The University of Mississippi Medical Center may have to put construction plans for a new parking garage on hold: The university property where administrators planned to build was recently revealed to be a massive unmarked grave for perhaps 2,000 corpses.
The macabre discovery was announced earlier this week. Officials have long suspected that some bodies might be buried on the university-owned woodland property. But underground testing showed that the corpses numbered in the hundreds. There may be as many as 2,000.
It gets spookier. Some of the bodies belonged to patients in a lunatic asylum that operated between 1835 and 1955. Others are deceased slaves from the 19th century, and still others are Civil War casualties. Tuberculosis victims may also be buried at the site.
While any structure built on the site would assuredly become haunted, it is doubtful that the university can afford to develop the property. It would need to relocate the bodies first, and that costs about $3,000 each, and the university can’t afford to shell out $3 million to purge the area of corpses, according to The Clarion Ledger.
At this time, the university plans to build elsewhere, and leave the corpses in the ground.