American History Hit - New York Morgue's Dark Secrets

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

The unclaimed dead of New York City's streets and rivers were brought to the New York Morgue in the second half of the nineteenth century. This history is full of dark, sad stories and buried secrets.Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney are joined by Cat Byers who is a writer and historian based in Paris currently finishing a PhD on the barely-studied New York Morgue.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARK.You can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Hello, folks. Welcome to American History Hit. I'm your host, Don Wildman, a proud citizen of the city of New York, where I've lived and worked for decades, side by side with my fellow 8 million souls. It's by far the most populous city in the land, not even close, never mind the millions who come just a visit. With so much attention paid the place, you'd be hard-pressed to find a stone unturned, historically speaking. But that's where Cat Buyers comes in. In today's episode from our sister podcast, After Dark, We're offering up a special gift on this Halloween.

Cat takes us to the streets and back alleys of the Big Apple, joining Anthony and Maddie to explore the grim and gruesome history of the New York morgue. Back in the late 19th century, New York prospered under the watchful eyes of industrial magnets and robber barons like John Jacob Astor, Jay Gould, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Iron-pillared department stores loomed over the avenues, as massive public works like the L and the Brooklyn Bridge transformed. the landscape. But in the midst of all that seemed so gilded were the smudgy, smelly neighborhoods downtown, slums like five points in hell's kitchen, where crime was rampant, disease was rife,

and death was always right around the corner. So what's a city that never sleeps to do? Build hospitals, schools, hotels, libraries? Sure, certainly. But you also need a morgue. Oh, you'll definitely need a morgue. Happy Halloween, everybody. Enjoy this episode of After Dark. In an archive in Brooklyn, a box gathers dust. Each day, sunlight rises through the window, passes over the box and then disappears, leaving it in darkness once again. Inside it are photographs, photographs of the faces of the unclaimed dead of New York from the late 19th century. It was a time when the city's population was.

exploding, fueled by waves of immigrants, washing ashore in search of a new life. With that tide, some were buoyed, rising to success and riches. Others found themselves desperate and drowning. Some found themselves dead. Their bodies left anonymous amid a sea of people, no one knowing who they were or where they'd come from. Corses like these, the unnamed dead, were taken to a dingy building on a pier at the foot of 26th Street. There they were laid out and they were photographed. At first, the photos were displayed to the public. Some were poured over by anxious families searching for their missing loved ones.

Others were overlooked, their subjects as alone in death as they had been in life. after a period the images would be taken down. Eventually, they were put into a box and forgotten. But for those curious enough to lift the lid, these eerie works survive handed down to us as the only witnesses we have of a changing populace and the institution that served them, one that no longer exists.

Its records have been either locked away or consigned to the murky depths of the Hudson River. This is the story of New York's unknown dead and the building that processed them. This is the story of the New York morgue. And welcome to After Dark. My name's Anthony. And I'm Maddie.

And as you can hear, we're both incredibly gravelly today. And today we are on the edge of death because we are suffering with hay fever. And that's absolutely fine. But but, and I'm so genuinely glad about this, we have one of our favorite returning guests. All of our guests are favorites, but this is one of our particular favorite returning guests because this is one of my favorite episodes. And we are, of course, talking about Kat Byers. You've talked to us before about the Paris morgue.

And as Maddie has just said, this time we're going to be talking about the New York morgue. So, Kat, welcome back to After Dark. Thank you. I'm so glad to be back. Another day, another morgue. You know, that's my motto. Another day, another morgue. Kat, give us a little bit of a,

because obviously we're in a whole different place here than we were when we spoke to you last about Paris. But give us a little bit of the context of the time and the place, late 19th century America. What's the backdrop to the introduction of this morgue? Yeah, so this morgue, so when we previously spoke about Paris, Paris opened in 1804, right at the beginning of the century. So we're now 50 years later, we're across the pond, we're in New York,

and they first decided to open a morgue in New York in around 1865. And they'd needed one for a long time, like Maddie said at the beginning. You've got this huge population growth. All the kind of facilities that they had for, you know, managing the dead have become really, really insufficient. And there's all these reports of kind of the previous version of the morgue, which was basically just a shed. In the summer, it would have all this, like, it was just, it was grim. There's all these reports of decomposing matter and like coffins half open and really grim. And there's also these potters fields that are moving around the city because Manhattan's growing

and it's going upwards and upwards. And so they keep having to move all the cemeteries further upwards as well. So you've really got a situation where things are getting a bit out of hand and they need a solution. And what we've also got going on is the American Civil War has just finished. So you've kind of just got a country in chaos, a city that's been in chaos. and you're on the other side of it and you're in this whole new world and it's a big moment for just change

and for I guess experimenting and trying new things and just how do we rebuild a new city, a new country, a new state, a new society after everything that's just happened. And then into all this, we have this model of a morgue. And so what happened is they took the model directly from Paris. So there's this guy called John Bigelow, who was the sort of US Minister for France.

