A retired man who now spends his days combing through county archives has revealed how he built a digital record of America’s long-forgotten state hospital system—by reading the paperwork almost no one else touches. The man, who goes by Wendell Roe, explained that the name is not the one he was born with. He said Roe is what the state wrote down when it needed to file a body without a person attached to it, and he felt it was a name that should not be left unused. Roe retired at 61.
Since then, he says, he has devoted most of his time to county archives and scanned annual reports submitted to state legislatures—an activity he admits he never imagined for himself at 40. His focus is the state hospital system, institutions that once housed hundreds of thousands of people across the country. When one of these hospitals closes, Roe noted, the building usually gets the attention. Photographers capture peeling paint, filmmakers record darkened hallways at night, and that often becomes the entire story.
The paperwork, however, is still there. Annual reports to legislatures, trustee minutes, census rolls, and coroner’s findings remain on record. Most of it is public. Most of it has been digitized.
Almost nobody reads it. Roe reads it. He describes his work as simply telling people what those documents say. He is clear about one point: nothing in these buildings is haunted.
Everything that happened, he says, happened while the lights were on, and someone was writing it down in a very neat hand. That writing captures the overcrowding, the boilers that were never replaced, the outbreaks that followed, and the burials that were recorded with numbers rather than names. Roe points out that tens of thousands of people across the country are buried under a number. Where the names have survived, he reads them aloud.
He introduced his ongoing project under the name Quiet Wards, where he shares what he finds in the records, and invited viewers to the next installment.