Good Morning and Happy Halloween everyone.
Lots going on today, tonight is the Twin City Opera House's Open Public Investigation starting at 9:30 you can sign in and get your ticket to join us on a halloween investigation from 10 pm to after 3am of my favorite haunted spot in Ohio the Twin City Opera House you can see all the details and hear about the hauntings at
www.twincityoperahouse.com Then their is also our Lost and Found Ohio jack O Lantern contest, today is the last day to get those entries in. I found one more sent to me last night so that gives us three entries, come on people more than a dozen of my friends clamoured for me to run the contest this year so lets see those Jacks!
send them to
www.grimshawl1972@yahoo.com 
We also have plans for many upcoming investigations being finalised we were just on the phone last night with DaShane Watkins and were working out a couple investigations with his Spiritual Hope Society in November. In fact I believe every weekend in November is now full of hostings and investigations already.
Now onto fridays blog article The Dead of Pinion Park.....
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Sparks Nevada....
Pinion Park is an unlikely spot in the Rail City. A surprising, attractive patch of green in one of Sparks' oldest residential neighborhoods, Conductor Heights, now a mix of older homes and industrial sites.
The property to its south a vacant lot overgrown with weeds and rabbit brush.
Together they include what amounts to a mass grave, the anonoymous resting site of 600 or more souls, once patients of the adjacent state hospital. Some of them have been there almost as long as the hospital itself.
Once known as the Nevada Insane Asylum it was founded in 1882.
Today's hospital and the care it gives bears little resemblance to that institution, though if you look closely at building 12, one of the oldest, the hooks protruding from the walls where patients were once tied gives a hint.
The asylum was its own little world in those days. It had its own dairy farm. Much of the staff lived on the grounds. Those committed rarely reentered the world outside, They were society's abandoned.
"There was a greater stigma attached to mental illness," notes noted Nevada historian Philip Earl. "Sometimes families just dropped them off and moved on. They were forgotten andignored by their familes and the state, of course, just did what it could."
The neglect didn't end with death. For most it was a short trip to an empty field on the edge of the asylum. Local writer Dennis Cassinelli witnessed some burials as a boy growing up in Conductor Heights.
Usually there was no ceremony. "They used a horse and wagon and sometimes there was no coffin, just big cardboard box," says Cassinelli. "And they'd park the wagon and dig the whole and just push the box into the hole. If it didn't fit, they'd jump up and down on it."
Wooden stakes with tin name plates served as markers, but as time passed many disappeared.
The burials stopped in 1947. Even then, the dead weren't allowed their rest. Cassinelli witnessed the most violent assault in 1945 when the hospital hired a contractor to dig a drainage ditch through the cemetery.
Before the horrified gaze of neighbors and young children, the big drag line used by Isbell Construction tore into the earth ripping bodies and coffins in half.
"I still remember it," says Cassinelli. "You don't forget something like that."
Later when the city of Sparks widened 21st street more graves were disturbed and in 1959 the city leased a portion of the property and built a park for the neighborhood.
By then the only record of those who are buried there was in a leather bound ledger now in the State Archives. For each a single line, name age, country or state of origin, cause of death.
Although many here were forgotten by their families a few were not. One of them, Cora Clark, was born into a prominent Carson City family. She was committed by her husband for reasons unclear in 1917. She and her family corresponded over the next 25 years.
They sent money to support her care, Then, on one visit they were told she had vanished.
There was no death notice. No one notified the family. No one had told them to stop sending money. Cora Clark had disappeared into the asylum cemetery, No one knows where the money went.
More than a year ago, a relative came looking for a lost relative and discovered a cause.
"We asked where her grave was and was told it was unmarked," says Carolyn Mirich. Then we discovered there was no plot map showing where anyone was buried."
Mirich says she began researching cemeteries at other states' asylum. There were unmarked graves elsewhere, but there were maps showing who was buried where. "This was the worst of the worst," she says," it stopped being about looking for Cora. We just found so many things wrong."
Banding with Cassinelli and other advocates a non profit organization with a long naqme was born, the Friends of Northern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services Cemetery. They began pushing for change.
Sadly she says she found some attitudes hadn't changed. "We kept hearing 'it's just a paupers' cemetery.' she says she was told.
Undeterred they eventually found allies in State Senator Bernice Martin Mathews and Assemblywoman Debbie Smith.
The legislature responded passing Senate Bill 256 designating it as an historic cemetery. The state began addressing more than a century of neglect. To Mirich and the others, it was long overdue.
"The people buried there are just as important as those buried in any municipal cemetery. They deserve respect. They deserve to be buried once and remain there. They deserve to have their names some where as proof they existed."
What's emerging is a plan for a memorial park leaving the mature trees and grass, but removing the playground equipment. That's the one unfortunate side effect. The neighborhood has been using the park for decades and it's the only one they have. Now they are losing it.
That story in part two of our series, "Neglected and Forgotten."