And he literally took, took the plans, took the model, took it straight to New York and was like, right, let's just build the exact same thing in New York and see what happens. You say there that, you know, this is an America coming out of the Civil War. And I suppose in a lot of ways it was an America that was newly familiar with death, with what death looked like, with the smell of death, with bodies and being proximate to that and the processes that maybe surround that. So talk us through what the new morgue looks like. You say it was almost a direct blueprint transition from France into New York. But just tell us a little bit more about that building, what it would be like if we were standing

in it today, for example. So it was quite a lot smaller than the one in Paris. So they took the model and they took all the regulations and that kind of thing. But you had to adapt it to, again, an existing city, a totally different society, totally different like urban environment, municipality, all of that. And so they built it at Bellevue Hospital. So it was also attached to a hospital, which is not what you had in Paris. And so it was on the end of East 26th Street right next to the river because obviously a lot of, you know, bodies would come in from the river. And also that meant that it was easily accessible to then transport the bodies to the mass graves and the island, people that were unclaimed where they would be buried. So there was a kind of a whole system there.

And it was quite a low building. It went through various different versions. So every sort of 10 or 15 years or so it would fall into absolute corruption and disrepair. and they'd try and fix it up. But the first version was quite small. It was slightly lower than ground level. So you'd go down into it. And all the reports say it had obviously

this quite overwhelming smell of damp from the river. And then in the summer, supposedly the smell was a little bit more than damp. I think one description said the overwhelming stench of death. So not particularly like a nice place to be. Not something you put on the tourist posters for New York. No, not quite. Come come and smell the stench of death this July. But so similar to Paris, they had a display room.

So you went in and there was kind of like a, I guess, sort of like a walkway part of the room. And then there was a wall that had big glass windows and you could look through them. And then through the windows, there were just four slabs laid out. And so these would have bodies on them. And the same with Paris. You'd have hooks behind the bodies to hang clothes on. And then also in the room where the public came, there was a wall. And this was called the Wall of the Unknown Dead.

And so this is where these photographs would always. all be positioned. Once photography started, which was just two years after the morgue opened, they started taking photographs of the bodies. So these would all be on the wall there. And this is the real difference, I suppose, isn't it, between the New York morgue and the Paris morgue. And for anyone who hasn't listened to that episode yet, pause it right now.

We'll wait for you to catch up. Go and listen to it. We'll just give you a second. Okay, good. Hopefully you're back with us. So we've looked at death photography in the 19th century on this show before, Kat. And that was very much photographers coming into people's homes or the dead being taken to photography studios. And there was a sort of stillness to that, but also an intimacy.

And it's quite emotionally coded. And I just wonder if that's the same thing that's going on in the morgue or if this is a more sort of clinical process. What is the function of those photographs? It is absolutely a much more clinical focus. And I remember your Post-Martin photography episode. I really enjoyed that one. in this case, obviously the function is to try and identify the dead. So it's kind of actually the inverse.

If we think of post-mortem photography, which is trying to remember people that you knew in life. Here is the absolute opposite is trying to discover who they are. And the person taking the photograph and the people looking at them have no idea who this person is. So it really is the kind of, yeah, the direct opposite of it. And the photographer was a man named Oscar G. Mason. And he had actually been and was the hospital photographer. So in this period as well, we've got this absolute growth of medical photography and the US really kind of led the way in that in a lot of ways, partly because of the

Civil War and because of all these sort of army hospitals and the photography that was happening there. And so Mason was then brought in to photograph the bodies at the morgue because they thought, this is great if we take pictures of people who are not too far decomposed, who are still recognisable, put them on the wall. This gives us a much better chance of being able to identify people, especially because they had much more limited facilities for display. And display was also never popular in New York in the way it was in Paris. It never became this big, popular, great tourist place to go.

It was always seen as like just a ghastly place that you don't really want to hang out in. And so, yeah, they started taking these photographs. And they're also really interesting because in some ways they're sort of medical photographs because obviously Mason's a medical photographer and there's that kind of clinical detachment to them. But then they also really remind us of criminal mugshots. And there's that feeling as well there. And what's also in New York, there's kind of a pre-existing, uh, idea of having photographs like this on display because 10 years before the morgue,

the police had started this kind of rogues gallery, uh, mug shop place where basically people could go and see these photographs of, you know, this is a, this is a petty criminal, this is a shoplifter, this is so and so. And so people could kind of know who the local criminals in the neighborhood were and all this kind of idea. So there's already a prerequisite for doing that. So that kind of comes into it as well. So they do, they kind of combine medical, slash criminal, but also post-morton because these are photographs of the dead. And the photographer himself was really aware of that. And he writes about the photographs in these annual reports.

And he's really sensitive to it. And he's very much aware of like, we're trying to find, you know, their kin, we're trying to find out who these people are, whereas other people maybe weren't so sensitive about it. I suppose as well, the photographs halt the decomposition process. And so you can identify a body for a lot longer. It can go off display and you still have that record of them. Just before, we're going to talk about some of these photos,

but I just wanted to ask really quickly while it's in my mind. You mentioned there that whereas the Paris morgue is very much a tourist attraction and part of a sort of pantheon of activities you could do in the city, in New York you say it's considered a ghastly place and something that somewhere that people don't want to go to. And I wonder if, is that a cultural difference? Is it a difference between the beginning and the end of the 19th century? is it this association that's starting slip in in terms of criminality

and that the photographs are making that link between criminality and the bodies in the morgue? Is it all of that? Is it none of that? What's going on? Why is there that difference? You know, that's a great question because we don't know. And I think the thing is about this morgue, especially because it's never been studied before now, is that a lot of these aspects, especially things like figuring out why wasn't the display popular there, it could be, and probably was partly because of all the reasons you've just listed, I think there was a cultural element, there was a social element,

you've got a kind of a different religious sensibility in the US as compared to France. You've also got, like you say, this is now mid-century, we've again just come out of the civil war. Is there a sense of being like, I don't really want to go and see dead bodies on display? That's not perhaps interesting to me

or entertaining in a way it might have been before. But then at the same time, the Paris More kind of emerged out of the French Revolution. So maybe it's also, yeah, maybe it's more having a kind of puritanical background culturally. Also, it was a smaller space. It was not as centrally located in the way that Paris was. There's so many different possibilities. And also what's odd in New York is that the photography becomes much more the thing to go and see.

