March 6, 2025 • 34 mins
In Jackson, Mississippi, in 2012, a construction crew found human remains in the backyard of Mississippi’s biggest hospital. They turned out to be from a long-forgotten chapter of the state’s past–the old “lunatic asylum.” The asylum closed its doors in 1935 and that building, along with its cemetery where 7,000 former patients had been buried, was abandoned. Reporter Larrison Campbell travels to Jackson, where a show by the artist Noah Saterstrom has brought national attention to the asylum’s history. And she tries to understand just how 7,000 people could be forgotten.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Imagine for a moment that it's fifty million years ago.
The earth is incredibly hot, about twenty five degrees hotter
on average. There are gators in Canada. The Gulf of
Mexico is the stuff of present day nightmares. It swallows
(00:24):
the bottom halves of Mississippi and Alabama and the whole
state of Florida. The Mississippi River is not yet an
old man, but it's flowing. It's at the mouth of
this river that the trouble begins, because as the river flows,
(00:44):
a fine layer of blue black silt begins to settle
around the delta. And this isn't just any silt, it's
mineral heavy, the decay of everything the river has held
over the millennia. The river will get faster and change course.
This layer of silt will move with it, fanning out
(01:05):
along the shallow waters of this ancient sea. After another
twenty million years or so, it'll become a layer of
clay four hundred feet deep in some parts. And it's
right on top of the thickest part of the clay
that one day Mississippi will decide to build its capital city.
(01:29):
This is, to put it mildly, a terrible decision because
this clay is a burnt orange monster. It's made of
a mineral called smectite, so absorbent it can swell to
two hundred times its size when wet and shrink just
(01:51):
that much when it's dry. Over the next two hundred years,
follow roads and send homes tumbling into creeks, cracked pipes
and concrete foundations and even bones. It's called Yazoo clay,
(02:13):
and it's where our story begins. I'm Larison Campbell, and
this is under Yazoo clay as it happens. I am
(02:35):
intimately familiar with this clay because Jackson, Mississippi, that poorly
placed capital city, is where I used to live. This shifting,
swelling soil has completely shaped the character of the place
and everyone who lives there. Residents are used to broken
water mains and boil water notices and seeing trees and
(02:58):
utility poles in their neighbor's yards. But there's an upside
to this chaos. In a place as fractured as Mississippi,
complaining about Yazoo clay is kind of the one thing
everyone can agree on. It's like traffic in Los Angeles
or the weather in New England. So when my producer
and I found ourselves at a fancy Jackson art opening
(03:21):
talking about dirt, I wasn't too surprised. It is the strangest,
most destructive soil I've ever dug in before. Still, I
never heard it talked about quite like this.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
It has character, It is a mind of its own.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
It seems this is Gabby and Stasia. They've got a
very different relationship with the clay because they spend all
day in it. These two are archaeological field texts.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Destructive like to the to stuff in the ground, or
like to tools.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
All of the above. What Gabby and Stasia are digging for, well,
that's kind of the whole reason we're in Jackson. But first,
the art opening. It's foreign artist named Noah Saderstrom, who
is also a Mississippi native. Noah's tall and thin with
(04:15):
a bushy beard. He's thrown a blazer on over a
button up, but his most noticeable accessory is a pair
of wire framed glasses spectacles. Really, on this particular evening,
Noah's tough to pin down. From the moment he arrived
until he headed out. He was in the midst of
a crowd of wine sipping Jacksonians and florals and sport coats.
(04:38):
They were all there to ask what happened to doctor Smith,
because that's the title of Noah's show, The hell of It,
The hell of a thing incredible. I mean, you'd sent
me photos of.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
What you were doing, but I didn't tell well.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
This is amazing. I couldn't picture it. You know what
he couldn't picture a panorama that's six feet tall and
one hundred and twenty two feet long. In football terms,
that's the forty yard line. The museum had constructed a
room within a room, a circular olive green arena to
(05:15):
hold the length of Noah's painting, and when you see
it up close, you understand why Noah needed all that space.
The panorama tells a very complicated family story about a
very complicated man, Noah's great grandfather, doctor dil Smith. But
it wasn't an easy story to uncover, Noah says, the
(05:37):
man was intentionally erased from his family history.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Doctor Smith disappeared in nineteen twenty five. I spent the
last seven years researching in public and private archives to
figure out his.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Story, and then Noah painted that story an exquisite and
obsessive detail across the one hundred and eighty three canvases
that make up his panorama. But what is that story? Well,
doctor Smith was an eye doctor, married a father of four.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
It's probably like seven tenths of this painting exists of
the details that were known until he entered state custody,
and then it goes dark, which is another forty years
of his life.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
The story went dark because in nineteen twenty five, Noah's
great grandfather entered the Mississippi State Insane Asylum as it
was called. Then, any records of what happened next the
rest of doctor Smith's life were sealed, and this is
where Noah the artist intersects with Gabby and Stasia the
field techs. The site they're working on is the side
(06:45):
of the asylum where he was sent. Mississippi's first mental
health hospital opened its doors in eighteen fifty five. In
the course of its eighty years, the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum,
as it was officially called back then, treated over thirty
thousand people, nearly a quarter of them would be buried
on its grounds. It would also get rebranded a few times,
(07:08):
first the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, then the Mississippi State
Insane Asylum. I'll just be calling it the Old Asylum.
