The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island

We bring you a lot of stories each year, but we don’t often get to share the work behind them. We recently held an event at WNYC’s The Greene Space in New York City, where our subjects and producers reflected on the challenges, and joys, of telling these untold stories. For the last podcast of the year, we’re bringing you that live show: a behind the scenes look at The Unmarked Graveyard.

We want to bring you as many stories next year as we did this year — and we can’t do that without your help! Please consider making a contribution to support our work by going to radiodiaries.org.

Back in 1995, LaMont Dottin was 21 years old and a freshman at Queens College when, one evening, he didn’t come home.

His mother went to the local police precinct to try to report him missing, and his name was added to a list of thousands of cases that the NYPD’s Missing Persons Squad was supposed to be investigating. Then his case fell through the cracks.

This is the final episode of The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island. Listen to all 8 stories in our podcast feed, tell a friend and share your thoughts with us on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook. @RadioDiaries

The Belvedere Hotel is in the heart of New York City’s theater district. Many of its guests come to see the sights, take in a show. But there are a few dozen people who call the Belvedere home. Decades ago, they came to New York and rented rooms there. As the hotel changed hands over the years, they never left.

One of them was Hisako Hasegawa.

This is episode seven of our series The Unmarked Graveyard, next week will be our final episode. You can listen to the entire series in the podcast feed.

Angel Irizarry spent years working as a detective, and in 2021 he set out on a personal investigation to track down an uncle who’d been estranged from his family for decades.

But early in his search he made a disappointing discovery: his uncle Cesar had died. So Angel embarked on a new quest, to learn what had become of Cesar during his long absence.

This is episode six of our series The Unmarked Graveyard, untangling mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery.

This story was reported in collaboration with The City’s Missing Them project.

Dawn Powell wrote novels about people like herself: outsiders who’d come to New York City in the early twentieth century to make a name for themselves. For a few years, those novels put her at the center of the city’s literary scene. Ernest Hemingway even called her his favorite living writer.

When she died of colon cancer in 1965, Powell donated her body to science. But then her books disappeared from shelves, and, unbeknownst to her family, her body went missing too.

For more than a century, it was almost impossible to find out much about people buried on Hart Island. But in 2008, that all changed — thanks in large part to a woman named Melinda Hunt.

When Annette Vega was in elementary school, she found out the man she called “dad” wasn’t her biological father. But all she knew was that her mom had had a teenage romance with a guy named Angel Garcia. Annette has searched for Angel for more than 30 years, a search that is finally coming to the end.

This is episode three in our series The Unmarked Graveyard, untangling mysteries from America’s largest public cemetery. New episodes drop every Thursday.

When Noah Creshevsky learned he was dying of bladder cancer two years ago, he decided to decline medical treatment. Soon, he and his husband David were faced with another decision: what would become of his body after he died?

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

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 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.

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

On September 28th, we’re launching a new series: The Unmarked Graveyard: Stories from Hart Island.

Hart Island is America’s largest public cemetery—sometimes known as a “potter’s field.” The island has no headstones or plaques, just numbered markers.

More than a million people are buried on Hart Island and many are shrouded in anonymity. Explanations for how they ended up there can be hard to find. Over the next seven weeks, we’ll untangle mysteries about the lives they lived and the people they left behind.