State mental hospital reclaims forgotten graves

STEILACOOM - Thousands of bricks lie buried in a field across from Western State Hospital. Dig one up and you'll find a number etched into the surface, faded, like the memory of what it represents.

The bricks mark the graves of former patients at the mental hospital. More than 3,300 were buried there between 1876 and 1953, then largely forgotten.

People with mental illness were little understood and often feared at the time. That's why numbers instead of names were carved into the stone, to provide families with anonymity. The bricks slowly sank into the soft loam, and grass shielded them from view.

It became just another field where children played and people walked their dogs, until this spring when a small group of employees at the hospital learned about the cemetery and brought its condition to light.

Lisa Sechler, who works in the hospital's payroll department, would kneel in the field and stab the dirt with a screwdriver searching for bricks to uncover. "I felt it could have been me or anybody in my family, and would I want their graves to be grown over and forgotten?" she said.

Employees like Sechler, and patients at the hospital, spent months cleaning the cemetery and unearthing 425 gravestones. They showed off their progress at a dedication ceremony yesterday, the first day of Mental Illness Awareness Week.

Reclaiming the cemetery and its history is part of a larger effort to remove the stigma attached to mental illness, said Laurel Lemke, the hospital's ombudsman. "I've lived in the area for 15 years, and I didn't even know it existed," she said of the cemetery. "For me, it's a very healing experience."

The project is one of several similar but unrelated efforts going on nationally, said Larry Fricks, the director of consumer relations for the Georgia Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse.

Massachusetts, Minnesota, Arizona, Connecticut, Ohio and South Dakota also are reclaiming state-institution cemeteries, said Fricks, who helped put together a manual to guide groups with their projects.

Fricks was part of a group that discovered a psychiatric-hospital cemetery in Georgia where as many as 30,000 people are buried, their graves topped with iron markers.

"We discovered about 2,000 of the iron markers with numbers had been pulled up in the late '60s and '70s to make it easier to mow the grass and were never put back," he said.

Symbol of hopelessness

To Fricks, the forgotten cemeteries symbolize historical attitudes toward people with mental illness.

"It's a symbol of utter hopelessness," he said. "When those people went to state hospitals, not only did they not return to their communities, but many were simply buried on the grounds of the hospital.

"Tell me another hospital other than psychiatric, that you look out and see all those who came there for help buried on the grounds," Fricks said. "In theory, we were sent to a hospital to get well."

Sechler's research on people buried at Western State Hospital found that patients generally lived long lives.

"There was some sickness that went around, but most of them (died) from old age," she said. "I was looking through pages and pages of people in their 70s and 80s.

"It was different than I expected," she said. "I expected to see younger people, people in their 30s maybe. It was kind of a relief to see. They weren't just dying left and right."

As they died, most were buried in the field, usually with the numbered bricks. Several hundred were cremated and their remains are buried in three sites at the cemetery.

"There's not a real rhyme and reason as to how they got buried," Lemke said. "They got buried here and buried there. And there were supposed to be pathways, but they buried people in pathways."

Carla Wutz of Tacoma wandered around the cemetery for a while yesterday before finding her great-grandfather's gravestone, No. 1526.

Wutz had tracked it down through state records and has it marked on a map. It took her a long time to learn the truth, she said. "My grandfather knew, but he wouldn't tell."

Eventually she learned the story about her great-grandfather. He worked at a local brewery and a keg fell on his head, she said. "He was OK for a while," she said. Then "he went berserk one day and they put him here."

He died a few years after arriving at the hospital, she said.

Wutz is glad the hospital was there to care for him, and appreciates the work being done on the cemetery.

People in search of their relatives and their history "need a place to go and say `This is where they're at.' "

Many unclaimed bricks

Wutz found her past. But many more bricks stretch across the field unclaimed. Even today, the hospital will not publish the names attached to the numbers.

Fricks said it's important for hospital cemeteries in Washington and across the nation to be reclaimed and the people remembered.

"You're just talking about peoples' fathers, mothers, daughters, uncles, aunts and grandparents," he said. "It's a powerful statement that we are going to go back and making amends for the past."

It also sends a message, he said, that people suffering from mental illness are no longer condemned to live out their lives in an institution. Patients "can and do recover from severe mental illness."