I met Noah about a year before the opening. I'd
heard there was a Mississippi artist working on a show
about his family connection to the Old State Asylum. I
think I emailed him the next day. Because as much
(07:29):
as Southerners love their family stories, there are certain ones
you're just not supposed to tell. But sometimes those are
the ones that can't help coming out, you.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Know how like.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
If you're pulling on some sort of spool, it starts
to tumble, and then kind of tumble faster, and then
the yarn just kind of like falls off onto the
floor in big piles. It kind of feels like that.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
By the way, that was a real live vocalist at
the art opening. It was a big night with wine
and cheese and those really delicious little doughnuts. And that's
because this tumbling spool of yarn, it's bigger than the
story of Noah's great grandfather. The asylum closed in nineteen
thirty five, and for the next seventy five years or so,
(08:29):
it felt like everything from state lawmakers to local society
did that. Damn Yazoo Clay was trying to erase the
story of Mississippi's old state asylum. But for the last
decade that hasn't been the case, and that change started
someplace you wouldn't expect, with construction of a parking garage
(08:49):
at the University of Mississippi Medical Center or UMMC. It's
become a bit of Jackson folklore. Even people at the
museum that night were talking about it.
Speaker 5 (09:00):
They were doing some digging at UMMC and dug up grays.
Speaker 6 (09:09):
You've heard about it in the paper or even was
talking about it.
Speaker 5 (09:12):
No, it was just phone calls coming in because their
husband was working there and they were excavating, clearing the
ground for future projects.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Fan skulls, skulls, human skulls right in the middle of
the biggest medical center in the state.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And this is the.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Speaker 5 (09:41):
Oh so, perhaps an old asylum.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Perhaps an old asylum tucked back in the It goes
way far back to the highway there. I think it's
back in the back corner. The University of Mississippi Medical
Center sits on a hill in the center of Jackson.
It's impossible to miss sprawling yellow complex right at the
intersection of two of the busiest streets in town. It's
(10:04):
maybe the most important place in the state. Those thirty
odd buildings hold Mississippi's only medical school, it's children's hospital,
and Oregon Transplant Center. It's also Mississippi's only safety net hospital,
which means it's not allowed to turn away patients who
can't pay, and in Mississippi, that's a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Ummc's place in Mississippi is incredibly important. Many people have
no other options for healthcare except UMMC.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
This is Leida Gibson. She works with the medical Center.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
And it's needed for people who maybe come to Jackson
for a day and have to get everything taken care
of because they live one hundred miles away.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
It's hard to talk about anything in Mississippi without taking
a moment to acknowledge that it's a very poor, very
six state. Those of us from here joke that were
ranked last and every category you want to be first in,
and first in every category you want to be last.
During COVID, demand for beds at the University Medical Center
(11:13):
was so out of control they ended up turning two
parking garages into field hospitals, Which is all to say
there's a lot of pressure on this place. So back
in twenty twelve, the university began clearing a field on
campus to make space for a parking garage, but it
never got built because it turns out the ground was
(11:35):
already occupied.
Speaker 7 (11:39):
Certainly, whatever plans they had envisioned had to be overwhelmed
by the number of bodies that they found.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
That's Jerry Mitchell. He was a reporter with the Jackson
Clarion Ledger when he broke the story back in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 7 (11:54):
I got a tip that they were going to build
like an underground parking garage at University Missipi Medical Center.
When they started to do that, they discovered they're like
a thousand bodies, and so as they would have it,
(12:17):
they had this big press conference. Everybody else came and I,
you know, I just pretended like I was there covering
this like everybody else.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
The press conference was about the new visitor center the
parking garage would be a part of. They were very
much not talking about bodies. But Jerry didn't let that
get in his way. After the press conference, he took
the vice chancellor Jimmy Keaton aside.
Speaker 7 (12:40):
I said, I hear you guys may not be able
to build that parking garage because you found a thousand bodies,
And doctor Keaton's like, uh, I think it may be
two thousands.
Speaker 8 (12:53):
So.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
I want to pause here. We're talking thousands of bodies.
And by the way, two thousand also turned out to
be an underestimate. The university would bring an experts, archaeologists
and ground penetrating radar, and they'd eventually discover there were
as many as seven thousand people buried right in the
(13:17):
middle of town, and almost nobody knew about them.
Speaker 7 (13:22):
All these other press people are walking around, they have
no idea what we're talking about. I think we're talking
about this thing there from the press conference were I
have no idea. You know, all these bodies being found
on the campus of the hospital, and of course they were.
The bodies were a part of, as you know, as
(13:42):
was explained to me, a part of what was called
the asylum there, which was actually built before the Civil War,
and so it was the mental institution, basically the main
one in Mississippi.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
There are a lot of superstitions about cemeteries. It's bad
luck to walk on a grave or even just a
trip anywhere in a cemetery. If you whistle in a graveyard,
you'll summon the devil, and of course, never ever, under
any circumstances, take anything from a grave. So if you,
(14:26):
like me, are highly superstitious, you might just decide to
pack up and find a new spot. But remember, the
state's main medical center has no other spot. The campus
is in the heart of the city, so there's no
room to expand outward. They have to work with what
they've got, and what they've got is twelve wide open
(14:50):
acres with thousands of graves.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I don't believe anybody in the community, anybody certainly at
the medical center, are now really understood that there could
possibly be that many burials on campus. One of my
first questions when I came on was why can't we
just leave it? You know, why don't we just leave
it alone? And why don't we let these people rest?
Speaker 6 (15:17):
The space pressures for using the last undeveloped land on
the campus were increasing, and the Medical Health Center was
doing long term planning twenty five and fifty year planning,
so these this was part of the discussion.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
That last voice was doctor Ralph Didlake. You'll hear more
from him in lighta later, but for now, here's the
rub the hospital is responsible for the cemetery and the
former patients buried in it, but it's also responsible for
its current and future patients. So is this yazoo clay
for building or for burial? There's also another layer, so
(15:56):
to speak. Graves are just part of what remains when
a person eyes. They also leave behind friends and family,
and the friends and family of those buried in the
cemetery they've been waiting a long long time to get
answers about what became of their loved ones. And it's
not just Noah.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
I'm Anna Sadist from my connection to the first I'm
the mother of the artist and the granddaughter of the
person of interest here, doctor Smith. I don't remember what age.
