Stay in a place long enough and it might begin to reveal its secrets. A business on Center Street finally ends its six-month liquidation sale, quashing speculation about its survival. A neighborhood bistro’s opening becomes an invitation to walk around in a historic enclave just outside downtown. A phantom bridge, long fallen out of use, becomes a bridge to somewhere.

And a building steeped in mystery and mythologized in film and literature just might shed a bit of its cloak right before your eyes.

I was walking past the Oregon State Hospital one crisp evening in June when I noticed it – a townhouse-sized, front-to-back hole in the hospital’s historic J-building, a section of the facility slated to be torn down. Hidden behind the cover of a perfectly positioned tree was a three-story break between buildings. Where once there was the crumbling edifice of a building facing Center Street, there was only blue sky.

But there was something else.

Only through a digital image could I get close enough to really look at them: Two murals painted on the third floor walls of a hospital ward’s interior. The first, on the eastern wall, an Oregon coastal scene: a quiet fisherman’s wharf in the foreground, a lone figure standing on the dock peering into a bay. Behind him, the edges of a cliff jut into the sunset. Below him, three empty dinghies float aimlessly in the sullen waters. A fishing boat tethered to the dock rests after the haul.

It is an amateur work – the color palette a bit too garish, the sunset a tad cloying, the perspective off in the most charming ways. It has the composition of a tourist’s postcard. If I saw it as a print at the Salem Art Fair, I’d just flip on by.

And yet, this mural is among the most beautiful pieces of visual art I have seen in Salem, not really for what it is, but for what it does. It reveals something about life behind the walls of the State Hospital, perhaps a need to connect with natural settings whatever our limitations in reaching them.

This painting is slowly giving itself to the elements, the tear running straight down through the middle of the eastern mural frays more every day.

The second mural, to the west, is equally as quotidian. Seemingly rendered by the same hand, it depicts a mountain scene, a river flowing from a small lake through what looks like an Oregon forest into the foreground. Absent of all people, it looks plucked from someone’s memory. For all we know, it was.

Nobody has been able to track down any information about the paintings, which had been slumbering in a 126-year-old building before their recent exhibition to the public. The city’s historic preservation experts, the keepers of institutional memory at the State Hospital itself, even my neighbor, who was an orderly at the hospital in the 1970s and who starred as an extra in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, haven’t a clue who painted the murals, when they were painted, or what areas they might depict.

Like everything else at the State Hospital that hasn’t been revealed in a Pulitzer-prizewinning journalistic expose, or a novel, or a film, or a personal account, the murals are interesting because of what we don’t know about them. The lack of details about them startles me, but it also reconfirms that even in this age of instant information, and constant personal revelation, some secrets never get out.

The two murals will not be saved from demolition – that much is clear. Removing the murals would cost $150,000 a piece, a price too hefty for the hospital’s planners to consider.

I am not sad they will soon be gone – though I keep checking on them at least every other night. To me, their temporality has made them even more beautiful. Having known them for these few weeks makes me feel like a part of my neighborhood and of this place, at this exact time. I have been here, in Salem, walking by, at the moment of their quiet spectacle.