The Forgotten Dead Beneath Asylum Hill: Mississippi's Lost Cemetery of the Insane
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
For decades, thousands of students crossed the campus of the University of Mississippi Medical Center without realizing they walked above one of the state’s largest forgotten cemeteries. Just a few feet beneath sidewalks, parking lots, and buildings rested the remains of patients who died inside Mississippi’s first state asylum for the mentally ill.
Their names faded. Their graves disappeared. Yet their stories refused to stay buried.
The Birth of Mississippi’s First Asylum
In 1855, Mississippi opened the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum in Jackson for $175,000. Like many public institutions built during the mid-nineteenth century, it promised refuge for the poor, abandoned, and mentally ill. Reformers envisioned compassionate treatment, but reality quickly proved far harsher.
The institution struggled almost from the beginning.
During the Civil War, Union troops stripped the grounds of livestock, leaving patients and staff without vital resources. Seven of the asylum’s ten employees left to join military service, forcing those who remained to care for hundreds of vulnerable patients under increasingly desperate conditions.
Disease followed hardship.
Within five years of its opening, there was no space for male inmates. In 1870, newspapers published that the asylum was full, and warned families not to show up with a patient since they would be turned away.
The average wage of an attendant was $20 per month.
By the 1880s, contaminated ponds supplied much of the institution’s drinking water, spreading illness throughout the patient population.
In 1900, officials renamed the facility the State Hospital for the Insane, but a new name did little to solve old problems.
A City Called Asylum Hill
At its peak, the hospital housed nearly 6,000 patients. Overflow accommodations spread into nearby houses, a school, and even a church. The surrounding neighborhood eventually became known as Asylum Hill.
The area evolved into a self-contained community. A fertilizer factory, orphanage, and tuberculosis sanatorium were employed while the asylum remained its centerpiece.
When the hospital closed in 1935, officials transferred the remaining patients to the State Hospital at Whitfield.
During its eighty years of operation, approximately 35,000 people passed through its doors.
Many never left alive.
Most families either could not afford transportation or simply never claimed their loved ones. Hospital workers buried thousands of patients in simple pine coffins beneath modest wooden crosses in the asylum cemetery.
Graves Forgotten by Time
For nearly twenty years after the asylum closed, the cemetery remained largely undisturbed.
Then, in 1955, construction began on what would become the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
The fragile two-foot wooden crosses, their names painted by hand decades earlier, slowly rotted beneath Mississippi’s unforgiving climate. As buildings replaced open fields, the cemetery disappeared from memory. Even the asylum itself was demolished.
In the mid-1990s, workers installing utility lines uncovered forty-four pine coffins. No markers remained. No names survived.
Officials simply reinterred the remains in the university’s cemetery for anatomical donors, and construction continued.
The forgotten dead slipped back into silence.
The Cemetery Returns
That silence ended in 2012.
Road construction at the University of Mississippi Medical Center uncovered another sixty-six pine coffins. Investigators soon realized crews had cut directly through one of the asylum’s abandoned burial grounds, where most interments dated from the 1920s and early 1930s.
The discovery sparked a far larger investigation.
The following year, excavation for a parking garage beside the dental school exposed nearly 1,000 additional coffins. Ground-penetrating radar soon revealed something even more astonishing. More than 2,000 graves stretched beneath the surrounding property.
Using nineteenth-century hand-drawn maps, researchers estimated that between 7,000 and 11,000 patients remained buried across the twenty-acre site.
Mississippi’s forgotten cemetery had finally resurfaced.
More Than Bones
The discovery presented an enormous challenge. Relocating every burial would cost thousands of dollars per grave. Yet archaeologists recognized an unprecedented opportunity to study nineteenth-century public health, institutional care, nutrition, and disease. Researchers also hoped to restore identities lost for generations.
By extracting DNA from skeletal remains and comparing it with living descendants, families might finally learn where their relatives had been buried.
The Families Searching for Answers
Karen Clark of Clinton, Mississippi, believes her great-great-great-grandfather, Civil War veteran Isham Earnest, died at the asylum between 1857 and 1859 after officials declared him insane.
Another descendant, Penny Stiles, traced the heartbreaking story of her great-grandmother, Bulah Jackson.
Bulah entered the asylum in 1901 shortly after giving birth to her son. The following year, a deputy shot her husband in the leg while resisting arrest. Authorities sentenced Thomas Pritchard to prison as an accessory to murder.
Eventually, Pritchard remarried. On official records, he listed Bulah as deceased. She wasn’t.
The 1940 census still listed her as a patient at the institution. She had entered the asylum in her early twenties and remained confined there into her late fifties.
A Colonel’s Final Battle
Among the asylum’s forgotten dead rests Charles Gaines Armistead.
Born in 1826, Armistead served as both a lawyer and Mississippi state senator before the Civil War. During the conflict, he commanded the 12th Mississippi Cavalry and led the feared Confederate unit known as Armistead’s Raiders.
Battle wounds changed his life forever.
He suffered gunshot wounds in both 1863 and 1864, eventually developing paralysis.
On June 28, 1869, he died inside the asylum from what physicians described as “war wounds and resulting insanity.”
His wife, Fanny, had died thirteen years earlier.
The Tragic Flight of E.L. Berry
One of the asylum’s most haunting stories unfolded in late 1898.