Speaker 9 (16:30):
I realized that I didn't know anything about my grandfather
because she would talk about her mother quite a bit,
and when I asked about my grandfather, she said he
lost his memory and went away, And so I thought,
maybe somebody will direct him back home sometime.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
There's this old adage in the South, we don't lock
our crazy way, We put it on the front porch
and give it a cocktail. But it's not entirely true.
In just this one state, thirty thousand people were sent away,
and as many as seven thousand of them were buried
under this yazoo clay. Why did their stories get buried
(17:12):
with them? What's he down through the years in spite
of it?
Speaker 9 (17:17):
I would just say silence, absence. This is just not
where we go.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
My suspicion. There is the silence is the response to
the shame.
Speaker 10 (17:32):
When I share these stories, there's there's just a lot
of silence, you know, because what can you say? It's
you know, it's a lot to take in. I am
Elizabeth West, my ancestor family member. His name was Hillman,
(17:56):
sisterm and actually I had had no knowledge of him
up until about, I don't know, five years ago. The
people who were omitted were the people who had the
direct line to a history that we have mixed feelings about.
(18:20):
You know, many people black and white don't want to
remember the country's period of slavery, even when they want
to remember it, they just don't want to remember the
slavery part. And for many of us, you know, we
are told to just look forward, there's no point in
(18:41):
looking back. But well, I don't think we've gotten to
the point where we sit down and really talk about
it because there's just no words. You just take it
in and you start seeing how these things in the
past us have this direct line to where you are
(19:04):
in this moment, and it's a lot. It's a lot
to think about.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
In this country, genealogy is a billion dollar industry. We
are obsessed with understanding our family histories and stories. But
what if your relative story doesn't have an ending? What
if the last decades of the lives they lived were
just washed off the canvas. What do you get out
of a story with no end.
Speaker 11 (19:36):
My name is Kimberly Jackson.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Tell us about your It's your great grandmother, right, so
you know about her.
Speaker 11 (19:44):
So we were always told their name was Zenny. It
was just such a mystery, such a mystery as to
what happened to her, well just about everybody else, you know.
You know, there was a beginning to the store, and
there's an end to the and they had they have
the whole middle. That wasn't that with her, That was
(20:05):
not that with her. There was always obituaries and always,
of course, like I said, story is to be told,
but hers was always that sense of unknown and with that,
like I said, a little twinge of sadness but it
was a lot of love, but little twinge of sadness
and it just felt like, you know, it was just
a puzzle missing.
Speaker 12 (20:25):
My name is Wayne Lee My Hairstyles. Grew up in
Kentucky live in Durham, North Carolina. See, I grew up
with a little bit of the stigma of they thought
your grandfather was crazy. They put him in an insane sylum,
(20:46):
you know, was he was?
Speaker 6 (20:48):
He not?
Speaker 12 (20:48):
Our mom said, he wasn't crazy, he was just starving.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Each of the descendants we spoke to was dogged in
their research, tireless in their efforts to find out answers
about their loved ones and about their own past, because
they had to be This is a story that was
buried again and again. Here's the thing. Coming across human
remains at the medical center wasn't a new problem.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
They were extending a road and they went, oh, there's.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Some people there.
Speaker 6 (21:23):
Some bones had been discovered several years before when an
old laundry building was being built, and at that point
the institution was reminded that there's a cemetery. So fast
forward to the twenty eleven time frame. A new road
construction project was started and almost immediately they ran into burials,
(21:48):
and at that time the original sixty six burials were
exhumed for the road project.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
In nineteen ninety, when a building was being constructed in
that area, the construction workers came across some burials as well,
and at that time the leadership went to the city
and got all the sort of legal documents in place
so that they could exhume these remains and relocate them
(22:15):
to the UMMC cemetery.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Finding bodies there got to be such a common occurrence
that in the nineteen seventies the state legislature passed a
bill allowing them to basically do whatever needed to be done.
Speaker 6 (22:32):
The nineteen seventies legislation is pretty broad, and then there
was a certain amendment of that that's worded to disinter rearrange,
So we could probably have shoehorned almost anything into that language,
but it would have been a terrible idea.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
So the medical Center finds seven thousand graves, they've got
the legal standing and paperwork in place to do what
they need to do to solve their space issue. So
what isn't a terrible idea? That's after the break The
largest art museum in the state, the Mississippi Museum of
(23:15):
Art connects Mississippi to the world and the power of
art to the power of community. Located in downtown Jackson,
the museum's permanent collection is free to the public. National
and international exhibitions rotate throughout the year, allowing visitors to
experience works from around the world. The gardens at Expansive
Lawn at the Mississippi Museum of Art are home to
art installations and a variety of events for all ages.
(23:39):
Plan your visit today at MS Museumart dot org. That's
MS Museum Art dot org.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I'm Lida Gibson. I am the coordinator of the Asylum
Hill Project.
Speaker 6 (23:55):
I'm raftedlike. I am director of the Center for Bioethics
and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
I was a surgeon for twenty five years and then
went into administrative positions.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
The Asylum Hill Project, that's the arm of the university
organized to reconcile the needs of the living with the
needs of the dead, and that reconciliation has to be
weighted towards the living. The medical center needs the land
to expand to provide more vital services. So the question
(24:28):
isn't if the cemetery will move, it's how So it was.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
The vision of doctor Ralph Didlake to handle this challenge
of having a cemetery on the last remaining part of
the campus. It was his vision to kind of deal
with this in a way that was ethical, that embraced
the community.
Speaker 6 (24:54):
I was very interested in the problem. I found it
to be a challenging nut to crack, both from an
administrative efficiency standpoint and from a bioethics standpoint. So, yes,
did I seek it out. I'm not sure I overtly
sought it out, but I didn't run away from it.
(25:15):
And at that time I was director of the Bioethics Center,
and I kept hearing various plans brought forward, and I
felt very strongly that whatever plan was selected, whatever was
done with the land or the remains, had to be ethical.
