Over 2000 'lost' graves found during construction at University of Mississippi Medical Center

[PunkerDuckie]

http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/08/us/mis...html?hpt=hp_t2

(CNN) -- Amid a grove of trees, buried beneath the grass and dirt, Mississippi's past is colliding with its future.

Surveyors last month discovered dozens of neat, tight rows of coffins just feet below the ground at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.

Sure, there were stories that there was a cemetery somewhere on the grounds of the medical center that today sits where the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum once stood.

But the location of the cemetery was lost to history. That's until an estimated 2,000 unmarked graves were discovered during a survey for a planned campus expansion.

The find has forced the medical center to halt its expansion and begin the daunting task of figuring out what to do about the 2,000 bodies lying in the path of their next big thing.

It's a scene that has played out in recent years in New York, California, Texas, Illinois and Wisconsin as developers look to build on what is believed to be vacant land only to find forgotten graveyards.

"As development continues likely more are to be found," Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropology professor at the University of Florida, said.

But the sheer size of the Mississippi find -- one of the largest in recent years -- has many asking one question: Who were these people?

Finding coffins

For as long as anyone can remember, construction workers and contractors have been finding the simple pine boxes on the property of the medical center, which opened in 1955.

There were four, five and sometimes six boxes with only skeletal remains found here and there on the grounds. Once, in the 1990s, workers building a laundry facility found about 40 unmarked graves, said Jack Mazurak, a spokesman for the medical center.

But last year, that number jumped with the discovery of 66 coffins during a road improvement project at the campus.

Over the years, there were rumors. Depending on who you asked, the coffins contained the bodies of the Civil War dead or slaves.

But experts disagreed. Historical records revealed the area was not a major battlefield during the war, and there was no indication in the state historical archives that a slave cemetery existed on the site.

The medical center partnered with the Mississippi State University anthropology department, with a team led by Prof. Nicholas Hermann, that was tasked with removing the remains for testing.

Almost immediately, Hermann's team determined the bodies were connected to the asylum, which opened on the grounds in 1855.

"We're guessing because there's no personal remains, no clothes, not even really any buttons or pins or anything, that they were probably residents of the asylum and either buried in a shroud or not buried with anything, so that would put them probably around in the mid to late 1800s to early 1900s," Derek Anderson, an archeologist on the team, told CNN affiliate WLBT shortly after the finds.

Once testing is finished, the bodies will be reinterred in the medical center's designated cemetery, Hermann said.

'A lot of graves'

A number of factors, from historical records to the layout of the coffins, led Hermann to believe this was just the beginning of the find.

When he found out the medical center was planning on building a cancer center and a children's justice center on the site, he said: "I think you are going to have a lot of graves."

Part of his assessment hinged on history. The asylum drew residents from across the state, people who were committed for a variety of ailments. Many, according to records, were institutionalized for years.

When residents died, few were claimed by families. Experts believe poverty may have also played a role -- families could not afford to retrieve and transport the bodies.

As a result, many were buried in unmarked graves in an area of the property believed designated as the asylum cemetery. Without headstones and markings to denote the outlines of the cemetery, it was swallowed up by time.

So how do you determine that without digging up the grounds and, possibly, disturbing the dead?

The answer: ground-penetrating radar.

"When I saw the printout of that ...property, it was mind-blowing," Mazurak said.

The radar survey showed hundreds and hundreds of coffin-like outlines in tight rows. Many were believed to be just four or five feet below the surface.

"As it turned out there were 800 to 1,000 graves on the southern piece of property, and another 1,000 graves on the north side of the property," Mazurak said.

'Living link'

Almost immediately, construction plans on the site were put on hold.

Already the university medical center was absorbing the cost to exhume and rebury the bodies found last year at a cost of about $3,000 each, Mazurak said.

Removing 66 coffins from underneath a road was one thing. But removing hundreds of coffins from an unmarked graveyard was another thing entirely.

"There is a living link to each grave," Mazurak said.

Exhuming and reinterring upwards of 2,000 bodies would cost millions, a price the university can't afford. So for now, the medical center will leave the dead where they lie and look for alternatives for the expansion.

As news of the find made headlines, people across the country reached out to the medical center.

The questions, in many cases, were the same: Can you tell me if my family member is buried there?

