East Mississippi State Hospital has, for well over a century, been a residence for people whose mental health problems are so severe that they cannot cope in the outside world.

For a number of those resident patients, mostly those who had no family and no money, the hospital also became their burial ground.

An estimated 2,000 patients have been buried in East Mississippi State Hospital’s Cedar Haven Cemetery. Because of the stigma associated with mental health problems in the past, many of those patients were buried in graves marked with only a number.

Because the hospital, which was originally named East Mississippi Insane Asylum, was established more than 125 years ago, records of who is buried in the cemetery are sparse at best. Hospital officials are unsure exactly when the cemetery itself was created, but guess that it began along with the hospital in 1885.

Diana Eggler, who works in the office of public information at EMSH, said the hospital gets calls every month from people who have learned that their ancestors died while in residence at the hospital and are interested in visiting their graves.

Most of the time, the hospital is not able to tell those people with any certainty whether their ancestors are buried in Cedar Haven Cemetery.

“Since the hospital’s been here for so long and the cemetery’s been here for so long, sometimes the records were just not kept well,” Eggler said.

The cemetery now marks all its graves with names, thanks to funding from a support organization, and to former employee Sadie May Green, who took an interest in the cemetery when she was employed at EMSH, working to discover the identities of some of the patients who were buried there and procuring funds for 650 markers.

Wednesday, a memorial honoring the hundreds of thousands of unnamed patients buried in state psychiatric facilities across the United States was dedicated at Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Because so many of the patients buried in Cedar Haven remain unidentified, and because descendants of former patients have shown interest in visiting their ancestors’ resting place, EMSH hopes to create their own memorial honoring the cemetery’s unnamed dead. Eventually, they hope to also purchase plaques for patients who are known to be buried in the cemetery with no marker, Eggler said.

“We owe it to them to see that they are remembered in the best way,” EMSH Chaplain and cemetery chairperson Rev. Patricia Carter said in a written statement. “We want to be able to give family members a place to go in order to remember their loved ones.”

For more information on East Mississippi State Hospital, visit them on the Web at www.emsh.state.ms.us.