It had to be not just respectful and ethical, but
(25:40):
it needed to fit well into a Southern community. It
had to have a Southern ethos about it. And I
remembered a line from William Faulkner's The Readers where he
paraphrasing he said, Southerners don't fear death, but they take
fear funerals very seriously.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Southerners take funerals very seriously. The same goes for what
comes after the burial, and cemeteries hold a very special
place in the Southern imagination, but in the Southern reality
quality specialized healthcare is sparse, difficult to access, and sorely needed.
(26:25):
What importance is there in doing right by the dead
when there's such dire need for the living scarce resources?
Mean that this question of what to do with this
land and how and when is a zero sum game.
Rush the excavation and you violate the Southern reverence for
the grave. But take your time and how many patients
(26:49):
will go to their graves sooner than they should? Zero
sum or not. As Faulkner says, there's no fear in death,
that there is a fear of being forgotten. Maybe that's
where all those superstitions come from.
Speaker 11 (27:06):
Oh yeah, because see my grandma was being on visiting cemeteries,
so yeah, we would oh yeah, big, Oh it was.
It was a whole thing for the churches to get
together and clean the cemetery, you know, mowed the lawn
of the cemetery, changed out the flowers. That was the
whole thing. That was a day set aside to do
that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Once upon a time, the Old Asylum Cemetery received that
level of Karen attention. What might the grounds in the
asylum have looked like then? It was eighteen fifty five
when the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum opened its doors, surrounded
by its one hundred and sixty acre campus, and it
would keep growing. By the time it closed its doors,
(27:48):
the Old Asylum covered about thirteen hundred acres. It was picturesque,
sprawling green with a main building designed with classical architecture
in mind akupola, Greek columns, the works.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
I will say too that when the asylum was established
it was state of the art.
Speaker 8 (28:11):
I mean.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Mississippi, of course was one of the richest states, if
not the rich estate, because it's easy to get rich
when you're exploiting other people and enslaving other people. But
this was sort of a monument to the goodness of
Mississippi leaders as well as just to take care of
(28:33):
those who are less fortunate than we are.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
The goodness of Mississippi leaders tough to believe that. They
thought providing mental health care would help the state's image
more than ending slavery. That was their calculus. All seven
thousand of these graves are unmarked, but that isn't how
they started.
Speaker 8 (28:54):
I don't know if La mentioned to y'all, but the
original originally the graves, every single grave was marked with
a wooden marker, and it was painted with the name
of the deceased, the date of death, and the county
the person was from.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
That's doctor Jennifer Mack who's heading up the excavation of
the Asylum cemetery. And what happened to those wooden markers.
Remember the yazoo clay, that burnt orange stuff I told
you about at the top of the episode. Oh, yes, yes,
it's terrible.
Speaker 8 (29:23):
Yeah, it's terrible, terrible dirt.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
The soils are also a challenge Herezukla character. How can
soil just eat metal?
Speaker 6 (29:34):
It's just it's amazing, yes, what it can do.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Today the old Asylum Cemetery is an unmarked field of
green grass, dappled with the occasional tree, surrounded by chain
link fence lined with black mesh. There are hents of
burnt orange poking through the grass, but not a grave marker.
(30:06):
When we first got down South, we thought it the
Asylum was the story. We touched down in New Orleans
and drove up by fifty five, secure in the belief
that we were on our way to tell the tale
of an old asylum falling into disrepair, the mystery of
what happened within those walls. We were wrong.
Speaker 7 (30:29):
Yeah, that was an email.
Speaker 9 (30:33):
Thought that was an email.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
I felt guilty of reading the email. I felt guilty.
By the time I got to the second sentence, I was.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Like Yeah, I was like, oh no, this is reckless
more an email.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
On the one hand, bummer, because like, it would have
been nice to interview them. One of the people we'd
hoped to talk to was Patrick Hopkins, a philosopher and
ethicist who works with the Center for Bioethics Medical Humanities
at UMMC. Patrick and one of his colleagues recently received
a grant for something that piqued my interest. They were
(31:09):
going to be reading through volumes like boxes and boxes
of the old asylum's patient files. Finally, this was our
entry into this world that had been intentionally locked away.
But Patrick, the guy who had the key, wasn't interested
in opening that door. To attempt to talk authoritatively about
(31:34):
patient experiences at the asylum at this point would be
scholarly malpractice and would lend itself to bringing attention to
whatever random bit of information we have recently come across,
rather than waiting for the big picture. As an analogy,
if I were writing a biography of someone, you wouldn't
want to interview me about that person's life when I
(31:56):
had only gotten up to their third birthday in my research.
I mean, it's a great point with respect to the
process of research, But these are also real people and
their very real families have waited decades to learn anything
about their lives. Is saying keep waiting really doing right
(32:17):
by them? Or are we doing right by the living?
Short change the debt? And ultimately that's what this whole
thing is about. How can Asylum Hill make room for
the present, for the future while honoring the past. How
can these descendants reconcile the desire to know their ancestors'
(32:38):
stories with the pain that that may inevitably bring. Yazoo
clay is a tricky soil. It doesn't fall neatly into
any one category. It's the nemesis of contractors statewide, wrecking
home foundations, road work, and generally causing chaos. But a
(33:00):
ride down the highways outside Jackson and the lushness of
the green will take your breath away. Yazoo Clay forms
a foundation for the wreckage secrecy can bring, but the
breakdown of what came before can make for fertile ground.
In the case of the clay on Asylum Hill, it's
(33:23):
managed to do a bit of both. That's coming up
on Under Yazoo Clay.
Speaker 12 (33:32):
I'm Wayne Lee, I'm a Dawser. I'm at the Greenwood
Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi, and I'm gonna do a little
demonstration with the divining Arts.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Under Yazoo Clay is executive produced by the Mississippi Museum
of Art in partnership with pod People. It's hosted by
me Laris and Campbell and written and produced by Rebecca
Chassan and myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Machado,
with editing and sound design by Morgan Fous and Erica
Wong and thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for music. Special
thanks to Betsy Bradley at the Mississippi Museum of Art,
(34:11):
as well as Leida Gibson at the Center for Bioethics
and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Visit Jackson and Jay and deny Stein,
Imagine for a moment that it's fifty million years ago.
