Restoring Lost Dignity
Law helps people find loved ones' remains at mental hospital depicted in film.
SALEM, Ore., June 30, 2007 — -- Oregon State Hospital in Salem was made famous by the 1975 movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," starring Jack Nicholson.
More than 30 years later, many of the buildings are now vacant. There are dust-covered hallways where dozens of wheelchairs now sit idle. Hanging from the wheelchairs are tags bearing patients' names. All of them are patients who have long since died.
For nearly six decades, the patients who died at this hospital were cremated. Their remains were stored in the basements of the hospital buildings here. Many of the buildings are no longer used.
Today, nearly 3,600 of those patients remain unclaimed. They are family members left behind.
"The canisters were stored in the basements of various buildings here, and then as those rooms were needed, you know, they got moved around," said Joni Detrant, Oregon State Hospital's spokeswoman. "We found paper labels on some of them, but most did not have labels. They were imprinted on top with numbers."
The numbers are all that is left to match the remains to aging medical records.
Sadly, mental health advocates say it is a picture mirrored across the country.
"These kind of master books or maps get lost, and all you're left with is a series of numbers," said Ken Duckworth, an advocate with the National Alliance of Mental Illness. "It just adds to the lack of dignity that these people have."
At Central State Hospital in Georgia, there are 25,000 graves with no names.
At a former mental hospital in Danvers, Mass., there are hundreds more.
But in Oregon, there is a new law that aims to restore some of that lost dignity. It allows current generations, armed with as little as a loved one's birth date, to learn if their relative's remains are here.
Bill and Rita Snyder learned of the effort. The Snyders wondered if Bill's two late uncles, who as a child, his family rarely spoke of, could be here. They were.
"It was alarming to think that they would be sitting somewhere in a basement," said Rita Snyder.
