Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We'll close the show today by shedding some light on a place in New York City that many of us have never visited. I wonder if any of you listening right now have any experience with it. We know our city consists of a few islands, Randalls Island, Roosevelt Island, et cetera. What about Hart Island? Off the coast of the Bronx exists an island you can only get to by ferry. For many years, it was totally inaccessible to the public. Why? It hosts the largest mass graveyard in the United States. Now, not many of us like to think about what happens to us after we die, but we've got a few options.

Many people choose cremation, or they're buried in family plots and traditional graveyards. Lately, people have been opting to turn their remains into trees, perhaps to symbolize the cycle of life, or because they're looking for an environmentally positive alternative. Few chose to be buried in a place like Hart Island, yet it hosts the remains of millions of New Yorkers who could not be identified. Fell ill during pandemics, like COVID-19 or age, or whose families could not afford an alternative.

While those who call Hart Island their final resting place are 1 of 100 or so in an unmarked grave, they each had lives full of experiences that eventually led them there. The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island, a new podcast series from Radio Diaries introduces us to the anonymous by uncovering the mysteries of individuals who've been buried on the island. Here's a clip of some of the voices we hear on the show.

Susan Hurlburt: Neil Harris was last seen in Inwood New York on December 12, 2014.

Participant 1: There were thousands of questions. Where's his family? Where's his people?

Participant 2: Uncle Caesar was estranged from our family 40 to 50 years.

Participant 3: The playwright, novelist, and author of The Happy Island, Ms. Dawn Powell.

Susan Hurlburt: Holy shit, I know that person, and it's got a name attached to it. Neil Harris, Jr.

Participant 4: You can't help but wonder what her life has been.

Participant 5: I never went back and I never looked for him again.

Participant 6: Annette found you, she found us, and we here. Now we know who you are.

Brian Lehrer: Joining us now is founder and executive producer of Radio Diaries, Joe Richman, as well as Susan Hurlburt, Neil Harris, Jr's mother, whose voice we heard at the top of that montage. Joe, can you take us to Hart Island? Where is it? What does it look like? How long has the city buried our dead there?

Joe Richman: Since 1869. There are more than a million people buried on Hart Island. And as you mentioned at the top, it's not easy to get there. It's a little bit more accessible than it used to be. Families take a ferry there and you go to the mass grave where your loved one is buried. We were able to go with some of the family members in our series. We were able to go to Hart Island. I think one thing Susan could maybe talk about is how different-- There's a lot of stigma about this place, of course. Once you go there, I think sometimes minds are changed. It has a bit of a sacred feeling about it, just off the coast of the Bronx.

Brian Lehrer: Well, before we bring Susan in, how does it get decided who gets buried on Hart Island?

Joe Richman: People are buried there for a number of reasons. Sometimes families can't afford a private burial. Sometimes people fall through the cracks in various ways. They can't be identified by the city. They're unclaimed by family. As you mentioned during epidemics, Hart Island got a lot of attention during COVID because about 10% of COVID deaths were buried in Hart Island. Back during AIDS, some of these epidemics, there are more people buried there. There are some strange cases, too. You mentioned it's not a place many people choose to be buried. One of our stories is about a composer who decided to be buried on Hart Island because he felt there was something beautiful and humble about being buried there.

Brian Lehrer: Susan, hi. Welcome to the show.

Susan Hurlburt: Hi.

Brian Lehrer: Your son, Neil Harris, is the first person whose story we hear about in this series. Can you introduce us to him a little bit and talk about how he wound up buried on Hart Island?

Susan Hurlburt: Neil, he had schizophrenia. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Unfortunately, the mental health laws at the time were like they just let him go and he was of age so he could do whatever he wanted. He wound up sitting in Riverside Park. I didn't know it. I had flyers out. I didn't know where he was. I was looking. Then he passed away in 2017. I wasn't notified till 2018. That I'll never understand, but it is what it is. They wound up burying him on Hart Island. I will say that when I first found out I was mortified. I was very upset about that.

Brian Lehrer: I can imagine. Listeners, here's a clip of Susan reading a letter she received from Neil as a child in episode one of the Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island.

Susan Hurlburt: This was something that Neil wrote to me when he was little in school. "My hero is my mom because she has always been there for me. She always brings me and my friends to Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. I remember when we didn't have a home or any money and we were living with my aunt. After a while, she got a job and we got a home. That's why my mom is my hero."

Brian Lehrer: Seems like you two had a close relationship with one another. When did that change? How did you become estranged?

Susan Hurlburt: I believe it was after Sandy. I think Neil had underlying issues all his life. He did. I think that right after Hurricane Sandy, like a switch went off inside of him and he became very nervous and he paced a lot. He was talking to himself. I knew that there was a problem. I had called the crisis unit, and they came in and they refused to even talk to him because he said he didn't want to talk to them. Since he was 29 years old, he didn't have to talk to them. The situation just got worse and worse. Then finally he just disappeared.

Brian Lehrer: Staying on your story a little more, and then we'll go back to Joe Richman from Radio Diaries and talk about the larger piece and a Green Space event coming up. After Neil left home, he became a staple resident of Riverside Park. I see. Instead of going by Neil, he was known as Steven, and here are some voices of neighbors who knew him.

Participant 7: I used to sit up at the corner there, feed my little birds, and that's when I talked to him and he told me that he was from Long Island and his name was Steven. It was like pulling teeth to get him to say anything. He was not a talker. He didn't seem to trust people much. At the time, I still wasn't sure if he was sleeping in the park because I see him sitting on the bench every day with his nap sack but I never saw him sleep. I called the outreach for the homeless. They went to talk to him and they told me Steven doesn't want any help.