The earth is incredibly hot, about twenty five degrees hotter
on average. There are gators in Canada. The Gulf of
Mexico is the stuff of present day nightmares. It swallows
(00:24):
the bottom halves of Mississippi and Alabama and the whole
state of Florida. The Mississippi River is not yet an
old man, but it's flowing. It's at the mouth of
this river that the trouble begins, because as the river flows,
(00:44):
a fine layer of blue black silt begins to settle
around the delta. And this isn't just any silt, it's
mineral heavy, the decay of everything the river has held
over the millennia. The river will get faster and change course.
This layer of silt will move with it, fanning out
(01:05):
along the shallow waters of this ancient sea. After another
twenty million years or so, it'll become a layer of
clay four hundred feet deep in some parts. And it's
right on top of the thickest part of the clay
that one day Mississippi will decide to build its capital city.
(01:29):
This is, to put it mildly, a terrible decision because
this clay is a burnt orange monster. It's made of
a mineral called smectite, so absorbent it can swell to
two hundred times its size when wet and shrink just
(01:51):
that much when it's dry. Over the next two hundred years,
follow roads and send homes tumbling into creeks, cracked pipes
and concrete foundations and even bones. It's called Yazoo clay,
(02:13):
and it's where our story begins. I'm Larison Campbell, and
this is under Yazoo clay as it happens. I am
(02:35):
intimately familiar with this clay because Jackson, Mississippi, that poorly
placed capital city, is where I used to live. This shifting,
swelling soil has completely shaped the character of the place
and everyone who lives there. Residents are used to broken
water mains and boil water notices and seeing trees and
(02:58):
utility poles in their neighbor's yards. But there's an upside
to this chaos. In a place as fractured as Mississippi,
complaining about Yazoo clay is kind of the one thing
everyone can agree on. It's like traffic in Los Angeles
or the weather in New England. So when my producer
and I found ourselves at a fancy Jackson art opening
(03:21):
talking about dirt, I wasn't too surprised. It is the strangest,
most destructive soil I've ever dug in before. Still, I
never heard it talked about quite like this.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
It has character, It is a mind of its own.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
It seems this is Gabby and Stasia. They've got a
very different relationship with the clay because they spend all
day in it. These two are archaeological field texts.
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Destructive like to the to stuff in the ground, or
like to tools.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
All of the above. What Gabby and Stasia are digging for, well,
that's kind of the whole reason we're in Jackson. But first,
the art opening. It's foreign artist named Noah Saderstrom, who
is also a Mississippi native. Noah's tall and thin with
(04:15):
a bushy beard. He's thrown a blazer on over a
button up, but his most noticeable accessory is a pair
of wire framed glasses spectacles. Really, on this particular evening,
Noah's tough to pin down. From the moment he arrived
until he headed out. He was in the midst of
a crowd of wine sipping Jacksonians and florals and sport coats.
(04:38):
They were all there to ask what happened to doctor Smith,
because that's the title of Noah's show, The hell of It,
The hell of a thing incredible. I mean, you'd sent
me photos of.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
What you were doing, but I didn't tell well.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
This is amazing. I couldn't picture it. You know what
he couldn't picture a panorama that's six feet tall and
one hundred and twenty two feet long. In football terms,
that's the forty yard line. The museum had constructed a
room within a room, a circular olive green arena to
(05:15):
hold the length of Noah's painting, and when you see
it up close, you understand why Noah needed all that space.
The panorama tells a very complicated family story about a
very complicated man, Noah's great grandfather, doctor dil Smith. But
it wasn't an easy story to uncover, Noah says, the
(05:37):
man was intentionally erased from his family history.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
Doctor Smith disappeared in nineteen twenty five. I spent the
last seven years researching in public and private archives to
figure out his.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
Story, and then Noah painted that story an exquisite and
obsessive detail across the one hundred and eighty three canvases
that make up his panorama. But what is that story? Well,
doctor Smith was an eye doctor, married a father of four.
Speaker 4 (06:09):
It's probably like seven tenths of this painting exists of
the details that were known until he entered state custody,
and then it goes dark, which is another forty years
of his life.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
The story went dark because in nineteen twenty five, Noah's
great grandfather entered the Mississippi State Insane Asylum as it
was called. Then, any records of what happened next the
rest of doctor Smith's life were sealed, and this is
where Noah the artist intersects with Gabby and Stasia the
field techs. The site they're working on is the side
(06:45):
of the asylum where he was sent. Mississippi's first mental
health hospital opened its doors in eighteen fifty five. In
the course of its eighty years, the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum,
as it was officially called back then, treated over thirty
thousand people, nearly a quarter of them would be buried
on its grounds. It would also get rebranded a few times,
(07:08):
first the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum, then the Mississippi State
Insane Asylum. I'll just be calling it the Old Asylum.
I met Noah about a year before the opening. I'd
heard there was a Mississippi artist working on a show
about his family connection to the Old State Asylum. I
think I emailed him the next day. Because as much
(07:29):
as Southerners love their family stories, there are certain ones
you're just not supposed to tell. But sometimes those are
the ones that can't help coming out, you.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Know how like.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
If you're pulling on some sort of spool, it starts
to tumble, and then kind of tumble faster, and then
the yarn just kind of like falls off onto the
floor in big piles. It kind of feels like that.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
By the way, that was a real live vocalist at
the art opening. It was a big night with wine
and cheese and those really delicious little doughnuts. And that's
because this tumbling spool of yarn, it's bigger than the
story of Noah's great grandfather. The asylum closed in nineteen
thirty five, and for the next seventy five years or so,
(08:29):
it felt like everything from state lawmakers to local society
did that. Damn Yazoo Clay was trying to erase the
story of Mississippi's old state asylum. But for the last
decade that hasn't been the case, and that change started
someplace you wouldn't expect, with construction of a parking garage
(08:49):
at the University of Mississippi Medical Center or UMMC. It's
become a bit of Jackson folklore. Even people at the
museum that night were talking about it.
