Central State Hospital
Opened in 1842 as the State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum, the Milledgeville campus sprawled across 2,000 acres and more than 200 buildings, and by the late 1950s held nearly 12,000 patients as the largest mental institution in the country. Decades of overcrowding, primitive shock and ice-bath treatments, and a 1959 expose revealing that not one of its 48 ward doctors was a trained psychiatrist soaked the place in suffering before it closed in 2010.
An estimated 25,000 to 30,000 patients lie in six cemeteries, their identities erased when prison crews threw the numbered iron grave markers into the woods. Visitors speak less of any single ghost than of an oppressive, accumulated weight, as if a century of forgotten dead still presses against the silent rows of Cedar Lane Cemetery.
📍 620 Broad Street, Milledgeville, GA 31062, Milledgeville, GA · Get directions