In Paris, that was like sort of secondary to the bodies. You wanted to go see the bodies for real. You weren't that bothered about the photos. But in New York, you'll find in sort of in the newspapers, they're often talking about photographs. and calling, yeah, this gassy display, this, you know, this wall of the unknown dead, who's in the photos this week. So there is more, much more interest in the photos and who's up there. And they also kept photographs for a really long time. By the end of the period,

there was 600 photos up there. So the display would get bigger and bigger and they would keep, yeah, they'd keep images up for quite a long time depending on how much space they had. So that was a bit more of a draw. And I mean, there's still obviously where people who went to go and see it because it was somewhere you could go and see dead bodies. I mean, occasional descriptions of like kids hanging outside and that kind of thing. And there were some people who wrote about the fact that people would go there as like a ghoulish tourist attraction. But it was never a big, big international hotspot in the way that Paris was. Well, we have one of those photographs, which Kat has provided for us.

And I'm going to try and give you a sense of it. And then, Kat, if you can share the details that you know, because I know you've done some research on this, It is a black and white photograph of a man who, for all intents and purposes, if I didn't know what I was looking at, seems to me to be alive. There's a liveliness about him. Despite the fact that his eyes are closed, he seems to be, and obviously this is just human inference here, he seems to be a very kindly man, something very light about him. What I would ask you to imagine is a version of Charles Dickensian, almost. It's very Dickensian in how he looks. look like Charles Stephens. He does. I think it's the goatee. Yes, yeah. I think it's the facial hair and then the receding hair line at the same time. He's dressed relatively well, although his clothes seem to be quite smudged a little bit tattered now. But it's, you know, he's wearing a three-piece suit. He's wearing a tie, which they've obviously put him back into for the purposes of this photograph. And yeah, he seems like a kindly older man, although not that old. This is a fascinating photo.

And you can see, I'm always really reticent to cast judge. You know the way we spoke about this in Paris, where people are just like, well, I'd never go and see and I'd never. And when you look at an image like this, you can see why it would intrigue people and why it would fascinate people. But tell us about this image, this man, do we know anything about him? Yeah. So this photograph is one of hundreds of photographs that I found in that box in the Brooklyn Archive. And yeah, it's incredible. He does look really lifelike. And this is something that we see in quite a lot of the photographs is that they look like they're asleep. And you assume that photographs. of dead people, they're all going to look a specific way, but actually it's a huge range in how people look. And in this case, so the photographs in this box that I found, they have notes on the back and they have notes saying where the body was found, if they were identified or not, you know, a signature of the coroner at the time. And in this case, this man was identified. And we know that he was 45 years old. He was five for eight. Yeah, he's only 45. Yeah. But hard living in New York is going to age you.

we'll share this picture on socials just so that you can you can see why we're reacting like that he I mean I thought he was maybe in his 60s no he's only 45 and there's a description of what he's wearing you know his waistcoat and his jacket and his linen undershirt and his boots and he was found at the foot of spring street which is in lower Manhattan and he was brought to the morgue and I think it was February 1870 so again pretty early on in the morgue's history and then he was identified in July of that year. So the photograph must have been up for a while. And obviously by that time, you know, he was long gone.

He was buried. And his name was Peter Van Guthrin. There was a name for the person that identified him. We can only assume that they were a friend or a family member. Yeah, so we know exactly who he was in that image. And I think with all these images, obviously a lot of them weren't identified, but other ones were. And it's incredible because you just get this tiny snippet of somebody and you only have their death. We don't have anything about their life.

we don't know anything about them and, you know, this is just this one moment, this last moment, and that's all we have of them. It's fascinating, isn't it, how we can guess at elements of his life based on the clothing that he's wearing or indeed his facial hair. And there are little ways that you could read, you know, maybe what social class he was from or potentially the kind of job he might have done or something like that. But ultimately, we will never be able to colour in that whole picture. And that's so fascinating. Kat, I'm wondering, while you're talking there, It's just thinking, does it matter when these people are identified? You say that in the case of Peter here, that he was already buried,

that his photograph had been up for a really long time before anyone came forward and said who he was. So what would happen if someone was already buried and then they were identified? Would there be a headstone, for example, given to their grave? Are they marked in an unmarked grave? And then that's it, that no one never visits when they're buried or speaks about them. Again, what was the purpose of identifying them? Who was it for? Well, I suppose it matters to the people that knew him.

So I think in a case of something like this, there isn't any suggestion that there was foul play or suspicion around the death. If there had been, then it would be, okay, and then we can try and figure out who killed him, what happened, what the crime was. In this case, it was a drowning, you know, maybe it was a tragic accident. We don't know exactly what caused the drowning to happen, but there wasn't any inference that somebody else was involved. And so in that sense, it would matter to the people that knew him and who were missing him, who didn't know what happened to him.

