The Obsidian Registry · File 120
New York Has Buried a Million People on an Island You Can't Visit. Someone Is Digging Them Up.
The city buries the people nobody claims. It turns out somebody did.
Built on the real record of Hart Island. Every documented fact is numbered and cited at the end. The rest, use your own judgment.
logged · file_120.txt · 8.6 KB · recovered by
Intake record
| Recovered from | Ferry dock tool locker, City Island, the Bronx |
|---|---|
| Contents | A burial crew's trench ledger, a dead woman's library card, eleven pages of a grave digger's letters home, a ferry passenger manifest |
| Finder | Andre Mosley, former burial crew member |
| Status | Hart Island is real and documented. The open trench is not on any plan. |
Off the coast of the Bronx, in Long Island Sound, there is a narrow island about a mile long. It is called Hart Island. Since 1869, New York City has used it to bury people.1
Not famous people. Not people with family plots. It is where the city buries the people nobody claims, and the people whose families cannot afford a funeral. Babies who died in hospitals. The homeless. The poor. People who died alone in apartments and were not found for weeks.1
More than a million people are buried there.1 It is one of the largest public cemeteries in the United States.
For most of its history, the burials were done by prisoners. Men from the city jail on Rikers Island were taken to Hart Island by boat and paid a small hourly wage to dig long trenches and stack plain pine coffins inside them, three high, in rows. Babies were buried in smaller boxes, in separate trenches.2
There are no headstones. Each trench gets a single white marker. The graves are recorded by number in ledgers.2
For decades, the island was run by the Department of Correction, like a jail. Families who wanted to visit a grave had to ask permission, and were often told no. Many families did not even know their relatives were there.2
In 2016, a New York Times investigation described the island, its records and the families who had searched for years to find out where their loved ones were buried.2 Public pressure grew. In 2021, the city transferred control of the island to the Parks Department, which has slowly begun opening it to visitors.3
In the spring of 2020, during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York, burials on Hart Island rose sharply. Aerial photographs of workers in protective suits lowering coffins into long trenches went around the world.3
Every one of those coffins had a name on it. Most of the people inside had someone. They just did not have someone who could get there in time.
Remaining record sealed · 2 known copies
This is where they stopped the last reader.
You have read the part that leaked. The ending, the 3 cited sources, and the archivist's note are still sealed.
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