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It took me a few hours to find the girl whose face had appeared to me so clearly that morning, but as soon as I spotted the figure sitting on the bench out of the corner of my eye, I immediately knew that I had found the right person. She had a pile of cards, a handwritten cardboard sign, and, as my eyes met hers, she broke into an impish grin. She was definitely the one.
I handed her five dollars and sat down on the blanket.
“What is your question?” she asked me.
“I need to know what story to tell,” I answered.
She drew three cards, turned them over in front of me, and started to study them. As soon as I glanced at the cards, an old friend flashed through my mind, and instantly my question was answered. I quickly glanced at the cards again, snapped a picture of them with my phone, and then gently interrupted her thought process.
“No need,” I told her. “All I needed was to see the cards. I’ve got everything I need to know now.”
She looked at me, puzzled. “If all you needed was to see the cards, why did you pay me for a reading?”
“I was supposed to seek you out,” I answered, momentarily drifting back to the vision I had on the riverbank that morning and remembering that I had neglected an important detail. “I was also supposed to compensate you twice what you asked, so here…”
I reached into my pocket, handed her another five dollars and started to get up.
“Wait,” she said. “I have to ask. What’s the story? What are you writing about?”
“Its about the dead,” I quickly answered, realizing as the words left my mouth that she deserved more of an explanation than that. I took a breath and tried again. “I’m being nagged to write about the dead. But I’ve got too many possibilities in my head and I was drowning in an indecisive fog. Those three cards made it perfectly clear who and what I need to write about.”
She smiled and nodded. I thanked her again and headed home, ever so grateful for the simplicity of that exchange.
* * *
It was Samhain, and we had dedicated the day to honoring the forgotten.
We had started the afternoon at Washington Square Park, on the east side of the park where an estimated 20,000 bodies were buried and forgotten beneath one of New York City’s most well-known landmarks. The park was packed that day with children and adults alike in Halloween costumes, milling about in anticipation of the parade that would pass through Greenwich Village in just a few hours.
Jim and I stuck out for our lack of costumes and, yet instantly, attracted attention as we spread flowers throughout the east side of the park and sang songs and left offerings for the dead, purposefully ignoring the confused and questioning stares from passers-by. The crowds of people dressed as ghouls and ghosts hadn’t a clue that they were atop one of the city’s largest graveyards, and observing the depths of that ignorance only fueled our energy towards the task at hand. If only they knew what lies beneath, I thought to myself as I sprinkled flowers along the perimeter of the park.
From Washington Square, we walked uptown to Madison Square Park and then Bryant Park, performing the same ritual again in both places, and then briefly over the pedestrian bridge to Ward’s Island and back before taking the 6 train up to Pelham Bay in the Bronx and hopping a bus over to City Island.
The day before, I had arranged to borrow a boat from a friend whose family lived out on the island. It was a rickety old skiff, perhaps 12 feet long with a sputtering old Evinrude motor, that had seen better days but was sufficient for the purpose of our voyage. I was given a quick lesson on the boat’s quirks and operations before dragging her on the dolly down to the dock. I looked out into the water and focused my eye towards our destination in the distance.
City Island (left) and Hart Island (right). Photo by Bjoertvedt.
The sun was just starting to set as we strapped on our life jackets, grabbed a few flashlights and a set of oars, and headed out into Long Island Sound with a large plastic bag filled with fresh-cut flowers. It was a clear night, the water was still, and Jim piloted the boat while I helped navigate us northeast past Rat Island, the nautical map of this stretch long committed to my memory. I had been out on the Sound only a few times before in years past, but I had taken this trip many times in my mind, to the point where I felt a definitive déjà vu while we crossed the sound, despite the fact that I had never taken this exact route before.
A short time later, we stopped the boat and shut the motor off a hundred feet or so away from the shoreline near the northernmost tip of Hart Island. We carefully stood up in the boat and gazed out towards the island, immediately noticing that the land formation before us was literally shrouded in mist against an otherwise clear sky. Without a word we each grabbed an oar and slowly rowed closer in silence, drawn to the eerie, numinous energy that was emanating from the shoreline. Before us was a literal island of the dead, a 101-acre tract of land that held the distinction of being the largest publicly-owned burial ground in the world.
Over a million of New York’s indigent, forgotten, stillborn, and otherwise unclaimed dead are buried on Hart Island. The island has served as New York’s potter’s field since 1868, when the city purchased the island and designated it as “a public burial place for the poor and strangers.” Prior to the city’s acquisition of Hart Island, potter’s fields had been maintained throughout Manhattan from the time of the city’s inception. The area that is now Madison Square Park was the first large-scale potter’s field, until the city purchased the area that is now Washington Square Park in 1797 and designated that tract as a potter’s field until 1825. Bryant Park was used to bury the indigent from the 1820s until just before the Civil War; Ward’s Island was then used for burials for several years prior to the purchase of Hart Island in 1868.