Speaker 5 (09:00):
They were doing some digging at UMMC and dug up grays.
Speaker 6 (09:09):
You've heard about it in the paper or even was
talking about it.
Speaker 5 (09:12):
No, it was just phone calls coming in because their
husband was working there and they were excavating, clearing the
ground for future projects.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Fan skulls, skulls, human skulls right in the middle of
the biggest medical center in the state.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
And this is the.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Speaker 5 (09:41):
Oh so, perhaps an old asylum.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
Perhaps an old asylum tucked back in the It goes
way far back to the highway there. I think it's
back in the back corner. The University of Mississippi Medical
Center sits on a hill in the center of Jackson.
It's impossible to miss sprawling yellow complex right at the
intersection of two of the busiest streets in town. It's
(10:04):
maybe the most important place in the state. Those thirty
odd buildings hold Mississippi's only medical school, it's children's hospital,
and Oregon Transplant Center. It's also Mississippi's only safety net hospital,
which means it's not allowed to turn away patients who
can't pay, and in Mississippi, that's a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Ummc's place in Mississippi is incredibly important. Many people have
no other options for healthcare except UMMC.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
This is Leida Gibson. She works with the medical Center.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
And it's needed for people who maybe come to Jackson
for a day and have to get everything taken care
of because they live one hundred miles away.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
It's hard to talk about anything in Mississippi without taking
a moment to acknowledge that it's a very poor, very
six state. Those of us from here joke that were
ranked last and every category you want to be first in,
and first in every category you want to be last.
During COVID, demand for beds at the University Medical Center
(11:13):
was so out of control they ended up turning two
parking garages into field hospitals, Which is all to say
there's a lot of pressure on this place. So back
in twenty twelve, the university began clearing a field on
campus to make space for a parking garage, but it
never got built because it turns out the ground was
(11:35):
already occupied.
Speaker 7 (11:39):
Certainly, whatever plans they had envisioned had to be overwhelmed
by the number of bodies that they found.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
That's Jerry Mitchell. He was a reporter with the Jackson
Clarion Ledger when he broke the story back in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 7 (11:54):
I got a tip that they were going to build
like an underground parking garage at University Missipi Medical Center.
When they started to do that, they discovered they're like
a thousand bodies, and so as they would have it,
(12:17):
they had this big press conference. Everybody else came and I,
you know, I just pretended like I was there covering
this like everybody else.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
The press conference was about the new visitor center the
parking garage would be a part of. They were very
much not talking about bodies. But Jerry didn't let that
get in his way. After the press conference, he took
the vice chancellor Jimmy Keaton aside.
Speaker 7 (12:40):
I said, I hear you guys may not be able
to build that parking garage because you found a thousand bodies,
And doctor Keaton's like, uh, I think it may be
two thousands.
Speaker 8 (12:53):
So.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
I want to pause here. We're talking thousands of bodies.
And by the way, two thousand also turned out to
be an underestimate. The university would bring an experts, archaeologists
and ground penetrating radar, and they'd eventually discover there were
as many as seven thousand people buried right in the
(13:17):
middle of town, and almost nobody knew about them.
Speaker 7 (13:22):
All these other press people are walking around, they have
no idea what we're talking about. I think we're talking
about this thing there from the press conference were I
have no idea. You know, all these bodies being found
on the campus of the hospital, and of course they were.
The bodies were a part of, as you know, as
(13:42):
was explained to me, a part of what was called
the asylum there, which was actually built before the Civil War,
and so it was the mental institution, basically the main
one in Mississippi.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
There are a lot of superstitions about cemeteries. It's bad
luck to walk on a grave or even just a
trip anywhere in a cemetery. If you whistle in a graveyard,
you'll summon the devil, and of course, never ever, under
any circumstances, take anything from a grave. So if you,
(14:26):
like me, are highly superstitious, you might just decide to
pack up and find a new spot. But remember, the
state's main medical center has no other spot. The campus
is in the heart of the city, so there's no
room to expand outward. They have to work with what
they've got, and what they've got is twelve wide open
(14:50):
acres with thousands of graves.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I don't believe anybody in the community, anybody certainly at
the medical center, are now really understood that there could
possibly be that many burials on campus. One of my
first questions when I came on was why can't we
just leave it? You know, why don't we just leave
it alone? And why don't we let these people rest?
Speaker 6 (15:17):
The space pressures for using the last undeveloped land on
the campus were increasing, and the Medical Health Center was
doing long term planning twenty five and fifty year planning,
so these this was part of the discussion.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
That last voice was doctor Ralph Didlake. You'll hear more
from him in lighta later, but for now, here's the
rub the hospital is responsible for the cemetery and the
former patients buried in it, but it's also responsible for
its current and future patients. So is this yazoo clay
for building or for burial? There's also another layer, so
(15:56):
to speak. Graves are just part of what remains when
a person eyes. They also leave behind friends and family,
and the friends and family of those buried in the
cemetery they've been waiting a long long time to get
answers about what became of their loved ones. And it's
not just Noah.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
I'm Anna Sadist from my connection to the first I'm
the mother of the artist and the granddaughter of the
person of interest here, doctor Smith. I don't remember what age.
Speaker 9 (16:30):
I realized that I didn't know anything about my grandfather
because she would talk about her mother quite a bit,
and when I asked about my grandfather, she said he
lost his memory and went away, And so I thought,
maybe somebody will direct him back home sometime.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
There's this old adage in the South, we don't lock
our crazy way, We put it on the front porch
and give it a cocktail. But it's not entirely true.
In just this one state, thirty thousand people were sent away,
and as many as seven thousand of them were buried
under this yazoo clay. Why did their stories get buried
(17:12):
with them? What's he down through the years in spite
of it?
