One million buried in mass graves on forbidden New York island

This stayed with me for some reason, so I decided to share it here.

Most New Yorkers don't even know it exists. But a million forgotten souls are buried in mass graves dug by convicts on a tiny, forbidden island east of the Bronx. Since 1869, still-born babies, the homeless, the poor and the unclaimed have been stacked one upon the other, three coffins deep, on Hart Island.

Corpses are interred in great, anonymous trenches. There are no tombstones. Small white posts in the ground mark each 150 adult bodies. A thousand children and infants are buried together per grave.

This is where the faceless masses are stacked one atop another. The lost, the abused and downtrodden. The unwanted, missing and discarded, the forgotten and the damned. Those that never had a chance, or got lost in the machine and were ground in the gears and spit out.

How many stories lost? Families left without answers?



One million buried in mass graves on forbidden New York island

Just something to think about.

A bill has been introduced to the city council seeking to transfer the island to the parks administration, but has not been taken up yet.
Joseph dreams of being able to return as often as she wants to what she calls "a public cemetery that the public is not allowed to visit." She also dreams of flowers and a bench to honor her baby. "If I can put a marker on a bench, I'll be happy," she said.

WOW.

This is profoundly sad Over a century of burials, and it looks like next to no record keeping aside from that 60,000 mentioned. Talk about buried & forgotten, this place is the epitome of sorrow.

It seems like an awesome place to camp out.
Best place for ghost stories ever.

If.

If the zombies invade I sure wouldn't want to live near that island.

That Is sad.

They ought to repair that building in the top photo and make it into a shrine for the unknown souls so that people can go in there and reflect and think about how as society we like to forget sometimes.

if there are ghosts anywhere,
surely that island has a few.

watchitburn
This stayed with me for some reason, so I decided to share it here.

Most New Yorkers don't even know it exists. But a million forgotten souls are buried in mass graves dug by convicts on a tiny, forbidden island east of the Bronx. Since 1869, still-born babies, the homeless, the poor and the unclaimed have been stacked one upon the other, three coffins deep, on Hart Island.

Corpses are interred in great, anonymous trenches. There are no tombstones. Small white posts in the ground mark each 150 adult bodies. A thousand children and infants are buried together per grave.

This is where the faceless masses are stacked one atop another. The lost, the abused and downtrodden. The unwanted, missing and discarded, the forgotten and the damned. Those that never had a chance, or got lost in the machine and were ground in the gears and spit out.

How many stories lost? Families left without answers?

One million buried in mass graves on forbidden New York island

Just something to think about.

A bill has been introduced to the city council seeking to transfer the island to the parks administration, but has not been taken up yet.
Joseph dreams of being able to return as often as she wants to what she calls "a public cemetery that the public is not allowed to visit." She also dreams of flowers and a bench to honor her baby. "If I can put a marker on a bench, I'll be happy," she said.

Doing a Google search on how the homeless are buried gave me several links a long while back ago. They're buried in mass, but cannot accurately remember if they had a headstone for all the names "or individually".

Check
This

reply to post by watchitburn


Where Jimmy Hoffa is and will never be found.

reply to post by Bilk22


I bet you're right.

How sad.

We as a society should care more for the poor, orphaned and downtrodden, not just sweep it all under the carpet and try to ignore it.

Very sad. I grew up next to a graveyard. We played baseball and football in a large, wide-open field in there. I was told that the field was actually a mass grave.

Without directly and deliberately attempting to invoke Godwin's Law, this does have a certain tone of "cleansing", whether ethnic OR otherwise similar to the one that one group was doing to another group in Europe in the early 1940's..... Mass disposal of bodies in an almost industrial manner, check. A truly sad state of affairs but it just goes to show again, the blatant contempt that certain individuals in power have for their public duties and the health, safety and well-being of all citizens in their respective nations. Absolute power, centralised government, uni-lateral agreements, meh, bleh, heh!