Discovery of asylum's mass grave halts U. Miss. construction project
The University of Mississippi's School of Medicine was forced to delay construction of a parking garage after tests revealed the presence of as many as 1,000 bodies buried at the Jackson, Miss., site.
They were not identified, according to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, and are thought to have been former patients at the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, which closed about 80 years ago.
The discovery wasn't entirely unexpected, university spokesman Jack Mazurak told Yahoo News. "The property that the University of Mississippi Medical Center is located on used to be the location of the state insane asylum, which operated from 1855 to 1935," Mazurak said.
"Historically we knew that there were a lot of graves, many of which were not marked. In the '90s, we took the handful of marked graves and reinterred them in a designated cemetery area," he said.
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