Speaker 9 (17:17):
I would just say silence, absence. This is just not
where we go.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
My suspicion. There is the silence is the response to
the shame.
Speaker 10 (17:32):
When I share these stories, there's there's just a lot
of silence, you know, because what can you say? It's
you know, it's a lot to take in. I am
Elizabeth West, my ancestor family member. His name was Hillman,
(17:56):
sisterm and actually I had had no knowledge of him
up until about, I don't know, five years ago. The
people who were omitted were the people who had the
direct line to a history that we have mixed feelings about.
(18:20):
You know, many people black and white don't want to
remember the country's period of slavery, even when they want
to remember it, they just don't want to remember the
slavery part. And for many of us, you know, we
are told to just look forward, there's no point in
(18:41):
looking back. But well, I don't think we've gotten to
the point where we sit down and really talk about
it because there's just no words. You just take it
in and you start seeing how these things in the
past us have this direct line to where you are
(19:04):
in this moment, and it's a lot. It's a lot
to think about.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
In this country, genealogy is a billion dollar industry. We
are obsessed with understanding our family histories and stories. But
what if your relative story doesn't have an ending? What
if the last decades of the lives they lived were
just washed off the canvas. What do you get out
of a story with no end.
Speaker 11 (19:36):
My name is Kimberly Jackson.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Tell us about your It's your great grandmother, right, so
you know about her.
Speaker 11 (19:44):
So we were always told their name was Zenny. It
was just such a mystery, such a mystery as to
what happened to her, well just about everybody else, you know.
You know, there was a beginning to the store, and
there's an end to the and they had they have
the whole middle. That wasn't that with her, That was
(20:05):
not that with her. There was always obituaries and always,
of course, like I said, story is to be told,
but hers was always that sense of unknown and with that,
like I said, a little twinge of sadness but it
was a lot of love, but little twinge of sadness
and it just felt like, you know, it was just
a puzzle missing.
Speaker 12 (20:25):
My name is Wayne Lee My Hairstyles. Grew up in
Kentucky live in Durham, North Carolina. See, I grew up
with a little bit of the stigma of they thought
your grandfather was crazy. They put him in an insane sylum,
(20:46):
you know, was he was?
Speaker 6 (20:48):
He not?
Speaker 12 (20:48):
Our mom said, he wasn't crazy, he was just starving.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Each of the descendants we spoke to was dogged in
their research, tireless in their efforts to find out answers
about their loved ones and about their own past, because
they had to be This is a story that was
buried again and again. Here's the thing. Coming across human
remains at the medical center wasn't a new problem.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
They were extending a road and they went, oh, there's.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Some people there.
Speaker 6 (21:23):
Some bones had been discovered several years before when an
old laundry building was being built, and at that point
the institution was reminded that there's a cemetery. So fast
forward to the twenty eleven time frame. A new road
construction project was started and almost immediately they ran into burials,
(21:48):
and at that time the original sixty six burials were
exhumed for the road project.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
In nineteen ninety, when a building was being constructed in
that area, the construction workers came across some burials as well,
and at that time the leadership went to the city
and got all the sort of legal documents in place
so that they could exhume these remains and relocate them
(22:15):
to the UMMC cemetery.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Finding bodies there got to be such a common occurrence
that in the nineteen seventies the state legislature passed a
bill allowing them to basically do whatever needed to be done.
Speaker 6 (22:32):
The nineteen seventies legislation is pretty broad, and then there
was a certain amendment of that that's worded to disinter rearrange,
So we could probably have shoehorned almost anything into that language,
but it would have been a terrible idea.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
So the medical Center finds seven thousand graves, they've got
the legal standing and paperwork in place to do what
they need to do to solve their space issue. So
what isn't a terrible idea? That's after the break The
largest art museum in the state, the Mississippi Museum of
(23:15):
Art connects Mississippi to the world and the power of
art to the power of community. Located in downtown Jackson,
the museum's permanent collection is free to the public. National
and international exhibitions rotate throughout the year, allowing visitors to
experience works from around the world. The gardens at Expansive
Lawn at the Mississippi Museum of Art are home to
art installations and a variety of events for all ages.
(23:39):
Plan your visit today at MS Museumart dot org. That's
MS Museum Art dot org.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I'm Lida Gibson. I am the coordinator of the Asylum
Hill Project.
Speaker 6 (23:55):
I'm raftedlike. I am director of the Center for Bioethics
and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
I was a surgeon for twenty five years and then
went into administrative positions.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
The Asylum Hill Project, that's the arm of the university
organized to reconcile the needs of the living with the
needs of the dead, and that reconciliation has to be
weighted towards the living. The medical center needs the land
to expand to provide more vital services. So the question
(24:28):
isn't if the cemetery will move, it's how So it was.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
The vision of doctor Ralph Didlake to handle this challenge
of having a cemetery on the last remaining part of
the campus. It was his vision to kind of deal
with this in a way that was ethical, that embraced
the community.
Speaker 6 (24:54):
I was very interested in the problem. I found it
to be a challenging nut to crack, both from an
administrative efficiency standpoint and from a bioethics standpoint. So, yes,
did I seek it out. I'm not sure I overtly
sought it out, but I didn't run away from it.
(25:15):
And at that time I was director of the Bioethics Center,
and I kept hearing various plans brought forward, and I
felt very strongly that whatever plan was selected, whatever was
done with the land or the remains, had to be ethical.
It had to be not just respectful and ethical, but
(25:40):
it needed to fit well into a Southern community. It
had to have a Southern ethos about it. And I
remembered a line from William Faulkner's The Readers where he
paraphrasing he said, Southerners don't fear death, but they take
fear funerals very seriously.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Southerners take funerals very seriously. The same goes for what
comes after the burial, and cemeteries hold a very special
place in the Southern imagination, but in the Southern reality
quality specialized healthcare is sparse, difficult to access, and sorely needed.
