In the Northwest corner of the old Central State Hospital grounds lies a nondescript field, bordered by a chain-link fence and choked by weeds and tall grass.
But this is more than merely an overgrown field. It is a long-forgotten cemetery — the final resting place of more than 200 residents who lived and died at Central State.
That’s not immediately evident. The tombstones have disappeared, removed decades ago for reasons lost to time. Burial records for the interred mental patients don’t exist, making the question of who lies there an unresolved mystery.
Now, the Indiana Medical History Museum is trying to change that.
Last month, in an effort to humanize the former Central State patients, the museum, with help from Ball State University archaeologists, set out to delineate the cemetery’s boundaries and identify what patients –– and how many of them –– are buried there.
The tedious task of tallying the graves will help the museum add to the site’s history by telling the stories of Indiana’s mentally ill population, a historically marginalized and often forgotten group. So far, they estimate about 235 patients are buried in unmarked graves in the field at the corner of Tibbs and Vermont.
Expanding the narrative
Central State Hospital, originally known as the Indiana Hospital for the Insane, opened in 1848 as a nexus for mental health care in Indiana.Asylums at that time typically resolved to keep patients out of society’s sight. But Central State was different. Its intention was to actually treat patients with schizophrenia, depression, hysteria, alcoholism, dementia and epilepsy.
“The idea was that people who have mental diseases are not possessed by demons, they’re not being punished by God for moral failings, and they’re not innately bad people,” said Sarah Halter, the museum’s executive director.
At its height in the 1950s, the site was home to about 2,500 patients. It closed in 1994, following several scandals surrounding patient abuse.
In 2014, Halter and her staff at the medical history museum began the long process of trying to humanize and memorialize the hospital’s residents. They began telling stories from the patients’ perspective through exhibits and by hosting events, a break from a narrative built by administrators and doctors, the majority of whom were white men.
“They’re the ones history remembers –– the ones who were writing the annual reports. The people whose names are on plaques on the walls,” Halter said. “We really wanted to focus on the patients because their stories are as important, if not more important. The hospital existed for them.”
Vickie Cole, 71, remembers the patients and their stories well.
Cole began volunteering for Central State Hospital in 1963, when she was 14 years old. She was a volunteer on Saturdays, playing with the children, then worked in different capacities until the hospital closed in the 1990s.
“These people, who were dealt the kind of life that you and I probably would not have survived, made a life out of it anyway,” Cole said. “They were resilient enough to create a life no matter what they were given.”
Halter and her team began the shift toward humanizing these patients by creating exhibits on the hospital’s closure from their perspective. They commissioned a play based on a memoir from a patient from the 1880s, and they had Nanette Vonnegut –– author Kurt Vonnegut’s daughter –– read material from her grandmother, who was a patient in the 1940s.
They also began reinterpreting the museum’s specimen collection. Previously, brains with lesions and tumors on display had been interpreted clinically, Halter said, with vague descriptions that left readers without a sense they were describing real people.
Scientific interpretations are important, Halter said, but they don’t portray the patients’ humanity.
“You wouldn’t really get a sense of (the patient’s) humanity, and it certainly…
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