In addition to a potter’s field, Hart Island had also alternately housed an insane asylum, a drug treatment center, a boys’ reformatory, a tuberculosis sanitarium, prison dormitories, and a Nike missile base. The island was dotted with ruins from these various incarnations – ruins that were left crumbling and unexplored as the island had been closed to the public for as long as anyone could remember. The burials on Hart Island were performed by prison inmates from nearby Rikers Island. The inmates and employees of the New York City Department of Corrections were the only living souls legally permitted on the island. Signs warning the public not to land ashore were scattered all around the perimeter of the shoreline, and anyone who did step foot on the island was potentially subject to arrest.
A trench at the potter’s field on Hart Island, circa 1890. Photo by Jacob Riis.
Before I had met Jim, I had never even heard of a potter’s field, let alone had any thoughts of ever visiting one on Samhain night. I had occasionally wondered in the past what became of those who died and were unclaimed, or those whose families could not afford a burial. But I had never taken those thoughts to their logical conclusion until I started spending time with the segment of society that tends to end up in such places. I understood why nobody ever spoke of potter’s fields, as poverty and death are equally uncomfortable subjects as far as society is concerned. And yet, I found that once it truly sunk in – that there were untold thousands of the forgotten dead scattered throughout New York City – I couldn’t ignore or look away from the implications of that knowledge. I felt a need to honor them, and I wasn’t alone in that feeling.
Jim was unusually familiar with Hart Island, having worked as a prison laborer on the island during his last stint at Rikers some years back. A long-time petty criminal, he consistently credited his experiences at Hart Island with scaring him straight and setting him on the right path. Burying the indigent dead had moved something in him, forced him to examine his life and the hand that he was dealt. He spoke of the dead redeeming him in the same emotional manner that so many others spoke of Christ and, while I hadn’t known him prior to his prison experiences, I could regularly sense the deep changes that were continually occurring within him. He was homeless, struggling with sobriety, and stumbled regularly in that struggle, and yet there was a consistent fire within him that lifted him through his struggles, a fire that was deeply connected to the sense of purpose that he found while working with the dead on Hart Island.
“I got at least ten or eleven friends out there, that I know of, anyway,” he had said to me a few weeks prior to our trip. “Two of them died while I was locked up that last time, and for all I know I helped to bury them. It’s literally an island of forgotten souls out there for the most part. Most folks don’t even know its there.”
He told me of the memorials that the prisoners would build after they finished filling a trench. Altars of sticks and rocks, left in corners and crevasses throughout the island, built out of a sense of solidarity and empathy with those inside the simple wooden coffins that they stacked into the trenches day after day. “After a while, you feel a responsibility, an obligation to the task,” he told me. “Being locked up is a lesson in what it means to be forgotten. and most everyone who ends up on Hart Island is forgotten, whether you’re out from your cell for the day or freshly arrived in a wooden box. The forgotten in boxes, after a while, you realize that you’ve got perhaps a little too much in common with them.”
I thought of Jim’s time out on the island as we rowed close to shore and, as I looked over at him, I had a feeling that his thoughts were in similar places. We steered the boat eastward through the still water, and slowly started to circle around the island. I grabbed the bag of flowers and started to sprinkle them out of the side of the boat as we moved through the water. Jim rowed, and I sprinkled flowers, and we sang songs and prayers, rowing a full circle around the island of the forgotten dead as the sun set behind us.
As we made our way around the island, serenading the dead, the mist over the island started to glow in the moonlight. We felt shifts in the air as the island seemed to respond to our presence. A whistling breeze picked up, and it was almost as if the dead were singing along with us. The veil was thin, time and place started to blur, and there was a sense of ever-strengthening connection as we slowly rowed through the water.
By the time we had completely circled around Hart Island, it was well after dark and both of our voices were hoarse. The island was pitch black, the moon was half-full, and we sat in the boat staring out at the island, watching as a sudden gust of wind stirred the mist that had been hovering throughout our journey around the island. We looked at each other and without a word spoken we decided it was time to depart. Jim started up the engine, which promptly sputtered and died, and we took it as a sign to maintain our silence as we gently rowed back to City Island without a word said between us.
As we landed back on City Island, the sky opened up and it started to pour, and as we looked back towards the opposite shore, the island of the dead was still eerily glowing.
* * *
In the time since our trip out to Hart Island, which took place in either 2002 or 2003, the island’s existence and the mystery around it has become much more well-known and widely publicized.
