Under Yazoo Clay

Host Larrison Campbell catches up with four of the people she interviewed for the podcast to hear new family stories and reexamine how this asylum continues to shape their lives.

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Kimberly Jackson’s family never wanted to lose track of her great-grandmother Zinnie, but somehow she still disappeared. Now, however, Kimberly thinks she may have the answers that generations of her family wanted. Meanwhile, those in charge of the remains of the asylum’s former patients have a different kind of search ahead. And Larrison learns how this cemetery will finally be woven back into the community.

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The Mississippi State “Lunatic Asylum” opened its doors in 1855, right before the Civil War. That timing would shape the next 80 years of the old asylum’s life. Almost 30,000 patients would pass through its doors. We know some of their stories, but what about the old asylum’s? Episode 4 tells the history of Mississippi’s first state hospital, the promises that were made -- and why they were broken. And Dr. Jennifer Mack reveals that not everything that got buried in the Yazoo Clay stayed a secret.

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Growing up, all Noah Saterstrom knew about his great grandfather was that he had been an optometrist. Those were the only words his grandmother could say about him before she’d start crying. Later, Noah discovers that the reason his family had erased this man was that he’d been sent to the state lunatic asylum. Noah decides to break the generations of silence with a show about his grandfather’s mental illness at the Mississippi Museum of Art titled “What Happened to Dr. Smith.”

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Larrison meets Wayne Lee, whose own grandfather was buried in the asylum cemetery. Unlike other descendants, though, Wayne has a skill that he believes has led him to his grandfather’s unmarked grave. Wayne tries to discover if what sent his grandfather into the asylum was even a mental illness, and we learn just why these answers have been hidden for so long.

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In Jackson, Mississippi, in 2012, a construction crew found human remains in the backyard of Mississippi’s biggest hospital. They turned out to be from a long-forgotten chapter of the state’s past–the old “lunatic asylum.” The asylum closed its doors in 1935 and that building, along with its cemetery where 7,000 former patients had been buried, was abandoned. Reporter Larrison Campbell travels to Jackson, where a show by the artist Noah Saterstrom has brought national attention to the asylum’s history. And she tries to understand just how 7,000 people could be forgotten.

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When human remains are found at the site of Mississippi’s biggest hospital, it unlocks generations of family mysteries. From the Mississippi Museum of Art comes a podcast about mental illness, secrets and a forgotten history.

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