On a gray, wet Sunday afternoon in Sydney, as the first chill of Fall sinks into the ground below, I sit in a graveyard with no headstones. The grass is cut. The flowers are trimmed. A single stone sits in the middle of the garden, in tribute to the forgotten who were buried here.

This is the Field of Peace, or Ach’-na-Sith, located behind what was once called “The Butterscotch Palace”, where at least 60 psychiatric patients were buried without ceremony, without family, and mostly under the cover of darkness. This is the resting place of the ignored, built in the memory of the forgotten. An unmarked graveyard for bodies nobody claimed, for lives deemed not worthy of celebration.

Ach’-na-Sith sits in a small clearing alongside Sydney River, strangely hidden, even though if you sit on one of the many benches meant for quiet contemplation, you can plainly hear the cars stream past on the highway and see the industrial backside of Walmart through the foliage. In a way, it’s a testament to how close past and current tragedies can be, and how easy it is to ignore them. It was used as a burial ground of The Cape Breton Hospital, the local insane asylum, between the years of 1906 and 1959. Nobody really knows the exact number of how many people were buried here; 60 is merely a best guess.

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