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year long. Get a

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$0 delivery fee with your first three

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orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 in

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order, additional term supply. In

1:16

an archive in Brooklyn, a box

1:18

gathers dust. Each day,

1:20

sunlight rises through the window, passes

1:23

over the box, and then disappears,

1:25

leaving it in darkness once again.

1:29

Inside it, are photographs.

1:32

Photographs of the faces of

1:34

the unclaimed dead of New

1:36

York from the late 19th century. It

1:42

was a time when the city's population was

1:44

exploding, fueled by waves

1:46

of immigrants washing ashore in search

1:48

of a new life. With

1:51

that tide, some were

1:53

buoyed, rising to success and

1:56

riches. Others found

1:58

themselves desperate and drowning. Some

2:00

found themselves dead, their

2:03

bodies left anonymous amid a sea

2:05

of people, no one

2:07

knowing who they were or where they'd come

2:09

from. Corpses like

2:11

these, the unnamed dead, were

2:14

taken to a dingy building on a pier at

2:16

the foot of 26th Street. There,

2:20

they were laid out, and they

2:22

were photographed. At

2:25

first the photos were displayed to the

2:27

public. Some were

2:29

pored over by anxious families

2:31

searching for their missing loved ones.

2:35

Others were overlooked, their subjects

2:37

as alone in death as

2:40

they had been in life. After

2:43

a period, the images would be

2:45

taken down. Eventually,

2:48

they were put into a box and

2:50

forgotten. But

2:52

for those curious enough to lift the lid, these

2:55

eerie works survive, handed down to

2:57

us as the only witnesses we

2:59

have of a changing populace

3:02

and the institution that served them, one

3:05

that no longer exists. Its

3:08

records have been either locked away

3:11

or consigned to the murky depths of the

3:13

Hudson River. This

3:16

is the story of New

3:18

York's unknown dead and the

3:20

building that processed them. This is

3:23

the story of the New York

3:25

morgue. Hello

3:30

and welcome to After Dark.

3:50

My name's Antony. And I'm Maddie.

3:52

And as you can hear, we're both

3:54

incredibly gravelly today. And today we are on

3:56

the edge of death because we are suffering with

3:58

hay fever. That's absolutely fine. But,

4:01

but, and I'm so, I'm so genuinely

4:04

glad about this. We have

4:06

one of our favorite returning guests, all of

4:08

our guests are favorites, but this is one

4:10

of our particular favorite returning guests because this

4:12

is one of my favorite episodes. And

4:15

we are of course talking about Kat Byers. You've

4:17

talked to us before about the Paris morgue. And

4:19

as Maddie has just said, this

4:21

time we're going to be talking about

4:23

the New York morgue. So Kat, welcome

4:25

back to After Dark. Thank you. I'm

4:27

so glad to be back. Another day, another

4:30

morgue. You know, that's my motto. Another

4:32

day, another morgue. Kat, give us

4:34

a little bit of a, cause

4:37

obviously we're in a whole different place here than we were when

4:39

we spoke to you last about Paris, but give

4:41

us a little bit of the context of the

4:43

time and the place, late 19th century America. What's

4:47

the backdrop to the introduction of this morgue?

4:49

Yeah. So this morgue, so when we previously

4:51

spoke about Paris, Paris opened in 1804, right

4:53

at the beginning of the century. So we're

4:55

now 50 years later, we're across the pond,

4:57

we're in New York, and

5:00

they first decided to open an morgue

5:02

in New York in around 1865.

5:06

And they'd kind of, they needed one for

5:08

a long time. Like Maddie said at the

5:10

beginning, you've got this huge population growth. All

5:13

the kind of facilities that they

5:15

had for, you know, managing the

5:17

dead have become really, really insufficient.

5:19

And there's all these reports of kind of

5:21

the previous version of the morgue, which was basically

5:23

just a shed. In the summer, it would have

5:25

all this, like it was just, it was grim.

5:28

There's all these reports of decomposing matter and like

5:30

coffins half open and really grim.

5:32

And there's also these potters fields

5:34

that are moving around the city because Manhattan's growing

5:36

and it's going upwards and upwards until they keep

5:39

having to move all the cemeteries further upwards as

5:41

well. So you've really got a situation where things

5:43

are getting a bit out of hands and they

5:45

need a solution. And what we've also

5:47

got going on is the American civil

5:49

war has just finished. So you've

5:51

kind of just got a country in

5:54

chaos, a city that's been in

5:56

chaos, and you're on the other side of

5:58

it and you're in this whole new world. And it's. It's

6:00

a big moment for, for just change and

6:02

for, I guess, experimenting and trying new things

6:04

and just how do we rebuild a new

6:07

city, a new country, a new state, a new

6:09

society after everything that's just happened. And

6:12

then into all this, we have this

6:14

model of a morgue. And so what happened

6:16

is they took the model directly from Paris.

6:19

So there's this guy called John Bigelow, who

6:21

was the sort of US minister for France.