And so perhaps the body also mattered to them. We don't know. The body at that point would be in a masquerave. They're probably not keeping great records of where, which exact plot. I mean, even these days, they struggle sometimes to keep, I mean, it's gotten a lot better. But even yet late into the 20th century, they were struggling to figure out who was where in the city cemetery. So the likelihood of you being able to get that body back. I also on a practical level, I don't know if you'd want that body back. It's been like five months. So I think it is. It's probably much more just about knowing who he was and what happened to him and knowing where he ended up and not having, I guess, that kind of just empty space or that whole or that question still in your mind if he was somebody that was in your life of where did he go and what happened to him.

What's fascinating, Kat, I think, about your research specifically and then how we on this podcast and then people who are listening discuss this. is so much can be said about how we live in relation to how we treat our dead, I think. And that occurs to me, I'm always really fascinated and struck and sometimes, sometimes I'll be honest, sometimes appalled about the way the dead are treated in Britain in terms of the length of time that can pass between a death and then the formalisation of the burial or, you know, it's often weeks. And I know in Ireland we have a much, much quicker system. And I always feel that it's, it helps in the grieving process to do that much more quickly.

And obviously these people are missing out on that grieving process because, as you say, the body has gone. But what do you think it tells us about, and what do you think the dead can tell us about the living in that sense, rather than trying to piece together the clues about what these people were like in life, How do attitudes pinpoint us towards the attitudes of the living at this point? How does it reflect that? Yeah, I mean, I think that like you say, is so central to this. It's not about trying to track down who all these individual people are. It's like, what does this say about society, about the living, about who you prioritize, about who you marginalise, who gets to matter and who doesn't. And I totally agree. I think that even today, death is still so, it's not really democratic, is it, in so many ways, because I think that, It's expensive. The burial process is expensive. The death process is expensive. All of that stuff. And I think a lot of people are still really marginalized by that. And in the period, especially, this is when you've got this growing interest and kind of funeral pomp and all the money in it and, you know, how you die and how you are sort of how your death is memorialized is a massive reflection of who you were in life. And that's this big societal and cultural idea. So you're kind of like reinforcing that you didn't matter. in life because not only can you not, you know, afford a nice funeral pump, you are quite literally in a mass grave on an island and nobody knows who you are. And so there's this, that really reinforces

that. And the island that they ended up on, Hart Island at the time also had a reputation for just being awful. And there was all these news reports of like dogs getting into the graves and just really awful, disrespectful, dehumanizing stuff. And so it very much was this idea of this is all your worth. It was all your worth. You weren't worth much in life and you're definitely not worth much now and you're going to end up on this mass grave and you're going to be disrespected. And I think this is this idea that, you know, if you were marginalized or you were impoverished or you were perhaps, you know, had any association with any criminality, that's what you deserved. That's that, you know, you didn't contribute socially in the way that you were supposed to or, you know, maybe you sort of,

quote, you know, took handouts, they're not handouts, but, you know, you had state assistance in some way or you were in an institution and a penitentiary, a workhouse or anything, so you don't get more than this. Like, you know, you actually owe the state, so don't expect to get anything back. And there's this real sense of that in the kind of cultural, moral and social ideology of the time. Let's talk a little bit more about the institution itself then and the treatment of the dead because there aren't that many records that survive relating to the New York walk. We do have some photographs and I'm going to describe this photo that I'm looking at and then maybe we can talk about why those records are a little bit patchy. So the photograph that is in front of me is,

I believe, from 1879 and it sort of looks a little bit like a school gym. And on the floor, which almost looks like it's wet, maybe that's the damp, maybe it's just been washed, which I suppose would be a constant thing that would need to happen in the morgue. On the floor level, or raised slightly up in what looked like little sort of stands are many, many, many wooden coffins organised in rows. But what's really confusing me is that at the back of this scene, almost like a stage in a school, again, a school hall, school gymnasium, there seemed to be what look like, and I'm, Kat, you're going to have to clarify this for me, the skeletons, the reassembled skeletons of different possibly exotic animals.

There's a what looks like an elk possibly or at least a deer. There's some kind of bird with a very long neck that could be an ostrich. What on earth is going on? Well, actually, it was the animals that helped me find this photograph. It's a weird way to start it. But basically, this is a photograph of the dead house of the morgue, which is basically the storage room where all the coffins are. And I had been looking for this photograph for a really long time.

As you say, not a lot of stuff remains of the New York morgue and there's all these complications with archives. And everything I use is stuff that basically is kind of escaped and disappeared off into other places and papers and architectural plans and photographs and all these different things. It's a real like cobbling it together. So often I will go off down an absolute rabbit hole for a very long time trying to find something. In this case, there was a man named Jacob Reese. He was quite a famous social reformer effectively at the end of the 19th century.

He wrote this book called How the Other Half Live. And he was on those one of the first people in that period to sort of go into tenement housing and slums and photograph things and kind of just sort of reveal what was going on. And I'd read somewhere that he'd also taken photographs of the morgue and that he'd done this presentation once called How the Other Half Die and they'd met these morgue photographs. And I'd been trying to figure out where this photograph had gone for a really long time and I just assumed it was gone forever. I was never going to find it.

And when I was in New York, it was about a year ago, I'd just been in the archive reading about an anatomy museum that they built above the morgue. So quite early on, they decided to take the space above the morgue and the top two floors. They turned into, yeah, this comparative anatomy museum, which were all quite popular at the time when they were seen as these educational sites. Well, you had the sort of the public facing ones, which were a bit more like sort of these crazy spectacles. And then you had the sort of more serious medical ones. So it was for doctors in the hospital to come and study the specimens. And they had both animals and human remains.

