Estimated 38,000 burials beneath a Chicago neighborhood — the Cook County Asylum's forgotten potter's field
West Belle Plaine Ave near N Neenah Ave, Chicago, IL 60634
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free public park
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Wheelchair OK
Flat urban park; paved paths and open grass
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Photos OK
Est. 1854 · 38,000 Estimated Burials · Cook County Institutional History · Forgotten Mass Potter's Field · 1875 State Abuse Investigation · Chicago Northwest Side Heritage
The Cook County Poor Farm and Insane Asylum opened in 1854 on a large parcel of land in what was then Chicago's rural northwest edge. The facility was designed to warehouse the county's dependent populations — the indigent, the mentally ill, tuberculosis patients, orphans, and those who died in Cook County with no family to claim them. Conditions were notably poor throughout the institution's history; an 1875 state investigation documented abuse, neglect, and overcrowding that drew national attention.
A burial ground on the facility's grounds received the unclaimed bodies of patients and residents throughout the asylum's operation. By the time the institution was reorganized in the early 20th century and the land was sold for residential development, an estimated 38,000 people had been interred in what amounted to a mass potter's field. The sales and platting of the Dunning neighborhood in the early 1900s proceeded without systematic documentation or marking of the burial locations.
Construction workers discovered human remains during a 1959 excavation and again during a 1989 development project. The 1989 discovery attracted considerable public attention and led to formal archaeological assessment of what survived of the burial ground. Chicago dedicated a three-acre memorial park in 2001 on the portion of the original grounds still publicly accessible. The park contains concrete circles indicating burial concentrations, historical markers explaining the asylum's history, and an interpretive panel summarizing the estimated population of the underground dead.
The surrounding Dunning neighborhood — named for the superintendent of the institution who served from 1857 to 1875 — was built directly atop additional burial areas. The 2001 park was named for both Albert Read, an early Cook County Superintendent of the Poor, and for the Dunning neighborhood identity now attached to the site. Chicago Public Radio's WBEZ covered the site in a 2013 Curious City feature documenting the history and the community's relationship to the buried dead beneath their neighborhood.
Sources
The Ghost Research Society conducted documented investigations at Read-Dunning Memorial Park and recorded EVP during fieldwork at the site. The organization's published account describes multiple EVP captures during evening sessions in the park, along with investigator experiences of cold spots near the concrete burial markers and the sense of being observed from the tree line at the park's edges.
The site's attraction to paranormal investigators is straightforward — the scale of the dead (38,000 estimated) and the lack of individual markers for the vast majority of burials creates the conditions investigators associate with residual haunting: a large population of people whose deaths were institutional and undifferentiated, interred without ceremony, forgotten beneath a residential neighborhood that came to exist without awareness of what it was built over.
Accounts from neighborhood residents and park visitors are more diffuse. WBEZ's 2013 Curious City investigation quoted Dunning residents who described the park as carrying a particular quality of quiet unlike other neighborhood green spaces, and some described having learned about the burials and then experiencing difficulty walking over their own back yards with the same ease as before.
No formal paranormal events are organized at the site, and it receives no commercial ghost-tour traffic in the same way as better-known Chicago haunted locations.
A three-acre park with historical markers and concrete circles marks the portion of the Cook County Poor Farm and Insane Asylum burial ground preserved above ground. The rest of the estimated 38,000 burials lies beneath the surrounding Dunning residential neighborhood, discovered in construction in 1959 and 1989. The markers explain the institutional history; the concrete circles denote burial concentrations.
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