The Winnebago Mental Health Institute Cemetery is one of the more unsettling pieces of history hiding in the woods near Asylum Point Park in Oshkosh. The cemetery was established when the institution opened in 1873 as the Northern State Hospital for the Insane, and it was used for patients who died at the hospital. Today, 244 graves are documented at the site, but most have no visible marker. A handful are identified only by small numbered stones set flush with the ground, leaving a quiet clearing in the trees where hundreds of people were buried with little indication of who they were. The cemetery is sometimes called the Winnebago State Hospital Cemetery or State Hospital Cemetery, reflecting the institution’s former names.
For anyone exploring Oshkosh’s darker history, it is a sobering reminder that the former asylum was not simply a historic institution, but a place where generations of patients lived, died, and were buried.
