When the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum closed in 1935, its cemetery was unceremoniously forgotten. The plant life became tangled overgrowth, wooden grave markers deteriorated, and the thousands of marked and unmarked graves there lay untouched for decades. The land eventually became part of the grounds of the University of Mississippi Medical Center. When the institution rediscovered the graves during construction on campus in 2012, it started the Asylum Hill Project to research the history of the cemetery while respectfully studying, memorializing, and moving the deceased to a more suitable location…
