Hart Island, New York - A Place of Ghosts

Even if you're a native of New York City's five teeming boroughs, you may not have heard of Hart Island. A part of the Bronx, Hart Island rises low over the dark waters of Long Island Sound. Desolate, overgrown with shrubs and weeds and stunted trees, the island's population is around 800,000 individuals. That's a lot of folks for such a small tract of land.

These islanders don't seem to mind the crowded conditions, nor do they complain about the dreary landscaping, the garbage that washes up against the stony beaches, or the noises from the shipping that passes by Hart Island day and night.

In fact, they don't even own an identity.

Since 1869, the island has acted as a vast charnel house for the unclaimed dead that pile up in the morgues of Gotham City. If you do the math, New York City finds it necessary to dispose of approximately 6000 dead a year, or over 500 a month. Hart Island, then, is just one of the places the city uses in its "clean up" efforts. Labor is provided by the inmates from Rikers Island, just a few miles to the southwest and past the Bronx Whitestone Bridge.

If any place has the potentiality for ghosts, Hart Island is one of them, and I'm not just referring to the ghosts of the unanimous dead that reside here. From 1955 through 1961, the island hosted an active Nike missile base. The Nike, a short-range tactical system, became obsolete after only a few years of active field service, when new and improved ICBMs and ship-bases systems were perfected. It, and a host of other weapons systems, served as the last line of defense against Soviet bombers coming low over the Atlantic.

Those missiles were never used. The siles were sealed up and left to rust away on this forbidding, rocky place. Time has not been kind to this old site; the silos, imperfectly capped off when the military pulled out for the last time, are now filled with sluggish, murky rainwater.

The soldiers who manned this post so long ago are long gone. Except for the seabirds who wheel and swoop low over the water of the sound and alight here before moving on, the only activity on Hart Island is the never-ending burial parties as they arrive quietly by motor launch with their nameless, unwanted burdens. Most of the inmate workers, I'm sure, have no idea what the cracked concrete pads and silo doors were used for. More ghosts among ghosts is all they really are.

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