7,000 bodies could be buried on Mississippi campus

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USA TODAY

7,000 bodies could be buried on Mississippi campus

USA TODAY

Jerry Mitchell13 hrs ago

JACKSON, Miss. — Experts estimate up to 7,000 bodies are buried on the University of Mississippi Medical Center campus.

They are former patients of the state’s first mental institution, called the Insane Asylum, built in 1855, and underground radar shows their coffins stretch across 20 acres of the campus, where officials have wanted to build.

But those officials have faced a steep cost — $3,000 to exhume and rebury each body, as much as $21 million total.

Now UMMC is studying the cheaper alternative of handling those exhumations in-house, at a cost of $400,000 a year for at least eight years. It also would create a memorial that would preserve the remains with a visitors center and a lab that could be used to study the remains as well as the remnants of clothing and coffins.

Ralph Didlake, who oversees UMMC’s Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, believes the lab would be the first of its kind in the nation — giving researchers insight into life in the asylum in the 1800s and early 1900s.

The Mississippi Lunatic Asylum included a main building and several wings.   

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Yikes.