Dorothea Dix Park

The site of North Carolina's first and largest "lunatic asylum," which operated from 1856 to 2012. At its peak in 1974, the 2,343-acre campus had 282 buildings and over 2,700 patients. The asylum was the dream of reformer Dorothea Dix, though conditions deteriorated over time.

Dorothea Dix Hospital was the first psychiatric hospital in North Carolina, sprawling across approximately four hundred acres in southwest Raleigh. The original building, an imposing Tuscan Revival temple with three-story flanking wings designed by A.J. Davis, was completed in 1856. For over 150 years, this institution housed the mentally ill—and many of them never left. The hospital closed in 2012, but the land carries the weight of every soul who suffered and died within its walls.

The hospital had many names over its long history. Legislators initially called it The Insane Asylum of North Carolina. It was later known as the Lunatic Asylum for the State of North Carolina, then the Central Hospital for the Insane, and finally The State Hospital at Raleigh. Dorothea Dix herself, the mental health reformer for whom the hospital was ultimately named, refused to allow it to bear her name during her lifetime. She permitted only the site to be called Dix Hill in honor of her father. The General Assembly officially renamed it Dorothea Dix Hospital in 1959.

A patient cemetery was established on the hospital grounds in 1859 when the first deceased patient was buried there. For over a century, the cemetery received patients whose bodies remained unclaimed. During the Depression, approximately fifty burials took place each year. The cemetery's three acres now hold more than nine hundred graves, including Civil War veterans like Eli Hill, a Union soldier with the United States Colored Troops who was once enslaved, and Native Americans from the Lumbee tribe. For nearly a century, only a cross and a stamped number marked most graves—hiding family names from the shame of mental illness.

At the cemetery near where the hospital operated, some say they can still hear the screams of deceased patients at night. Walking near the old plantation house at dusk evokes a chill—it's the chill of knowing you are walking over unmarked, unnamed graves on land that once enslaved hundreds of humans. Add the unmarked plots where forgotten orphans were buried and the nameless patients left behind at Dorothea Dix Hospital, and the area seems ripe for ghostly legends.

The tales of ghostly encounters are almost endless across what was once both hospital and NC State University grounds. Hundreds, if not thousands, met their end within the 282 buildings that made up the old hospital complex. At nearby Oakwood Cemetery, the "spinning angel" statue protects the grave of Etta Rebecca White Ratcliffe, whose family had her committed to Dorothea Dix. Legend holds that on Halloween at midnight, the angel's head spins around twelve times.

The site is now Dorothea Dix Park, Raleigh's largest city park. Historical tours are offered that provide a serious, candid look at the dark history of the asylum. But beneath the walking paths and open fields, the dead remain—their stories largely forgotten, their graves mostly unmarked, and their spirits, some believe, still crying out for acknowledgment.