Among those buried at Hart Island are an untold number of stillborn children who died in city hospitals, many whom were buried at Hart Island without the knowledge or permission of the mother. Many of those mothers, along with the help of a local filmmaker and advocate, steadily fought the city and the Department of Corrections for the right to visit Hart Island. The department had always refused all requests to access the Island, from grieving relatives to filmmakers and journalists alike, but over the years their fight has gained traction, and the department gradually started to soften their position. In 2007, the department allowed ‘closure visits’ for the first time, which they granted only to family members who could legally prove that they had a relative buried on the island. The families were restricted to a gazebo next to the dock at Hart Island and had no view of the actual gravesites.
After eight women threatened to file suit against the Department of Corrections in 2010, seeking to visit the actual grave sites of their children, the department finally relented and allowed the women to visit the graves under tight security. The Department simultaneously lifted the overall requirement that visitors to the island need to legally justify their request through burial records. According to the Department of Corrections website, Hart Island is currently open to the public on a limited basis, although the visits are still restricted to the same rules that govern visits to Rikers Island, which means that no photographs, flowers, or mementos are allowed.
I lost touch with Jim a few years after our trip, and learned from an acquaintance several years later that he had died of cirrhosis in the hospice ward of Bellevue Hospital after a long battle. I was told that his body was unclaimed after his death, which means he was undoubtedly buried on Hart Island.
I put this story to words in the spirit of honoring his memory, and in the hopes that others will take it upon themselves to remember and honor the otherwise forgotten dead. What is remembered, lives.
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Thanks so much for your article. I am drawn to find a Potters Field now and honor those buried there. You rock M’Lady. They really do deserve to be honored. You were right; you are not alone!
Beautiful, Alley. I’ve similarly honored the dead buried in slave graveyards in the past, and this is a good reminder to do so again.
Well Alley, you do know how to write! Thanks again for this fascinating tale whose settings were, until a couple minutes ago, completely unknown to me!
I actually didn’t knew the meaning of Potter Field before this article (despite the rather neat Anthrax song of the same Name), However in Europe we do have the numerous monuments to the Forgotten Soldiers. In virtually every town in the UK, France, Germany, Austria and whatnot, you have memorial stones for those who died in both World Wars. In some fewer places, Tombs of the Unknown Dead have been built. I particularly like the Flame of the Unknown Soldier in France, that has been burning for 90 years in honor of the unknown Dead of the war.
Excellent piece, as usual. Thanks so much for all you do.
Wow! Alley, Great writing, touched me in a very meaningful way!
Alley, again thank you for your pieces. They are healing and inspiring, always. May the memories of those you evoke so well last after their awakening in each of us who reads your words.
Upon seeing the cards, I had an inkling of the contents of this article, but by the end of it, I realized they could be the only cards for this story, and the only story for these cards. By the time that the second paragraph ended, I knew it was you telling the story–when we get these by email, no author mention is given (drives me nuts!).
As always, upon reading this story, I am awed and, as often, stunned by what I never thought to consider.
My belle-mere and I will be alone this Samhain. It’s never been an easy holiday for her, and she’s not certain why. It’s possible something bad happened when she was too young to have it explained, but Halloween creeps her out.
She can sense the dead, and how they feel. Certain battlefields a peaceful, because the dead, or at least a majority, felt they were doing the right thing, but some have been nothing but a mass of confusion. She’s seen quite a few ghosts of people she knew, been visited by a number of relatives, but alas, not her late husband, with whom she had hoped to have more contact.
She and her family of marriage (first husband) lived in a house in western PA built by a man who when first drafted, was able to afford to send someone in his stead, but not the second time. He was a CO, on conschie, and deserted, fleeing to his home. He knew they’d search his house, and indeed the Union soldiers stayed there. Alexander Neelie died in a cave nearby of pneumonia, but his spirit, and several other “partial memories” stayed with the house. He liked the Piersols, and upon request one day when there was a sudden grease fire on the stove, put it out. When the subject comes up now and then, in company, of belief in ghosts, my engineer husband knows deep down they exist, from his own experience.
Perhaps, if not this year, next, I’ll find a local potter’s field for us to honor together aorund this time. I see in some other comments the same intention.
Indeed, what is remembered lives.
By the way, if there’s a pumpkin “patch” and a community food bank or kitchen near you, consider asking the former if the latter could have the unsold ones, especially the exotic squashes, which are truly tasty.
I have never encountered anything even remotely supernatural so far in my life but I have met people who have, so I like people who come to tell their stories like you. I don’t know if I’ll ever be receptive to things like that, but considering that I lived for years in a Late Medieval house that probably saw its share of departures, I dunno if it’ll ever happen.
You know, if you and Eric ever get together, you’d give performances more than worth the cost of a ticket, telling or reading your stories.
It may be too late for this year, and I don’t know if either of you can attend, but it would be a great program entry or three to have both of you there, telling your amazing, moving, and inspirational stories.