Searching for answers

That's the question Jannie White posed when she stumbled upon the news of the unmarked graveyard at the medical center.

White has spent years researching her family history, trying to piece together the path her family had taken from Mississippi north.

She grew up hearing stories about a great-grandmother who had been institutionalized at the asylum. The details were sketchy, and nobody was sure where the woman was buried or even what name she was buried under.

"I guess you would call it a rumor in the family. They kept saying she was in an institution a little bit outside of Jackson," White said in a telephone call from her Detroit-area home.

She picked up the telephone and started making phone calls, eventually connecting with Mazurak and others at the medical center.

"I asked whether they could tell me if she was buried there, and what name she was buried under," she said. "I'm just trying to find out what our last name was then."

But answers have been harder to come by.

Records related to the asylum are contained in 16 bound volumes at the Mississippi state archive, Hermann said.

The volumes, all handwritten, are rich with detail, chronicling the name, age, ailment and admission date for every patient from between 1855 and 1935, when the asylum was closed and relocated.

"Within those records, they provided a detailed account of how many people died every year and what they died of," Hermann said.

Hermann's team believes their research on the 66 skeletal remains may one day be able to determine who was buried where on the property, if not the exact location.

"People are very concerned about their relatives, and that's a driving factor," he said.

Studying the past

It's a years-long project that requires digitizing the records as well as testing DNA, primarily from teeth of the remains. Those results, Hermann says, will reveal details about where the person grew up regionally.

With that information combined with the records, Hermann and others believe it's possible to link the dead with the living.

Already, Hermann and his team have determined the 66 bodies uncovered during the road improvement project were buried late in the asylum's history, somewhere around the 1920s.

By knowing where the dead came from and what they died of, it will help shed light on the history and treatment of mental health conditions across the state of Mississippi in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Hermann said.

With a limited budget and less than a dozen people on the research team, the answers to many questions are likely years away.

But one thing, Mazurak says, is clear about the find in Mississippi: "The past frequently intersects, I almost want to say collides, with the present."

[Boston Babe 73]

This is why I want to be cremated. I prefer someone doesn't stumble upon me by mistake in a hundred years.

[PunkerDuckie]

You couldn't pay me enough to work in a building built on top of an old cemetery. I'm a wuss.

[kevansvault]

You couldn't pay me enough to work in a building built on top of an old cemetery. I'm a wuss.

Aww, come on...that'd be cool and you know it.

[PunkerDuckie]

hahaha.

No.

[puzzld]

You couldn't pay me enough to work in a building built on top of an old cemetery. I'm a wuss.

Not the dead ones you need to worry about...they won't hurt you. It's all the live ones.

[Boston Babe 73]

I'm with Punker. It creeps me out lol. I get vibes. I had to go to Phil Spector's house a couple of times. There's bad energy there. Its heavy. Bad . Hard to explain. I'm not psychic or a medium, but I'll call it sensitive to energy. Not where I would want to spend quality time lol.

[queenaevadamthng]

I agree with Punker and Bos. Bad Bad Juju. I was once told by someone that I was an empath. Don't know if I would go all there, but I am sensitive to a point. Especially places like that were people died under very sad circumstances. Not so much that I feel them on a psychic level, it's more me imagining how horrible their lives were and how badly they suffered. And then to be dumped and forgotten like a piece of trash in a landfill. Not a good feeling at all.

[hjtommt1]

I found some history on the asylum. It was supposed to be an improvement of conditions before 1855. It did have some history in the Civil War, even though it wasn't the site of a battle. So many graves...
http://msacp.cobb.msstate.edu/history.html

[Boston Babe 73]

I agree with Punker and Bos. Bad Bad Juju. I was once told by someone that I was an empath. Don't know if I would go all there, but I am sensitive to a point. Especially places like that were people died under very sad circumstances. Not so much that I feel them on a psychic level, it's more me imagining how horrible their lives were and how badly they suffered. And then to be dumped and forgotten like a piece of trash in a landfill. Not a good feeling at all.

This. I've been told MANY times that I'm an Empath. Only recently have I learned that you can try to ignore that part of you but that will never very work. I've only recently embraced it and it's SOME freedom. Control. Can't take control until you admit and submit. Stop fighting and take the bull by the horns. You'll feel a TON better. It's an OCD thing. Submit to control. Trust me.

Again. NOT psychic or medium. Just a heightened "feel”.

