By Mike Crupi/photo editor
This discarded headstone, numbered "31," once marked the grave of a patient from the former Willard Asylum for the Insane in Willard, Seneca County. It has been tossed near the treeline in a grassy field with a scenic view of Seneca Lake (second photo below), a field which you would never suspect serves as a final resting place for 5,776 mostly forgotten souls. Their graves are marked only with numbers and most of those numbers aren’t visible, hidden beneath layers of dirt and grass. A committee of local residents and historians hopes to preserve the cemetery as a historic site and erect a monument there with the names of the dead.