And I'd just been reading about that. And then I was flicking through this book in a shop about Jacob Reese. And then I saw this photograph and I was like, hang on, that room looks really familiar. And then I realized I'd seen a drawing of it in an illustration of the morgue. And then I saw the animals at the back and I looked at the date. And I was like, oh, oh my God, it's because they're installing new animals in the anatomy room above. So then I contacted the Library of Congress, which is where the photograph was kept. And I was like, weird question, guys.

So if you've got any photographs of this morgue Because I've found this picture And I'm convinced it's the morgue I don't know if it is Like do you have any record of this picture Do you have any others from the series And it turned out that this photograph Had been kind of misfiled somewhere else

And it had been labelled as a storage room Because if you don't think about it You would not assume that those are all coffins And you wouldn't assume that this is a morgue And so yeah Then they showed me some other photographs From a different angle And then I also sent them

An etching I had that proved it was the same room Because it was a drawing that had the same ceiling, all of that. That is how we tracked down the photo, one of the few photographs of the New York morgue. I adore research stories like that so much. But I think as well, it's just so much about the equation, I suppose, of some human remains with the animal remains.

And there's questions there about sort of the ethics of storage and the ethics of display. And the morgue as an exhibition space like the museum above it as well. there are some other things that I want to bring up from the stories that come out of the morgue. One of them is a headline from the New York World, which was published on the 25th of May 1894. And I'm just going to read this and then I'm going to let you explain this storycat because this is quite remarkable. The headline says, used corpses for targets. Ghastly experiments made by Dr. Phelps Morg, unclaimed bodies won't be fired at again to benefit

it's sciences. It's a nice reassurance that it's okay, they won't be fired at again. So people are firing presumably guns at bodies. Yeah, I mean, you know, it must have been a slow day in the morgue that day. You've got to keep busy somehow. So basically the morgue in the same way that it happened in Paris, but very much in New York was also a place for a lot of kind of medical and scientific experimentation because you've had all these bodies that a lot of people weren't going to claim that people didn't effectively really care about. And they were just, you know, perfect in the eyes of the time material to test things out of. So this was a case where, yeah, they were basically just propping up bodies in the storeroom and shooting at them. So then they could analyze gunshot wounds

and the impact of bullets. So there was quite a lot of examples of this, not all as extreme as quite literally shooting bodies in the storeroom, but there's a lot of medical developments that came to the morgue. The first ever skin graft from a dead person to a living person in the US happened with a body from the morgue that is also just a footnote in a medical journal. You know, the doctors being like, I've found this amazing thing. I made this skin graft. It's worked. I found a random guy in the morgue that no one's claimed. So I've just took some of his skin and I put it on this kid and look, it's worked. Wow. Okay. So yeah, there's a lot of, you know, and then also in medical journals and things like that, people talking about how great

the morgue was because there were so many cases that they could analyze and there were so many, yeah, different types of bodies that would also come in from the hospital, different pathologies, and also violent deaths, suspicious deaths, autopsies. So you have an awful lot going on then, it's really clear that a lot is going on there. So I just want to tie two pieces of that information together. All of this happening. And then now we have a relative sparsity of documentation that lead us back to there. Is that an administrative thing?

Were these deliberately destroyed? what's the gap between what was happening then and what we have access to now? It's a couple of different factors, depending on how suspicious you want to be, basically. Let's say very. Okay, let's go with the deep conspiracy theory. So one of the problems I have is that the hospital where the morgue was located, Bellevue Hospital, is still around today, has a, I want to say, notorious history. Quite a lot of bad and dark things happen. they had a very notorious psychiatric division.

Sometimes I would come across clippings in the newspaper about nurses, murdering a patient. You know, there was lots of bad stuff happening at Bellevue. And they technically have an archive, but if you ask them, they will say that they do not. And I had somebody once give me a list of stuff that had been in a catalogue at the archive that they now also are like, no, no, no, I don't know what you're talking about. We don't have that. And then there's also the fact of Hurricane Sandy and stuff did probably get destroyed during Hurricane Sandy, so that can also be something where you're like, oh, no, everything is gone. Sorry, don't look at us.

So that's a factor. And then there's also a factor of things just gradually getting destroyed for, like, as normal reasons, history, time, storage, things get lost. It's been hundreds of years. Most people don't think of keeping morgue registers as a priority. I obviously would, but I think, you know, a lot of stuff disappears for reasons that aren't nefarious. And then there's also the police side of stuff.

So anything that's linked to police in New York, quite a lot of stuff did just get thrown in the river. So there was a bit of a thing where after a case was finished, apparently they sometimes did, just used to throw all the files in the river. That would happen. There was also just an incredible amount of corruption in every part of the morgue and the municipality and politics and everything in New York in this period. So I think people were also just destroying their own records too. So, yeah. It's a complex web of reasons why a lot of stuff is missing, which means when I do find stuff, like finding the photographs, that was incredible.

I mean, they also had been at the back of a warehouse for a really long time. And it took the archive a year to track them down for me, not because they'd gone missing, but just because they have so much stuff. Yeah. So the complex journey, I would say, to researching this more work. One of the things that strikes me with a bit of 18th century knowledge about death dying and the business of death is that this will open. up inevitably an opportunity for some, let's say, illegal or immoral at the very least, practices to unfold. And I think Maddie is going to lead us into one of those examples.