On November 24, 1898, E.L. Berry, a one-legged patient at the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, broke away from his attendant and fled toward the swamps surrounding the Pearl River. Berry suffered from the terrifying belief that someone was pursuing him, a delusion that drove him deep into the wilderness.
Searchers failed to find him.
Investigators later pieced together his final hours. Berry apparently attempted to cross the Pearl River by removing his clothes and wooden leg before swimming toward a small stand of willow trees about thirty yards from shore. For reasons no one could determine, he turned back before reaching the opposite bank, leaving his artificial limb behind in the water.
After struggling back to shore, Berry dressed himself, rested his head against a fallen sapling, and lay down to recover.
He never got up again.
Starvation and exposure claimed his life.
Several days later, in December 1898, a local man named Willie Barr noticed a wooden leg floating in the Pearl River. The discovery led searchers to Berry’s body, which lay nearby where he had died alone in the woods.
Berry had spent only three months at the asylum. Doctors reportedly believed his condition had improved so much that he was close to recovery. Before his commitment, he had worked as a telegraph operator and made his home in Port Gibson, Mississippi.
History records the circumstances of his death but leaves one final mystery unanswered.
No surviving record reveals whether his family claimed his body for burial or whether hospital staff laid him to rest among the thousands of forgotten patients in the asylum cemetery.
The One-Armed Fiddler
Another remarkable story belongs to William Edward “Ed” Franks.
Born in 1884, Franks endured tragedy early in life when his first wife, Amelia, died during childbirth in 1904 at only nineteen years old. Their infant son Lauson survived only a few months.
Franks later remarried and raised nine children with his second wife, Martha.
Somewhere before World War I, he lost his right arm in either a logging accident or a shooting. Remarkably, he continued playing the fiddle despite the devastating injury.
In 1929, during Prohibition, Franks became involved in a violent confrontation at an illegal moonshine still where one man died.
Authorities never clearly established his role in the shooting, but afterward he developed severe paranoia.
Doctors committed him to the asylum later that year. He died there on August 6, 1931. By then, his family had moved to Arkansas. No one returned to claim his body.
Hospital workers buried him in an unmarked grave.
John Benedict Whitfill: A Victim of Poverty and Disease
The story of John Benedict Whitfill illustrates how poverty often led people to the asylum just as surely as mental illness.
During the Great Depression, Whitfill left his native Kentucky for the Mississippi Delta, hoping the region’s cotton fields would provide a better future for his family. Instead, he found the unforgiving life of a tenant farmer in Leflore County, where endless labor brought little reward. Although the Delta stood at the heart of Mississippi’s cotton empire, survival remained a daily struggle for many families.
Chronic hunger soon took its toll.
Whitfill developed pellagra, a disease caused by a severe deficiency of vitamin B3 (niacin). Common throughout the rural South during the early twentieth century, pellagra caused physical decline as well as neurological symptoms. His teeth fell out, his health deteriorated, and he began suffering from delirium. At the time, many physicians mistook the disease’s mental symptoms for insanity.
Unable to care for him, Whitfill’s family turned to the local sheriff for help. The sheriff transported him to the Mississippi State Hospital for the Insane, where doctors admitted him in late 1931.
He survived only about two months.
Whitfill died in January 1932 at the age of fifty-four.
No relatives claimed his body, and hospital workers buried him in an unmarked grave in the asylum cemetery. A short time later, the sheriff returned to Whitfill’s family to deliver the news of his death.
His widow, Margaret, eventually left Mississippi and returned to Kentucky in 1943.
Decades later, members of the Whitfill family traveled back to the former asylum in hopes of finding his grave. Instead, they learned that the original burial records had been destroyed, leaving them with no way to locate the place where he rested.
Because the asylum closed only a few years later, historians believe John Benedict Whitfill was likely among the last patients buried in its cemetery before the institution transferred its remaining patients to Whitfield in 1935.
His story also reflects one of the most tragic discoveries made by modern archaeologists. Many of the excavated skeletons show unmistakable signs of pellagra, confirming that malnutrition—not simply mental illness—sent countless Mississippians to the asylum, where many ultimately died and disappeared into anonymous graves.
Excavating the Forgotten
In October 2022, archaeologists working with the Asylum Hill Project began carefully excavating a four-acre section of the former cemetery.
As research expanded, estimates of those buried there increased to nearly 10,000 individuals.
The remains told stories that written records never could.
Dental analysis revealed widespread malnutrition and prolonged stress.
Other remains showed evidence of syphilis, a disease that often progressed into neurological disorders once mistaken for insanity.
A Century of Silence Begins to Speak
In May 2026, archaeologists at the University of Mississippi Medical Center announced they had excavated 1,070 graves from the former asylum cemetery.
Each discovery added another chapter to the institution’s forgotten history.
“We have a few bone fragments, a few teeth, and the nails from the wooden coffins,” archaeologist Jennifer Mack explained. “Every single person buried here was in his or her own coffin and in their own grave, and they were lined up neatly.”
Hospital records from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveal that staff generally buried patients whose families lived too far away, could not be located, or lacked the means to retrieve their loved ones.
Excavations have uncovered far more than human remains.
Researchers have recovered coins, jewelry, buttons, fragments of formal clothing, and other personal belongings—small reminders that every grave belonged to someone with a life, a family, and a story.
No cemetery maps survive. No grave markers remain. Yet with every excavation, another forgotten voice emerges from beneath Asylum Hill. The dead, long erased from memory, are finally telling their stories.