Oregon State Hospital

Oregon State Hospital, Salem, was the setting for Ken Kesey's book "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" and the film was shot on location at the hospital.

In an article in the New York Times, Richard Levine described being given a conducted tour of the hospital whilst filming was taking place in 1975:

Dr. Brooks [the hospital director], however, felt that the therapeutic and financial advantages for those patients who got to work on the movie - as actors, technicians or maintenance people - far outweighed any disadvantages, although he insisted that the film be set in 1963 instead of the present and that a disclaimer be included saying that it is not a factual representation of life in a mental ward. ''I just hope people realize that this is an allegory about how a man can be caught up in the System and allowed to undergo electroshock and a lobotomy,'' Dr. Brooks said. ''Why, except for the one that was done two years ago, we haven't had a lobotomy in this hospital since 1958.''

One of the people who underwent a lobotomy at Oregon State Hospital was the train robber and killer Roy DeAutremont. According to one source, the operation left him easier to control but severely damaged. He died in Oregon State Hospital in 1983. Salem newspaper The Stateman Journal marked the eightieth anniversary of the robbery with an article:

Ray, Roy and Hugh DeAutremont held up a Southern Pacific mail and passenger train near Ashland on Oct. 11, 1923. After dynamiting the mail car and killing four men, they fled empty-handed and remained at large for four years.
The brothers eventually were arrested and sentenced to life in the Oregon State Penitentiary. All three were released before their deaths....
Ray worked in the prison flax mill. He learned several languages and taught French, Spanish and Latin in the prison school. He also learned to paint, and several of his landscapes won awards in local exhibits.
Hugh founded a monthly magazine called “Shadows,” which twice won national honors for best prison publication.
Roy worked as a barber and contributed to his brother’s magazine. He later was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was transferred to the Oregon State Hospital, where he had a lobotomy.(Capi Lynn, 1923 botched train holdup nears anniversary, Statesman Journal, October 7, 2003)