Central State Hospital

Central State Hospital buried ten thousand patients under numbered plaques. In 2020, radar found bodies where no records showed any.

There is a cemetery behind the campus where the patients were buried under numbered plaques instead of headstones. One section alone has an estimated 235 graves, and in 2020 archaeologists at Ball State University used ground-penetrating radar to figure out where the bodies actually were, because nobody had kept good records. Central State Hospital opened in 1848 as the Indiana Hospital for the Insane and closed on June 30, 1994. Somewhere around ten thousand people died on the grounds across those 146 years. Most of them are still there.

On Christmas Day 1883, superintendent William Fletcher hauled every mechanical restraint in the building out into the yard and burned them in a public bonfire. It was one of the great defiant gestures in nineteenth-century American medicine. He got fired for it. The restraints came back within months. The institution that became Central State had opened thirty-five years earlier after reformer Dorothea Dix came through Indianapolis in 1844 and wrote a damning report on the jails and almshouses where the mentally ill were being warehoused next to violent criminals. The state responded by opening a 160-acre campus on West Washington Street with five patients on November 21, 1848. At its peak the place held over 2,500 people in buildings designed for far fewer.

Lobotomies in the 1940s and 50s. Electroshock therapy. Experimental treatments on patients who couldn't consent in any meaningful sense. The 1896 Pathological Department, which still stands on the campus and now houses the Indiana Medical History Museum, was designed by Adolf Scherrer with a 150-seat teaching amphitheater and a morgue. Staff collected and preserved more than two thousand human brains from deceased patients, labeled only with case numbers, stored in formaldehyde jars. Most of the jars sat forgotten for decades.

Investigators, maintenance staff, and security guards have described the same pattern for decades. The Old Power House, which dates to 1886, is the worst of it. A woman's screams echo from the basement. The old boiler turns itself on and off. A former security supervisor who worked the grounds in the 1980s described hearing footsteps in the administration building when he was the only person on shift.

In 2006, paranormal investigator Maggie Zoiss and two colleagues set up base camp in a second-floor room of the administration building for a documentary shoot. It was hot. They were trying to figure out how to open a stuck window. Zoiss's account: "all of a sudden three of us heard a voice say, 'Pull down from the top.' I asked everyone in the room who knew how to get the windows open. Everybody said they didn't know how to open the windows." The window was a transom style. Pulling down from the top is exactly how it worked. None of them had ever used one before. They also recorded a childlike voice on the same session.

Near the former worker dormitories, maintenance staff have documented cries in the night described as a woman calling from somewhere in the dark. The cemetery produces a heavy pressure in the air that investigators compare to being pressed down on the chest. During recent construction for an IMPD K-9 facility on the grounds, crews accidentally dug up the remains of three former patients and disturbed them during backfill. The campus began redevelopment in 2010 as the mixed-use Central State Village, and residents of the converted apartments have described doors opening on their own, sudden cold, and figures standing at the foot of their beds in the middle of the night.

Most of Central State Hospital has been demolished. The Old Power House is fenced off. The 1896 Pathology Building is a museum. The cemetery is a mown field with numbered plaques where ten thousand people are buried as case files.