Ala., widow of the author; Mrs. Virginia Ward James of Atlanta, and Mrs. G. C. Womack of Friendsville, Tenn.

The fire, discovered about midnight, started in the kitchen of the hospital's central building. It quickly spread to an elevator shaft and was licking the building's roof when firemen arrived.

Screams of trapped women rang out above the roaring conflagration as doctors, nurses, firemen and police ran through the blazing structure, risking their lives in an effort to save the 20 patients in the building.

They quickly huddled the rescued patients into another building where some sat silently, and others yelled hysterically.

Police Capt. Harold Enloe was the first man to reach the building. "I could hear screaming on the third floor," he related. "Flames by then were lapping through the roof of the building."

Every available piece of the city's fire-fighting equipment was called out and off-duty firemen were rushed to the scene.

The flames, leaping high into the air, lit up a large section of this mountain resort city. About 1,000 spectators, many of them dressed in pajamas, milled helplessly around.

The hospital, housed in several buildings about 3 miles from the heart of Asheville, is a unit of Duke University Hospital in Durham.

It was operated for about a quarter of a century by Dr. Robert S. Carroll, a noted mental specialist whose clientele included members of prominent families throughout the Nation. Dr. Carroll gave the institution to Duke several years ago.