Participant 8: It was always kind of reassuring to see him because he was such a big guy and so gentle in his presence. He was a constant presence in the park, but a mysterious one.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I wonder if anybody out there right now has any experience in any way with Hart Island or anyone buried on Hart Island and wants to help Joe Richman in form this reporting. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Joe, the last voice there said he was a constant presence in the park, talking about Susan's son, but a mysterious one. You refer to stories of those buried on Hart Island as frequently mysterious. How come?

Joe Richman: I think our original approach, the original draw to Hart Island was almost to create audio obituaries for people who never got an obituary. As we went into the series, each story got deeper and more mysterious. We think of them as mysteries because we're really trying to entangle, usually through family members, who this person was, what their life was. I think Susan's story, it's moving to me as a longtime New Yorker, most of us in the city come across people in our daily life who are woven into the fabric of our lives in some way, even though we know nothing about them.

Here's this guy who was on the same bench every day for two years and the neighbors knew him, but didn't know anything about him. Then when he died, that could have been the end of the story. He was buried in Heart Island and that's the way maybe it happens a lot of the time, it's someone falls through the cracks and that's the end of the story. Just through luck, someone in the neighborhood, a journalist was going through a missing persons database and saw a photo of this guy with the name Neil and pieced it together and got in touch with Susan, and that's how these two stories ended up finding each other.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a text message from a listener, Joe, who writes, "As a Rabbi, I was there with Picture the Homeless campaigning to make the island more accessible to families, peaceful but unsettling place administered by the Department of Corrections." Do you agree with every piece of that?

Joe Richman: What's important to say is that for almost 150 years, it was managed by the Department of Corrections, and in fact, inmates at Rikers Island often did the burials. That changed two years ago, so it's now run by the parks department. The plan is to slowly open the island to the general public. I found it actually a very beautiful place myself. I do love cemeteries, and this is a very unique and special cemetery.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Lee calling from another New York City island called Staten. Lee, you're on WNYC, hello.

Lee: Hi, Brian. [laughs] Thank you for that. We had a family experience, my brother-in-law's aunt was walking and she died as a result of a hit and run. She had no ID on her. The said body was sent to the morgue and it had the darndest time getting someone to listen to them that she was missing, she might be in the morgue, they wanted to ID her and she was like hours away from being buried on Hart Island when they finally got everything straightened out and got custody of the body. That's another piece of this, there might be people buried on Hart Island who have family who were looking for them and nobody was doing their job.

Joe Richman: This might be a good time to give a shout-out to Melinda Hunt of the Hart Island project because we wouldn't know much about many of the people buried in Hart Island if it wasn't for her efforts to get some of the city's records and she's created a database. Listeners could go to hartisland.net and actually go through. It's a crowdsourced database, to find out more information about people who are buried there.

Brian Lehrer: Susan, Joe is trying to tee you up earlier, but then we went on a long detour to talk about how being buried on Hart Island can come with a stigma. Can you talk about that?

Susan Hurlburt: Yes, like I said before, when I found out he was actually buried on Hart Island, which was known to me as Potter's field, I was mortified. After visiting, and it took me two years before I actually visited because when it was under the Correctional Facility, they sent you this long letter telling you all these things that could happen or, be careful of this, that, and the other. No, I didn't want to go.

I was very, very, very confused about whether to go or not to go. Then when I got in touch with Melinda, I spoke to Melinda a lot. She said, "Well, now the parks department has this," and I was offered to go. When I got there, I was pleasantly surprised. It is very serene, it was a beautiful ride on the ferry, I was even petrified of the ferry, but it was a beautiful ride. It's just not what people think it is, it really isn't.

Joe Richman: I have a question for Susan, if I can jump in?

Brian Lehrer: Real quick.

Joe Richman: Susan, you said part of your story is about how piecing these two stories together of actually finding him in the end even after he died. You said that most people, I think, would want find closure in that, but you said in a way that you wish you were still looking, that you didn't understand the idea of closure. I'm wondering how you feel about that.

Susan Hurlburt: I still to this day, I have to admit that I don't understand how people can say, "At least you know you have closure, you know where he is, you know this and that." To me, closure would be having him back. Some part of me feels like I'd rather still be looking, I'd rather hold on to that hope, that piece of hope that maybe he's alive.

Brian Lehrer: Now you're going to make everybody cry. As we run out of time, I want everybody to know that Joe Richman will be hosting an event with Kai Wright at the Green Space tomorrow night at seven o'clock in conjunction with his reporting on Hart Island. Want to give listeners a preview of what they can expect if they show up to the Green Space, Joe?

Joe Richman: Yes. Susan will be there, and a couple of other characters from our stories will be there and we'll just be doing little short excerpted versions of a few of the stories from the series. It's a big range of stories, and it'd be audio and visual. Come and say hello. Then you can hear all the stories either on NPR, all things considered, or on our podcast, the Radio Diaries podcast if you want to catch up on the backstories.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it. Joe Richman, founder and executive producer of Radio Diaries, and Susan Hurlburt, mother of Neil Harris, Jr, whose story is featured in episode one of the podcast series, The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island. Thank you both so much for coming on.

Joe Richman: Thanks, Brian.

Susan Hurlburt: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: That's the Brian Lehrer Show for today, Produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen produces our daily politics podcast, Muskan Nagpal, our intern this term. We had Shana  and Milton Ruiz at the audio controls. Stay tuned for Allison.

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