[PunkerDuckie]

I have a medical condition called the heebie jeebies. It's very serious.

[queenaevadamthng]

Heebie Jeebies is some serious stuff.....I hate it!

[blighted star]

This is an article from Australia's national broadcaster, looks like the estimates of 2000 were a little off - current numbers are up to 7000 bodies


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-1...xhumed/8513064

Two men sit scraping dust off a thin, wooden coffin in a trench.

Photo: In 2013, 66 graves were discovered. Current estimates place the figures between 5,000 and 7,000. (Supplied: UMMC)

After discovering remains of up to 7,000 patients from the state's first mental institution buried on campus, The University of Mississippi is now facing the logistical challenge of what to do with them.

The exhumation of patients from the former Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum in Jackson is estimated to cost the university more than $US21 million: $US3,000 to exhume and rebury each body.


It is a cost that University of Mississippi Medical Centre (UMMC) never envisaged when they set out to construct a new road to link the north and east areas of the campus in 2012.

Work was underway when construction equipment exposed 66 unmarked, wooden coffins.

At the time, UMMC said the coffins were less than two metres long but alarmingly narrow, "as if each held a pair of stilts instead of a human skeleton".

But archaeologists said the weight of the soil had compressed the coffins over the decades.

Since then, further remains have been unearthed across the 20-acre stretch, with archaeologists estimating the remains belong to about 5,000 to 7,000 people.

So what was hoped to be a road project expected to be completed in a couple of months turned into a significant logistical and financial challenge for UMMC.

A 2014 survey of the northern section of the old Mississippi Lunatic Asylum cemetery showing burial locations.

Photo: A 2014 survey of the old Mississippi Lunatic Asylum cemetery shows burial locations. (Supplied: UMMC)




At the time, UMMC said the coffins were less than two metres long but alarmingly narrow, "as if each held a pair of stilts instead of a human skeleton".

But archaeologists said the weight of the soil had compressed the coffins over the decades.


'Bedlam' at the Lunatic Asylum


Photo: The State of Mississippi's Lunatic Asylum operated from 1855 until 1935. (Supplied: Mississippi Department of Archives and History)

Prior to the asylum's operation, the state's intellectually and developmentally disabled population were reportedly held in jails, dungeons or even chained in closets and attics.

Although the asylum provided a place where they could live and be cared for, the conditions were squalid and during the Civil War era, the asylum was heavily understaffed.

A superintendent who visited Lunatic Asylum and later renamed it the Insane Hospital described the conditions as "verging on what the original Bedlam must have been like".

In 1935, the state of Mississippi moved the asylum to the present location of the State Hospital at Whitfield and two decades later, the UMMC was built on the same site.

'Respectfully preserving' and studying remains


A man sits by a half buried coffin, surrounded by other grave sites.

Since the discovery of the remains, the UMMC has tossed up ideas about how to best memorialise the remains.

In the meantime they have made use of the archaeological find, with graduate dentistry students and faculty studying the characteristics of the bones and analysing the dental remains.

Instead of the $US21 million exhumation and reburial process, the medical centre is floating a plan that would exhume the bodies at a cost of $US3.2 million over eight years.

This plan includes creating a laboratory to study the remains and an on-campus, public memorial to "respectfully preserve" the remains next to an existing campus cemetery where people who donated their bodies for education and research are buried.

A small, fenced-off cemetery amongst lots of trees.


Photo: UMMC's cemetery is home to those who donated their bodies for education and research. (Supplied: UMMC)

The university said such studies could reveal experiences and health conditions that ended in the institutionalised patients' deaths at a time when huge stigma was associated with mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia.

Molly Zuckerman, an assistant professor in Mississippi State University's Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, said many of the country's asylums dating back to the 19th and 20th centuries has been "lost to history or removed".

"But human remains represent archives and sources of information about human health and disease, and life experiences in the past that cannot be gotten from any other source of information," she said.

With the plans pitched at the preliminary level, the UMMC's next task will be to win the approval of the university's head and the college board and secure a financial backer in internal, state, federal and private sources.

[Boston Babe 73]

Yeah. Now you know why there's a diversion for forced mental health care. I'd like to think we're capable of developing a mental health care system that is much more updated and humane these days.

[catastrophe]

Quite the under-estimate originally made for number of graves.