(26:25):
What importance is there in doing right by the dead
when there's such dire need for the living scarce resources?
Mean that this question of what to do with this
land and how and when is a zero sum game.
Rush the excavation and you violate the Southern reverence for
the grave. But take your time and how many patients
(26:49):
will go to their graves sooner than they should? Zero
sum or not. As Faulkner says, there's no fear in death,
that there is a fear of being forgotten. Maybe that's
where all those superstitions come from.
Speaker 11 (27:06):
Oh yeah, because see my grandma was being on visiting cemeteries,
so yeah, we would oh yeah, big, Oh it was.
It was a whole thing for the churches to get
together and clean the cemetery, you know, mowed the lawn
of the cemetery, changed out the flowers. That was the
whole thing. That was a day set aside to do
that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Once upon a time, the Old Asylum Cemetery received that
level of Karen attention. What might the grounds in the
asylum have looked like then? It was eighteen fifty five
when the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum opened its doors, surrounded
by its one hundred and sixty acre campus, and it
would keep growing. By the time it closed its doors,
(27:48):
the Old Asylum covered about thirteen hundred acres. It was picturesque,
sprawling green with a main building designed with classical architecture
in mind akupola, Greek columns, the works.
Speaker 6 (28:05):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
I will say too that when the asylum was established
it was state of the art.
Speaker 8 (28:11):
I mean.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Mississippi, of course was one of the richest states, if
not the rich estate, because it's easy to get rich
when you're exploiting other people and enslaving other people. But
this was sort of a monument to the goodness of
Mississippi leaders as well as just to take care of
(28:33):
those who are less fortunate than we are.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
The goodness of Mississippi leaders tough to believe that. They
thought providing mental health care would help the state's image
more than ending slavery. That was their calculus. All seven
thousand of these graves are unmarked, but that isn't how
they started.
Speaker 8 (28:54):
I don't know if La mentioned to y'all, but the
original originally the graves, every single grave was marked with
a wooden marker, and it was painted with the name
of the deceased, the date of death, and the county
the person was from.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
That's doctor Jennifer Mack who's heading up the excavation of
the Asylum cemetery. And what happened to those wooden markers.
Remember the yazoo clay, that burnt orange stuff I told
you about at the top of the episode. Oh, yes, yes,
it's terrible.
Speaker 8 (29:23):
Yeah, it's terrible, terrible dirt.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
The soils are also a challenge Herezukla character. How can
soil just eat metal?
Speaker 6 (29:34):
It's just it's amazing, yes, what it can do.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Today the old Asylum Cemetery is an unmarked field of
green grass, dappled with the occasional tree, surrounded by chain
link fence lined with black mesh. There are hents of
burnt orange poking through the grass, but not a grave marker.
(30:06):
When we first got down South, we thought it the
Asylum was the story. We touched down in New Orleans
and drove up by fifty five, secure in the belief
that we were on our way to tell the tale
of an old asylum falling into disrepair, the mystery of
what happened within those walls. We were wrong.
Speaker 7 (30:29):
Yeah, that was an email.
Speaker 9 (30:33):
Thought that was an email.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
I felt guilty of reading the email. I felt guilty.
By the time I got to the second sentence, I was.
Speaker 3 (30:40):
Like Yeah, I was like, oh no, this is reckless
more an email.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
On the one hand, bummer, because like, it would have
been nice to interview them. One of the people we'd
hoped to talk to was Patrick Hopkins, a philosopher and
ethicist who works with the Center for Bioethics Medical Humanities
at UMMC. Patrick and one of his colleagues recently received
a grant for something that piqued my interest. They were
(31:09):
going to be reading through volumes like boxes and boxes
of the old asylum's patient files. Finally, this was our
entry into this world that had been intentionally locked away.
But Patrick, the guy who had the key, wasn't interested
in opening that door. To attempt to talk authoritatively about
(31:34):
patient experiences at the asylum at this point would be
scholarly malpractice and would lend itself to bringing attention to
whatever random bit of information we have recently come across,
rather than waiting for the big picture. As an analogy,
if I were writing a biography of someone, you wouldn't
want to interview me about that person's life when I
(31:56):
had only gotten up to their third birthday in my research.
I mean, it's a great point with respect to the
process of research, But these are also real people and
their very real families have waited decades to learn anything
about their lives. Is saying keep waiting really doing right
(32:17):
by them? Or are we doing right by the living?
Short change the debt? And ultimately that's what this whole
thing is about. How can Asylum Hill make room for
the present, for the future while honoring the past. How
can these descendants reconcile the desire to know their ancestors'
(32:38):
stories with the pain that that may inevitably bring. Yazoo
clay is a tricky soil. It doesn't fall neatly into
any one category. It's the nemesis of contractors statewide, wrecking
home foundations, road work, and generally causing chaos. But a
(33:00):
ride down the highways outside Jackson and the lushness of
the green will take your breath away. Yazoo Clay forms
a foundation for the wreckage secrecy can bring, but the
breakdown of what came before can make for fertile ground.
In the case of the clay on Asylum Hill, it's
(33:23):
managed to do a bit of both. That's coming up
on Under Yazoo Clay.
Speaker 12 (33:32):
I'm Wayne Lee, I'm a Dawser. I'm at the Greenwood
Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi, and I'm gonna do a little
demonstration with the divining Arts.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
Under Yazoo Clay is executive produced by the Mississippi Museum
of Art in partnership with pod People. It's hosted by
me Laris and Campbell and written and produced by Rebecca
Chassan and myself with help from Angela Yee and Amy Machado,
with editing and sound design by Morgan Fous and Erica
Wong and thanks to Blue Dot Sessions for music. Special
thanks to Betsy Bradley at the Mississippi Museum of Art,
(34:11):
as well as Leida Gibson at the Center for Bioethics
and Medical Humanities at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Visit Jackson and Jay and deny Stein,
Host
Larrison Campbell
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.