In the late 1900s, county probate court record keeper and passionate preservationist Collette King stumbled upon multiple small wooden boxes in the attic of the old courthouse in Mobile, Alabama. Inside these boxes were bundles of death certificates citing “Mt. Vernon Hospital Cemetery”. After some investigation, Collette realized she had found the only known surviving link to the hundreds of people -- many unidentified by name -- buried in a cemetery that few people knew existed.

Access to cemeteries in Alabama is guaranteed by State law, but you must be able to prove your relative is buried there in order to be allowed to visit. At the Mt. Vernon Hospital cemetery, between insufficient death records and removed grave markers, it can be impossible to prove a burial site.

Headstones assigned to the Mt. Vernon Hospital gravesites were not etched with names, only the patient’s numbers. Local preservations and archeologists agree that there’s little record of the burial grounds to speak of in the recorded history of the property. 

In 2015, the department's land manager wrote in an email exchange that “Due to security and liability issues, the Alabama Department of Mental Health has said access to the property is generally not granted unless "we receive legitimate requests" from family members. We do not have records, because records were not being maintained during that time.”

When Searcy Hospital closed in 2012, the 34 site structures that cover around 150 acres were placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Surprisingly, the cemetery was not included in the register. 

In the 1980s, director of the Mobile Historic Development Commission Devereaux Bemis conducted a thorough and extensive survey of the site using both text and images. No one told him about the cemetery, therefore it was not included in the survey. He found out about it much later, and even returned to personally visit the site of the cemetery, disappointed that it was not archived in his original document and confused about why he was never informed of it.

In 2023, it was confirmed by eye witnesses that all physical markings and evidence of the burial grounds have been removed, either by the Alabama Department of Mental Health, or by vandals. Currently, the only known death records are around 300 booklet pages archived on microfilm at the Mobile Probate Court, dating from the 1910s-1940s.