And then when we come back, we'll discuss with Kat in a little bit more detail. Here's an arithmetic problem for you. Pencils and paper at the ready, please. Albert N. White held the solemn office of the keeper of the New York morgue for 25 years. then one night he died of a heart attack. White had helped usher more than 50,000 corpses through the morgue, for which he'd received a modest stipend of $700 per annum. Reports often found him asleep in his chair while the bodies came in. But on his death, it was discovered that his estate was worth around $100,000.

Clearly, the dead had been enriching, beyond all lawful measure. One doctor admitted buying corpses from White. He said they were delivered on express wagons, packed in wicker baskets lined with zinc. He said he paid White $6 per corpse. Another doctor said he paid $3,000 to White for a bulk deal at an average price of $10 per corpse. $6 a body here, $10 there. 25 years on the job

and tens of thousands of dead souls to plunder. Just how many bodies did Morg Keeper White sell to the voracious anatomists of New York City? Well... Can I just say, as someone who is numerically very challenged, that I've come out in a cold sweat having to read that narrative. But I followed your instruction.

I did write some of those numbers down. Oh, wow. Don't get excited, Katta. I haven't worked anything out. Just all I have is the number she said that we're going to recount over again, just to make sure that they're right. So it was 25 years. He would have seen through 50,000 bodies.

His actual salary was $700 per year. But when he died, his estate was worth $100,000. And then after his death, some doctors came out and said he was selling corpses to him for somewhere between six to ten dollars per corpse and that he was bulk selling for $3,000. That tipped me over the edge, the bulk buy. It's shocking, but it's not surprising. We've, you know, we've looked a lot at body snatchers and the, as you say Anthony, the business of death, the money that was to be made in the 18th and in the 19th centuries in dealing with anonymous. bodies, people who'd slipped from the public record in some way, the marginalised, the people

who were maybe living on the street, who died in ways that meant nobody would miss them. And this is often what happened. And also, especially in terms of the 18th century, of course, once you were buried in the ground, whether you were a Duchess or a pauper, you might be snatched. So there was a sort of, I suppose, a social democracy happening there, a sort of, an evening out, I suppose, of hierarchy. But this is obviously happening on a slightly more institutionalised, organised scale at this point in the New York morgue. So, Kat, what's going on? Wait, wait, Kat, don't answer just yet because exciting developments unfolding as we speak.

I did the maths. I did the maths. I'm so impressed. It is my estimation, based on his estate being worth $100,000 that you're looking at him having sold, I averaged the price of about $8 per quarter. that he will have sold somewhere around the 12 to 12.5,000 bodies in order to, so that's probably like what? A quarter of the bodies that have passed through them all. Kat's nodding because I feel like you probably have done some of this. Listeners, can I just say cat looks so unsurprised by the end. She's like, yeah, that sounds about right.

Sorry, I'm just just just it's actually startling. It's incredible. Yeah, because also, I mean, if we're really going to get into accounting here, he's got expenses, you know, he's got expenses of the wagon, transporting. He's also not the only person involved in this. So, you know, he's probably sold even more because if we think about it, you know, he's got some overheads. He's got other people to pay off. There's a lot of other people that are also in this business. This is not a one-man show, although obviously when he goes to trial, they are very much trying to pretend that it's a one-man show, which is why he never does go to prison because there's two-man.

any other people involved. But yeah, like you say, I think, you know, body snatching, bodies are valuable in this period for medical study and people will go to whatever lens to get them. And if there are people who are vulnerable or marginalized or who it's much easier to just take their bodies and do what you want with them, people are going to absolutely take advantage of that. In this case, they certainly did and way better to operate this than literally out of the morgue. If you're the keeper, you could manage this. And there's, you know, there was some newspaper accounts about how he, we had the official register and then he had his own personal register of where the bodies were supposed to go

and then where they actually went. That's interesting that he was keeping his own records. Oh, yeah. I think, I mean, he didn't have a 25 years. He was good at it. You know, I don't think you could run what is essentially a commercial enterprise for that long without, you know, really having some good business skills there. And I think he definitely did.

And there was absolutely quite a lot of other people. involved. And they also, people knew about it. There's, it's interesting is that the trial happened in the 1890s right at the end. But he, there was, you know, there's mentions of these dodgy dealings in the morgue in like the 1870s. There's this whole Senate document, which actually is about other messed up stuff happening at the morgue to do with necrophilia and

theft and embezzlement and corruption and, you know, you name it that happened at the morgue. And there's kind of a bit of a subtext there where you're like, oh, yeah, there's a hint that people know that he's taking a tip but he's, you know, he's maybe good at what he does in other ways. They're overseeing it and they're overlooking it as a bit of a like, okay, you know, that's the price of it, like a little bit of gratuity. And I think what happens with the trial is more that the hires up are pissed off

that he's the one that's making loads of money off it because he's just a lowly morgue keeper. It's not fair that he's getting rich. You know, if you think about the class element of this and the social element, it's fine for the doctors and everybody to get rich off this. It's fine for people who are perhaps of a higher class or higher status than Albert Napoleon White to be getting rich. But for this guy to get rich in their eyes, that's not really appropriate. And he also has some most crazy life story. I've been trying to track him down. And he's just like, yeah, I was going to ask, apart from like side note, Napoleon, fantastic middle name,

without giving him too much airtime, because he sounds like a pretty dreadful person. But how does one become keeper of the New York Malk? What was his story? I, how he became the more keeper, I have no idea. And I really do want to, when I have more time, fully dig into that. But what I do know about him, he was born in Canada. And then he moved, he changed his name, moved to the US, joined the Civil War. And then after the Civil War, somehow ended up in a job in the morgue. I don't think it was particularly hard to get a job at the morgue. I'm also going to say that.

