The Unmarked Graveyard: Neil Harris Jr.

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NPR

News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Documentary

4.8 • 11.8K Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2023

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

A few years ago, 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 dead 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.

"The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island" is a new series from Radio Diaries that tells the stories of seven people buried on Hart Island through a range of circumstances. Hart Island, an uninhabited strip of land off the Bronx in Long Island Sound, is America's largest public cemetery, sometimes known as a "potter's field." Since 1869, more than a million people have been buried on Hart Island, including early AIDS patients, unidentified and unclaimed New Yorkers, immigrants, incarcerated people, artists, and about ten percent of New Yorkers who died of COVID-19.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from NPR Sponsored, the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation,
0:05.1	who believe high-risk, high-reward research is the best way to make breakthroughs against
0:09.3	cancer.
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0:14.1	Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Embedded from NPR.
0:20.2	For the next two weeks, we want to share episodes from a series called The Unmarked Graveyard.
0:27.0	This is from the podcast and radio show Radio Diaries.
0:31.1	If you don't know Radio Diaries, it was created by veteran radio producer Joe Richmond.
0:36.5	They make these beautiful, personal portraits where they give microphones to people and
0:41.0	ask them to tell their own stories.
0:44.8	And this piece is about a place called Heart Island.
0:49.0	It's basically a pottersfield in New York City, a common graveyard for people who die,
0:54.9	who aren't claimed by anyone.
0:57.9	People whose stories were untold, until now.
1:02.0	I will let Joe Richmond take it from here in the first episode of The Unmarked Graveyard.
1:12.6	In 2017, a man was buried on a narrow, mile-long island off the coast of the Bronx in New York City.
1:20.2	He'd been dead for months, but the city hadn't figured out his name.
1:24.6	So he was placed in a simple pine coffin that was stacked in a mass grave.
1:29.3	The only marker was a white post that read Plot 383.
1:35.8	Since 1869, more than a million people have been buried on Heart Island.
1:40.9	It doesn't look like a typical cemetery.
1:43.2	There are no headstones or plaques, just white posts with numbers on them.
	...

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