Swingle Mansion
What is it about a big, old, empty house that draws people? One such home is the infamous Swingle Mansion of Johnson City. It has gotten somewhat of a reputation for being haunted over the years, and stories abound about the travesties that supposedly took place at the old hospital. Local legend tells that Dr. Swingle was a very sloppy surgeon who accidentally killed more patients than he helped. To cover everything up, he allegedly buried the bodies in the backyard. It is said that if anyone were brave enough to venture to the backyard, they would hear the screams of his victims. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth:
Dr. Edward Thurston Brading attended Tusculum College in Greene County, Tennessee, and later went on to Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts to receive his degree. He moved out west to set up practice, but moved to Johnson City sometime between 1940 and 1942. There, he befriended other doctors:
Dr. Carroll Hardy Long was born in 1905 on West Walnut Street in Johnson City. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and spent two years as a resident at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. When he returned home in 1932, he became partners with his father, who had come to Johnson City in 1891. One of his first surgeries was repairing the intestines of a young African American man. With chloroform for anesthesia and a dining room table as an operating table, he was unable to replace all of the man’s intestines and he died; these events were published on the front page of the Jonesborough Herald & Tribune; he died in 1936. Through Carroll, Edward met Dr. Hugh F. Swingle, Jr. and Dr. Jack Gordon’s.
It was Dr. Jack Gordon’s father, L. E. Gordon, then the principal owner of the Empire Chair Company, who’s financial backing allowed the group to purchase Agnes J. Crouch’s (who bought the house from the Adam’s family) three-story brick house on North Roan Street at the price of $45,525.00 on February 25, 1948. They decided to call their business The Clinic Hospital, Inc., and Hugh was the President.
The next year, the clinic opened its doors and it soon employed Dr. Edward Thurston Brading and two years later, Dr. Benjamin "Owen" Ravenel of Charleston, North Carolina, who once attended The McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Davidson College in North Carolina, and later graduated as a physician from the Medical University of South Carolina. Owen was a skilled pediatrician and found a notch in the Tri-Cities.
Two years later, Carroll left the area to get board certification at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine of Wake Forest University and North Carolina Baptist Hospital of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Not too long after, Owen also left Hugh and Edward to fend for themselves. The partnership failed and Hugh was left holding the bag.
For a while, Hugh tried to maintain the clinic by himself, but even with the help of other doctors, the Swingle Hospital closed its doors in the 1960s, some say because of a rampant staph infection outbreak. Hugh went on to work with the Veterans Administration. He later died prematurely of colon cancer and was survived by his wife Joan and his son, who is named after his father.
Since the house sat vacant for so many years, it certainly attracted its share of homeless people and young adults who were “up to no good.” It may have been one of these that sat the fire in the house that eventually led the owner to board up the house and put up a “No Trespassing” sign.
Perhaps Dr. Carroll Hardy Long’s association with Hugh F. Swingle, Jr., and Carroll’s father’s tragic mistake that tainted this house and turned it more into a haunting house, not a haunted house.
