A national mental health organization is demanding the burial of the mummified bodies of two former mental patients now on display in a West Virginia Museum.
They’re known as the “Philippi Mummies.” In 1888, farmer and amateur scientist Graham Hamrick bought the two bodies from the state mental hospital in Weston and mummified them with his own patented embalming solution.
Today, those bodies are believed to be the same two mummies being kept at the Barbour County Museum. For $1, you can go into a special room and view them.
Lauren Spiro, director of public policy for the National Coalition of Mental Health Consumer/Survivor Organizations, calls that “shocking and horrifying.”
Spiro says the remains should be buried, much like Native American remains at museums are being buried.
“These are human beings that deserve to be treated with more dignity. And to be put on exhibit as some freaks, what does the message it sends to our children? It reinforces these horrible, stereotypical messages,” she said.
No one knows the identity or the history of the two women who were mummified. But the mummies themselves have a long history.
After Hamrick’s death, they served as attractions for P.T. Barnum’s circus. They returned to Philippi and were kept first in a barn and then under someone’s bed.
They have long been a tourist attraction – as described by a former museum curator, James Ramsey, in a 2002 interview for the West Virginia Public Television show, Outlook.
“When I was about ten years old, I caught my first glimpse of the mummies,” Ramsey said. “They would be taken over to the courthouse.
“And the way the man would get the attention to the people, and the way the man would get the attention of the people, he would cup his hand over his mouth and call across the street, ‘Have you saw the mummies? If you ain’t, come right over. Two bits, 25 cents, one-fourth of a dollar.’”
The mummies were flooded twice – in 1985 and 1994 – but survived. Spiro said her group stumbled across the mummies by accident.
“A colleague was going on vacation in West Virginia, looking for things to do, and it came up on the Web site. And he was so shocked, he informed me about it,” she said.
They’re called “Mummies of the Insane” on the popular tourist site, roadsideamerica.com. The site shows a picture of smiling man sitting between the two mummies. The mummies are not wrapped in cloth, but look more like burn victims with small white towels covering their genital area.
The web site is also featured in a curriculum about mummies from the Washington Post’s newspapers in education program.
“It just fuels this myth that we are different from you. That we’re freaks! And it’s wrong, it’s simply wrong,” she said.
But at least one person in Philippi defends the museum. Susan Church owns the Covered Bridge Bed and Breakfast in Philippi, but before that she spent her career running museums across the country.
Church says the mummies are treated with respect, and they’re educational, too.
“How many school kids in West Virginia might ever get the chance to see something that’s mummified? And this is not newly done, this is something that’s very old,” Church said.
And what about the mummies in other museums around the world?
“If you go to Chicago, New York, or London museum, and they had that, would you want them to be buried?” she asked.
This is the second controversy this year to emerge from the former state mental hospital in Weston. Earlier this year, mental health advocates objected when the new owners of the building restored its original name, “Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum” and began hosting ghost tours and mud-bog truck races there.