A couple of weeks ago, we got unintentionally marooned in Raleigh for a few hours. Not the dramatic, flip-a-table kind of delay—just the slow, soul-sapping variety. My baby cousin got tangled up with TSA and missed his flight because he was traveling with a high school ID. None of us were dressed to explore a city, and absolutely nobody wanted to sink into another airport chair and stare at a gate number.
So I said, “Let’s go to Dix Park.”
It turned out to be one of those small, offhand decisions that stays with you.
We parked near the old cemetery off South Boylan Avenue, right beside the historic Dorothea Dix Hospital grounds. It’s only about three acres, but it holds more than 900 graves—patients who died between 1859 and 1970. Many were never claimed. Families who couldn’t afford to retrieve them. Families who didn’t want to. Families who were told—directly or indirectly—to be ashamed.
The markers are simple. Some have been carefully restored by volunteers in recent years. Others are barely legible now, softened by time and weather, scattered across a gentle hill beneath a low, gray sky.
The moment we stepped out of the car, the airport stress disappeared. Just like that. The air was cold and clean and felt heavier than it should have—like it was carrying memory. Or grief. Or both.
Dix Park stretches across 308 acres right in the middle of Raleigh. It’s expansive and open, almost startling in how much space it gives you to breathe. But starting at the cemetery changes the tone. It adds an edge.
It’s beautiful.
And it’s eerie.
Southern gothic in the best possible way.
Exactly my speed.
We stayed longer than we planned to. Walked slowly. Read names and dates. Stood in front of the memorial wall. There’s a weight there—not oppressive, just present. Lives lived mostly out of sight. People folded quietly into history. It felt like stepping into a half-forgotten Southern story, the kind with overgrown edges and the sense that the past isn’t done talking yet.
And that history lands differently when you live with mental illness yourself.
Before it was a park, this land was Dorothea Dix Hospital—North Carolina’s first psychiatric hospital. In the mid-1800s, mental illness was met with fear, neglect, and cruelty. People were locked in jails, chained in poorhouses, or hidden away by families who had no real options.
One hundred and fifty years ago, that could’ve been me.
Dorothea Lynde Dix saw those conditions and refused to accept them. Born in 1802, she became a tireless reformer after witnessing the treatment of people with mental illness while teaching Sunday school in Massachusetts. She traveled state to state, pushing lawmakers to fund hospitals rooted in “moral treatment”—fresh air, meaningful work, calm surroundings. Care instead of punishment.
When she came to North Carolina in 1848, the legislature initially said no. The money wasn’t there. Support was thin. The bill failed.
Then something almost poetic happened.
While staying at a Raleigh hotel, Dix cared for a dying woman named Louisa Holmes Dobbin. On her deathbed, Louisa urged her husband—James Dobbin, a powerful political figure—to take up Dix’s cause. He did. He gave a speech. The bill was reconsidered. And in 1849, the state approved funding for what would become the Hospital for the Mentally Ill.
The hospital opened in 1856 on a hilltop once part of the Spring Hill Plantation. It was designed to be calming and dignified, surrounded by open land, trees, and long views of the city below.
Nature as medicine.
For more than 150 years, it functioned as its own small world—farms, workshops, cottages, a nursing school, even recreational trips. It evolved. It struggled. It adapted. And eventually, it fell victim to the same forces that shuttered psychiatric hospitals across the country.
Even with my own struggles, I’m not convinced that closure was the right call.
Deinstitutionalization was meant to be compassionate, but without real, sustained community support, too many people fell through the cracks.
Homelessness has surged. Untreated mental illness is everywhere. Some stories end in tragedy. It makes you wonder whether reform—not erasure—might have served us better.
Either way, Dorothea Dix Hospital closed in 2012.
The City of Raleigh bought the land. Advocates fought hard to keep it open and undeveloped. And because of that fight, Dix Park exists today.
The park doesn’t gloss over its past. It acknowledges the good and the complicated. The hope and the harm. The buildings still stand—brick, columns, tall windows—some restored, some left to show their age.
We missed the sunflower field this time, but I think I like the park better in winter anyway. It felt alive and haunted all at once. Trails winding everywhere. Open fields. Space to run. Space to sit still.
Walking those hills, you can feel the echoes. The same ground that once held people society didn’t know how to care for now holds families, dogs, laughter, and quiet reflection.
If you’re ever in Raleigh, go. Park near the cemetery. Walk the grounds. Take your time.
It’s a reminder that the most meaningful places are often built on complicated foundations—and that sometimes, beauty comes with a little Southern gothic chill running beneath it.
