Now she has written it, too.

O'Rorke, a longtime volunteer at the state psychiatric hospital, is putting the finishing touches on a book that will cover everything from the hospital's opening in 1856 through its closing in 2008.

The only chapter that is missing is what will happen afterward.

O'Rorke is a member of the Friends of Dorothea Dix Park, a coalition of local groups pushing for all of the 300-acre site to be turned into an urban park. But she has written an epilogue that leaves the property's fate up in the air.

That way, she is covered if parts of the land are developed. "It would be nice if they decide this spring, so I can say one way or the other," she said.

The state Department of Cultural Resources plans to publish the book in late spring or early summer. Lang Baradell, O'Rorke's editor, estimated it will be about 250 to 300 pages, including historic photographs and drawings.

For the past three years, state and local officials have wrestled with what to do with the site.

In October, the state hired the nonprofit Urban Land Institute, which recommended the state sell the hospital campus for an estimated $40 million to Raleigh. The city would then create a nonprofit group to operate the site, preserving much of it as parkland and developing other portions.

A revealing past

Baradell said that O'Rorke, a retired nurse with an undergraduate degree in history, was the perfect person to write the book.

She first began volunteering at Dix in 1964, talking with patients, serving food, distributing medicine and helping run physical therapy programs.

When the volunteer guild moved into a historic building on Dix Hill in the early 1980s, O'Rorke signed up to write a short essay about it. She soon realized that the state hospital had no official history.

Over the years, she dug up newspaper clippings and photographs, read old minutes from directors' meetings and interviewed aging doctors.

What she found was a history in miniature of mental illness over the past 150 years.

In the mid 19th century, the popular theory was that the mentally ill had been stressed by city living and needed to be removed to more rural surroundings. That led to the creation of Dix on a wooded hill, then several miles from Raleigh.

By the 20th century, doctors had realized that there were physical causes for mental illness and developed rudimentary treatments. The hospital became more of an institution, with debate about how much to restrain patients.

O'Rorke, 83, said it was often hard to read about the treatments used in those days.

"[Doctors and nurses] didn't know any better," she said. "I'm sure they were at their wits' end sometimes trying to figure out how to treat people, but it often seems very cruel."

Spirit of the hospital

These days, the hospital is mostly used for patients with illnesses that are hardest to treat.

Dix, which had 2,500 patients at its peak in the 1960s, now has just a few hundred.

In 2002, the state announced it would close the hospital and build a new one in Butner, about a 45-minute drive from Raleigh.

The hospital's history has played a small role in the debate over its future. O'Rorke had to dispel a rumor among hospital employees that the original deed included a provision that the site had to be used as a mental hospital forever.

She is not entirely willing to rule out another rumor -- that the ghost of Dorothea Dix still roams the hallways. She has heard several times that the crusading mental health reformer, who died in 1887, can be seen at night.

"I think it's just the spirit of the hospital," she said.

It is a spirit she hopes will live on when the hospital closes. She said she thinks a park would help harried urban residents relieve stress, in much the same way that the founders hoped it would cure depression and other ailments.

"People need recreation for their own mental health," she said.