There weren't many candidates. Yeah, I think if you needed some work and maybe you were quite like a physical guy and you could, I mean, it was quite a physical job. And you were fine with sort of managing dead people all day. I don't think the interview process was probably that stringent. And so then he joined the morgue there. and then he had quite a few children and then I found that his wife

died of an illegal abortion in the 1880s which in itself is a whole odd thing to have happened when we think about how dangerous abortion was in that period and obviously it was very much illegal and she was married

and already had children and they obviously at this point clearly had a fair amount of money because he's been selling bodies for 15 years already so there's an interesting element there of like okay what's what's going on here how has this happened

and then he remarries six months later her 16-year-old sister, either it's her sister or it's a young woman that was living in their house. She's referred to as a sister, but we don't know exactly who he is. And then he has some more children. I don't know why I didn't expect his terrible behaviour to extend to his domestic life, but there we go. Yeah, Albert Napoleon. And also what's interesting about him, probably no surprise there,

but all the pre-trial, there's all these, you know, the interview him now and again in the newspaper, and he comes up a lot because he's the kind of jolly morgue keeper and he's a great character and oh, he's a great guy and there's this whole, I don't know, they portray him in the press

as this sort of cheerful, hearty morgue man. Kat, before we wrap up, I want to ask, first of all, we've talked about a lot of the unclaimed bodies from the morgue end up in an area called Potter's Field. And I want to ask, is that a place that is still a grave site today? Can people go and visit it? And then I also want to ask, we've spoken a little bit about, was it Peter, I think, the man in the photograph who was dead.

But are there any other stories that have come out of the New York Mall that have really stayed with you or that you'd like to mention? So in terms of the Potter's Field, it's basically Potter's Field is the term for, you know, a potper graveyard, the city cemetery. And in New York, this is a place called Hart Island, which is still there today. Over a million New Yorkers are buried there, and it still operates like that today. There was a big shift a couple of years ago. So until about two or three years ago, it was still run by the Department of Corrections. So it was still run quite literally by the prison department. The bodies were interred by incarcerated people from Rikers Island being paid 50 cents an hour.

Like really, the system from 150 years ago had just continued. And then there's been a huge amount of activism around the island for the last maybe 20 years. there's a great organization called the Heart Island Project who have done so much work in raising awareness for the island and for the people who were buried there. But it's still, it's still functioning and it got taken over by the Department of Parks again a couple years ago. And so the legislation has been shifting all the time and then obviously during COVID as well. But they're trying to make it more accessible and so that people can go and visit. And I went there a couple of years ago, which was just, yeah, a very kind of an incredible experience to see what it's actually like.

and there's also been quite a lot of work being done to kind of lift the stigma of ending up in a masquerave on this island and the fact that it shouldn't be a huge stigma and that a lot of people again can't afford or don't want to pay for, you know, for a burial for this kind of, yeah, for a traditional individual burial. But yeah, Hart Island is still there, still there out in the Long Island Sound. And they also, there was obviously a lot of attention on the island during COVID because a lot of bodies were temporarily and tired on the island when they were managing the rising death toll. And that's also when a lot of attention was put on the island and people

realized that incarcerated people from Rikers Island were still being used to bury the bodies. And then that shifted. And so now there are independent outside contractors. In 2020, they were still using incarcerated labor. And that's an interesting thing with the morgue in this network as well, is that historically that was also part of it is that the morgue and the sort of penituary institutions and the workhouses and the asylums and the prisons were all under the same department. So you would literally have people in the workhouses, building coffins, sewing shrouds, sometimes going to the morgue to help. So there was this whole going to the morgue to help being sent to the morgue. So yeah, you'd have people effectively building their own coffins and sewing their own shards

in that period. And they also used clothing from the unclaimed dead that was in, you know, not great condition. They would shred it and make it into carpets for prisons and asylums and workhouses. So, yeah, it's a real sort of circular economy system going on. Yeah, it's a sort of closed loop circuit, isn't it, that you can get stuck in? And it's a hopeless situation that in the 19th century, at least, there was no escape. And it's shocking that echoes of that system and the infrastructure are still in place, at least were in 2020. That's, it's really, really remarkable. But even though there are these echoes, the morgue itself is closed today, isn't it?

So when did that happen? When did that institution close its doors? Yeah, so they went, as I said, that during the kind of, the period from like the 1860s to the 1910s, they would kind of try and reform it every 10 or 15 years and then it would just fall into absolute chaos and disrepair again. So it was kind of going over and over again. But then in the 1910s, they did this massive overhaul of the hospital.

And the famous McKin, Mede and White architects designed this whole new, you know, kind of new facility. And they ended up designing a brand new pathology building. And the morgue was incorporated into that. So it was this big, six-story, fancy new building. They even had, they had an embalming room. They had all the morgue stuff. They had all these autopsy spaces, forensics sort of lesson spaces.

They even had a floor full of like animals for animal testing. I mean, there's a, I find the architectural plans is like a whole, yeah, really fancy new building. They put loads of money into it. And so that's when we see this moment of it shifting away from the morgue and becoming this real sort of medical legal institutes, really medicalized. And they're kind of putting all the previous dark dingy stuff behind them and starting fresh. and also coinciding with this period.

