The Terrifying Georgia Mental Asylum With 25,000 Unmarked Graves

Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia was once the largest mental hospital on Earth. Today, it is slowly rotting away. However, few realize there are actually thousands and thousands of unclaimed bodies similarly rotting just below the surface of this sprawling estate.

Here’s the story behind the 25,000 unmarked graves at this abandoned asylum.

Flickr/kmoney56

Flickr/Christopher Titzer

In 1842, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot and Epileptic Asylum opened its doors to patients afflicted with all manner of mental ailments. It was considered a state-of-the-art facility at the time, eschewing ropes and chains in favor of holistic care and work programs designed to help rehabilitate the patients.

However, as frequently happened in such 19th-century mental institutions, things took a dark turn as the years went on. The population of the hospital had ballooned while the capacity of the buildings had stayed the same.

By the 1960s, there were over 12,000 patients living at Central State Hospital, with only one medical staffer per 100 individuals. The gentle practices that the hospital had once pioneered fell by the wayside as staff struggled to cope with the massive population.

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Eventually, the asylum became known for its mistreatment of patients. This was the point at which the body count began to climb.

Local rumors told of children being locked into cages, patients being "treated" with electric shock therapy or insulin in order to keep them docile, and that some were left in straight jackets for weeks at a time. Patients were dying at alarming rates and being buried in unmarked graves on the hospital’s land.

Perhaps most shockingly, an investigation in 1959 revealed that out of the 48 doctors employed in the wards, none of them were psychiatrists.

Flickr/C Smith

The hospital eventually shut down in 2010. Because the property is closed to the public and protected by security guards, many aren’t aware of the thousands of bodies buried on the estate. Some graves are actually quite shallow according to ground penetrating radar.

Photos often surface of the roughly 2,000 markers located at the nearby Cedar Lane Cemetery. The scale of this memorial is mind-boggling, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

In fact, there are over 25,000 unclaimed and unidentified bodies buried throughout the hospital grounds. That’s equivalent to the population of a decent-sized town. This cemetery of markers is purely symbolic – it’s hard to even fathom what the what a graveyard would look like if each lost patient had his or her own marker.

We may never know the identities of the former patients lying beneath the earth at this hospital, but the curious can stop by the site’s museum, established to keep the asylum’s legacy alive.