St. Ignatius items up for sale before work starts on building

In an effort to clear out the St. Ignatius Hospital building, the new owners are attempting to sell items left in the hospital long ago.

“Old lockers, industrial little things, pipes, pieces of, well, we don’t even know what they are, tables, cabinets,” said Colby Rasmussen, an independent contractor out of Spokane helping with selling the items. “Most everything is fair game. If people want to come in and take cabinets off the walls, they can have them.”

Rasmussen and business partner Fay Ripley have been working with one of the building’s new owners, Keith Begin of Wisconsin, to get items out of the hospital in preparation for its future.

“We can’t just go demolishing all of this cool history that people might want,” Rasmussen said.

Rasmussen and Ripley spent most of July hosting sales at the building, and the most recent public sale was Saturday. She said it did not go as well as expected.

“It was lower than we anticipated,” she said. “Summer time is a hard time for people we think.”

The business partners are planning a new approach for the upcoming sale Aug. 12. Previously, interested parties have been allowed to come in the building and sort through items they may want. This required labor on part of the buyer, but that will change for the next round.

“We’re going to put in the labor beforehand and have the items out,” said Rasmussen. “It will be more like an estate sale.”

To price items, Rasmussen said she and Ripley have been relying on their knowledge of vintage items as well as similar items posted to eBay.

“We’re pricing what we know is probably the right price.”

“People can make reasonable offers,” said Rasmussen.

Rasmussen said there is still plenty for customers to come see and take home.

“There’s quite a bit left,” she said. “A lot of things we thought people would really jump on are still there.”

The hope is to sell most of the items prior to the fall.

“In the early fall we would like to move onto working on whatever the projects will be down there,” said Rasmussen. “We would like to sell the majority of the stuff before then.”

Rasmussen said she could not comment on plans for the building at this time. She said those are still mostly unknown.

The building for the the past two years has served as the site of the Haunted Hospital which has brought thousands of dollars in revenue to the Colfax Downtown Association and Chamber of Commerce. It also brought in people from all across the United States and even landed Colfax and the hospital on Good Morning America and with a one-hour slot on TLC’s Paranormal Lockdown.

Ghost hunts have been suspended for the majority of this year following the city deeming the building unsafe for habitation. The building sold in June, and plans have been underway since to fix it up.

Colfax Unified Executive Director Valoree Gregory said she has been in talks with the new owners to resume ghost hunts until plans are actually put in place for the buildings there.

“He came back with a different proposal than what we had initially proposed,” she said. “More than likely it’s going to be open for ghost hunts, but we don’t know who will be involved in it.”

Gregory said potentially the building owners could take over the hunts, but she is not sure at this time.

“Someone’s going to do ghost hunts because that’s what he wants to have done for the next year,” she said.