The Unmarked Graveyard from Radio Diaries

The Last Archive

Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2023

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the first episode in Radio Diaries’ new series The Unmarked Graveyard, untangling mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery. Each week, they’re bringing you stories of how people ended up on New York City's Hart Island, the lives they lived, and the people they left behind.

This debut episode goes back to a few years ago, when a young man who called himself Stephen became a fixture in Manhattan’s Riverside Park. Locals started noticing him sitting on the same park bench day after day. He said little and asked for nothing.

When Stephen’s body was found in 2017, the police were unable to identify him, and he was buried on Hart Island. Then, one day, a woman who knew him from the park stumbled upon his true identity, and his backstory came to light.

Listen to new episodes of The Unmarked Graveyard from Radio Diaries every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Pushkin
0:10.0	Hey Last Archive Listen
0:11.1	Ben here I'm excited to share Pushkin's biggest audiobook sale of the year.
0:16.1	All our audiobooks are 25% off for Black Friday, and that means it's the best time of year
0:21.4	to download our two Jill Lepore audiobooks, the deadline and who killed truth.
0:26.0	Pushkin also has audio originals by Steve Martin and Sarah Lyle, plus so many others.
0:32.0	Head to Pushkin.
0:33.2	FM to check them out. Use promo code Listen 2023, and you'll get 25% off audio books
0:39.8	and $10 off an annual membership to Pushkin Plus during Black Friday weekend.
0:45.0	Hey listeners, we're sharing an episode today from the Unmarked Graveyard,
0:50.0	a new series from our friends at the Radio Diaries Podcast.
0:53.2	The series tells the stories of people buried in America's largest public cemetery,
0:58.0	New York City's Heart Island.
1:00.0	I think anyone who loves the last archive is going to love these stories, personal narratives that tell the history of a place that's largely off limits to the public and full of secrets.
1:09.0	As a New Yorker, I've always wondered about it, and I loved this series because of how attentively it brings these forgotten histories to life.
1:16.0	It's really beautifully done.
1:17.5	So please give it a listen and if you like this story check out the rest of the series on the Radio Diaries podcast. Here's the episode.
1:25.0	In 2017, a man was buried on a narrow mile-long island off the coast of the Bronx in New York City.
1:37.1	He'd been dead for months, but the city hadn't figured out his name.
1:41.5	So he was placed in a simple pine coffin that was stacked in a mass grave.
1:46.2	The only marker was a white post that read Plot 383. Since 1869, more than a million people have been buried on Hard Island.
1:57.0	It doesn't look like a typical cemetery.
	...

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