So previously you had the coroner system in New York with death management and the coroner system was also notoriously, again, surprise, incredibly corrupt. And so this is also the period when they end the coroner system and they start having a chief medical examiner instead. So they have this whole medical examiner system that's brought in. And although, you know, the pathology and morgue buildings have gone through various changes since then, the office of the chief medical examiner is still located at Bellevue in the exact. location that the morgue once was. And this is the, I think as far as I know, the largest chief medical examiners office in the US, huge. And they still obviously do a lot of kind of investigations there, a lot of developments there. So this is any suspicious deaths in New York

come through this building. And it's a massive, yeah, massive institution. And it's exactly where the morgue was. And there's this whole, you know, because there's been so little study in this area slash none, but when people talk about kind of, kind of, the beginnings of the chief medical examiner and the first guy that came in and all his advances in forensics and medical legal stuff, they sort of talk about it as if he just woke up one day and invented all of it,

because the previous system just had such a bad reputation that everyone kind of forgets that any developments happened, but instead he took over an existing system, like they updated it, but the kind of New York morgue was really the origins of all of that stuff and all the advancements they were making. And then when they swept it away, they were like, right, let's just forget that ever happened.

happened. We've got a brand new building, a brand new guy. Let's start from here. Well, let's not forget that that just ever happened. So as a parting, as a parting below, I'd love you just to recount maybe one story or history or tale or whatever it might be that's attached to the 19th century morgue just to leave us with that kind of lasting impression of the place and the institution and the types of people that pass through. Gosh, there are so many different stories, including some dark but surreal ones there's one involving this woman her husband her boyfriend her second

boyfriend a duck this is crazy murder case there's a lot you know that's yeah there's a big one we can get into that another time but I think because we've had so much death and darkness maybe it's best to end on one that I think is one of the lighter tales from the morgue

which is a case from I think it was 1901 and there was a featured in the newspaper there was a patrolman walking around midtown. It was middle of winter. And he came across some boys sort of looking at something in the gutter and he asked them what they were doing and they'd found a baby.

And so I know this doesn't start like a great beginning of a lighter story. It's not very promising. Bear with me. And so he looked at and it's wrapped in a blanket and he, you know, it was cold and he thought, oh gosh, the child's frozen. So he took the baby to the morgue and it was placed at this point. there was sort of refrigeration and everything. And so it was placed, you know, in the, I guess, the storage space,

refrigeration space until an autopsy could be done. And then a few days later, at the end of his shift, the sort of the doctor in charge of doing the autopsies, brought the baby out and unwrapped it and discovered that it was made of candy. What? So this was just a candy baby. We don't really have any more details than that. A life-size candy baby.

What? And when you say candy, cat, just for British, any Brits listening, what do you mean by candy? Do you mean a chocolate baby or do you mean made of sugar? What? I'm guessing sugar. We don't have many details. I'm actually imagining a jelly baby. But larger is kind of how I pictured it and maybe more like life colored. Yeah, who knows how this ended up happening. And apparently in the register, just says like unidentified candy baby. So I imagine that the policeman got quite a lot of, uh, you'd never live up. Yeah, you would not live that down. But there were cases of this.

It was one about paper skeleton ones. And sometimes it was people kind of playing jokes in the morgue. And other times it, yeah, it was actual mistake and stuff because you'd also have mistaken identity. Sometimes by accident, sometimes people trying to commit big of me. So, you know, there was a lot, um, insurance fraud also obviously came up with that too. But yeah, the candy, candy baby was a story with, I suppose, You want to say a happy ending in the more.

Who made it? How did it end up there? The most pressing question I want to know, did anyone eat it? You know what? I don't know. I just also don't know if you would want to at that point. I'm not sure how fresh it would be. I love a jelly.

Like love a jelly. Not jelly babies, actually. I really don't like jelly babies at all. But jelly sweets. No, no. Jelly sweets I do. And even I, in my desperation, wouldn't eat that. I don't think.

That's probably not something. But do you know what I love? about that. And this is what I love about history generally. Somebody, somewhere in the city of New York, knew exactly who made that candy baby, knew exactly why they made it. And they have gone to their grave with them and maybe one or two other members of their friends or family circle knowing all the details about that. And we are left with this ridiculously tantalizing tale. And sometimes it's better for us not to know. Sometimes it's just more human for us not to know. So I love that we can't piece everything together in that case.

I think that also happens a lot with the morgue, especially with the stuff that I only get from news sources, where I'm like, what? Like, what are you talking about? There was another story about this couple that fell out over pasta. Again, why these details were in the newspaper, like, the way she cooked macaroni and she stormed out. And then he went to the morgue and she, like, looking for her and they misidentified someone as her. But then there's this weird bit in the newspaper report about this, like, odd exchange between him and the morgue keeper that sounds like fake poetry. Anyway, and And then she comes home a couple days later and he's like, I thought you were dead. And she's like, no, I'm not. And then she's also like, wears my wedding dress. And he's like, I buried you in it. And she's like, what, what have you done? And then, yeah, that in itself is just a whole other tablet story. And it turns out he'd buried a human made of macaroni.

One can only hope the second installment. If someone turns into fiction. I love macaroni too. Yeah. Weird stories. Well, Kat, we will get you, we'll have to get you back to tell the story of the people with the duck. Oh, exactly. know that one.

Yeah. But thank you so much for coming on After Dark today. And thank you at home for listening. If you want to leave us a five-star review, you can do that wherever you get your podcast. And you can even email us at AfterDark at HistoryHit.com. Tell us what you think of the show

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