Ten years ago, I had a library visit from a hospital staffer who excitedly asked me to provide him information about the “dead people in the park.” Although I’ve received some odd questions during my years in the library of a state psychiatric hospital, this request was something unusual even for me. I suppressed a grin and asked him to give me more details. He told me he had stumbled upon a numbered stone during his lunch break walk in the park across the street from the hospital and was sure he had found the old patients cemetery of the hospital. I shrugged my shoulders and referred him to the campus historical expert. He left, and I thought that would be the end of talk about “dead people in the park.”

Not so. Two weeks later I received a call from my friend Laurel who invited me to attend a meeting after work about what to do about those “dead people in the park.” Now I was taken aback. Laurel is typically level-headed. She informed me that not only were there bodies in the park, there were over 3000 interred in a cemetery.Patients who lived and died at the “insane asylum” often had lost touch with their family members. The state bore the responsibility to bury their remains. Stigma about mental illness inspired lawmakers to stipulate that persons buried on site at a insane asylum must not name the deceased. Only a stone marker indicated the final resting place of somebody’s child, parent, relative.

More to follow….

Tags: cemetery, death, insane asylum, psychiatric hospital libraries, Western State Hospital, Western State Hospital Library, Western State Hospital Museum, WSH

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