ABOVE: Late 19th or early 20th century photo of the administration building.
Naming the Numbered A historian uncovers the identities of those buried at The Ridges
O
STORY BY RACHAEL BEARDSLEY // PHOTOS PROVIDED
ne faded picture of Viola Rapp remains. In it, Rapp smiles thinly into the camera, a single strand of long, dark hair falling into her face. She could be a teenager for how young she looks. Yet for over 60 years, Viola Rapp was only known as number 607. Rapp died in 1934, at what was then called the Athens Lunatic Asylum, where she was buried in the female section of the asylum’s cemetery number two. Her identity was lost, save for a name and number scratched into a grave log. Rapp was one of over 1,900 people buried at the former hospital, which treated thousands of mentally
22 | SUMMER | FALL 2020
ill patients from 1874 to 1993. Cemeteries flank the grounds, now called The Ridges. These numbered graves of over a thousand people have faded into the landscape, unnoticed and unnamed. Until now. Doug McCabe, former archivist at Ohio University, has been instrumental in researching the lost histories of former patients such as Rapp. “The vast majority of these people were not born [mentally ill],” McCabe says. “Something happened to them, some kind of trauma, and then they were judged as having gone over the edge and placed in an asylum.” During his time as university archivist, McCabe had access to the former asylum’s records which
