The caskets likely contain patients from the State Lunatic Asylum, which once stood on the campus. The grim discoveries have forced the college to revise its expansion plans.
The caskets likely contain patients from the State Lunatic Asylum, which once stood on the campus. The grim discoveries have forced the college to revise its expansion plans.
Surveyors plotting the expansion of a Mississippi medical school have come upon a chilling discovery: as many as 2,000 unmarked graves.
The bodies likely belong to the State Lunatic Asylum that opened on the University of Mississippi Medical Center campus in Jackson in 1855, said Jack Mazurak, a spokesman for the school.
The grim finds began roughly a year and a half ago when the school came across 66 graves. The university’s administration planned to exhume the bodies and reinter them in an on-campus cemetery.
But exhuming and relocating all the bodies in this month's massive discovery is too costly — around $3 million — so they will likely remain in place.
“It was a few (bodies) at a time at first and it seemed manageable,” said Mazurak. “Then it became more and more and more.”
The caskets — all lined up in a row — forced school planners to build a parking garage on a new site. Plans are being revised for an $11 million American Cancer Society Hope Lodge and Children’s Justice Center, as well.T
he undeveloped cemetery site has turned out to be an ideal setting for University of Mississippi archaeology students. “Really it was a great learning experience,” Mazurak said of one of the gravesites.
The insane asylum opened opened in 1855 and housed 150 patients. Eight years later the Union's 46th Indiana Infantry Regiment bivouacked there before laying waste to Jackson, according to the
Following the Civil War, the asylum expanded to house 300 patients. Later, a fertilizer factory and tuberculosis sanatorium were built nearby.
The asylum moved in 1935 and the state-owned land was designated to become the medical school in the 1940s, Mazurak said.
He added that the news has resulted in calls from all over the country from people who believe they might have relatives buried at the site.
One reporter for the Clarion Ledger wrote his great-grandmother might be among the dead.
“According to family accounts, she became so obsessed with the Holy Bible, she tried following it perfectly, and lost her mind,” Gerry Glenn Jones wrote.
Mazurak said the experience was another example of life in the Deep South.
“In Mississippi, the past tends to intersect with the present,” he said.
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