6:23

And he literally took, took the

6:26

plans, took the model, took it straight to New

6:28

York and was like, right, let's just build the

6:30

exact same thing in New York and see what

6:32

happens. You say that, you know,

6:34

this is an America coming out of the Civil War. And

6:36

I suppose in a lot of ways, it was an America

6:38

that was newly familiar with

6:40

death, with what death looked like,

6:42

with the smell of death, with

6:45

bodies and being proximate to that

6:47

and the processes that maybe

6:49

surround that. So talk

6:51

us through what the new morgue looks

6:53

like. You say it was almost a direct blueprint

6:57

transition from France into New

6:59

York. But just tell us a

7:01

little bit more about that building, what it would be like

7:03

if we were standing in it today, for example. So

7:06

it was quite a lot smaller than the

7:08

one in Paris. So they took the model

7:10

and they took all the regulations and that

7:12

kind of thing. But you had to adapt

7:14

it to, again, existing city, a totally different

7:17

society, a totally different, like urban environment, municipality,

7:19

all of that. And so they built it

7:22

at Bellevue Hospital. So it was also attached to a hospital, which

7:24

is not what you had in Paris. And

7:26

so it was on the end of

7:28

East 26th Street, right next

7:30

to the river, because obviously a lot of bodies would come

7:32

in from the river. And also

7:34

that meant that it was easily accessible

7:37

to then transport the bodies to

7:39

the mass graves on the island, people that were unclaimed where they

7:41

would be buried. So it was a kind of a whole system

7:43

there. And it was quite a

7:45

low building. It went through various different versions.

7:48

So every sort of 10 or 15 years or so,

7:50

it would fall into absolute corruption and disrepair and they'd

7:52

try and fix it up. But the

7:54

first version was quite small. It was slightly lower than

7:56

ground level. So you would go down into it and.

8:00

the reports say it had obviously this quite overwhelming

8:02

smell of damp from the river. And

8:04

then the summer, supposedly the smell was a

8:07

little bit more than damp. I think

8:09

one description said the overwhelming stench of death.

8:12

So not particularly a nice place

8:14

to be. Not something

8:16

you put on the tourist posters for New York,

8:18

is it? No, not quite. Come and smell the

8:20

stench of death this July. So similar

8:23

to Paris, they had a display room. So you went in

8:25

and there was kind of like a, I guess, sort of

8:28

like a walkway part of the room. And then there was

8:30

a wall that had big glass

8:32

windows and you could look through them

8:34

and then through the windows, there were just

8:36

four slabs laid out. And so these would

8:38

have bodies on them. And the same with

8:41

Paris, you'd have hooks behind the bodies to hang

8:43

clothes on. And then also in

8:45

the room where the public came, there was a wall

8:47

and this was called the Wall of the Unknown

8:50

Dead. And so this is where these photographs would

8:52

all be positioned once photography started, which was just

8:54

two years after the morgue opened, they started taking

8:56

photographs of the bodies. So these would all be

8:58

on the wall there. And this

9:00

is the real difference, I suppose, isn't it, between the

9:03

New York morgue and the Paris morgue. And for anyone who

9:05

hasn't listened to the episode yet, pause it right now. We

9:07

will wait for you to catch up. Go and listen to

9:09

it. We'll just give you a second. OK,

9:12

good. Hopefully back with us. So

9:15

we've looked at death photography in the

9:17

19th century on this show before, Kat.

9:19

And that was very much photographers

9:22

coming into people's homes or the

9:24

dead being taken to photography studios.

9:27

And there was a sort of stillness to

9:29

that and but also an intimacy.

9:31

And it's quite emotionally coded. And I just

9:33

wonder if that's the same thing that's going

9:35

on in the morgue or if this is

9:37

a more sort of clinical process. What is

9:39

the function of those photographs? It

9:41

is absolutely a much more clinical focus.

9:44

And I remember your post-mortem photography episode, I

9:46

really enjoyed that one. In this case, obviously,

9:48

the function is to try and identify the

9:50

dead. So it's kind of actually the inverse,

9:52

if we think of post-mortem photography, which is

9:54

trying to remember people that you knew in

9:57

life here, the absolute opposite is trying to discover

9:59

who they are. the person taking the photograph

10:02

and the people looking at them have no idea who this person is.

10:05

So it really is the direct opposite of

10:07

it. And the photographer was a man

10:09

named Oscar G. Mason, and

10:11

he had actually been and was the hospital

10:13

photographer. So in this period as well,

10:16

we've got this absolute growth of medical photography and the

10:18

US really kind of led the way in that in

10:20

a lot of ways, partly because of the Civil War

10:22

and because of all these sort of army hospitals and

10:24

the photography that was happening there. And so

10:27

Mason was then brought in to photograph the bodies

10:29

at the morgue because they thought, this is great

10:31

if we take pictures of people who are not

10:33

too far decomposed, who are so recognizable, put them

10:35

on the wall. This gives us a much better

10:38

chance of being able to identify people, especially because

10:40

they had much more limited facilities

10:42

for display. And display was also

10:44

never popular in New York and the way it was

10:46

in Paris. It never became this big popular great tourist

10:49

place to go. It was always seen as like, just

10:52

a ghastly place that you don't really want to hang out

10:54

in. And so yeah, they started taking

10:56

these photographs and they're also really interesting

10:58

because in some ways they're sort

11:00

of medical photographs because obviously

11:02

Mason's a medical photographer and there's that kind

11:04

of clinical detachment to

11:07

them. But then they also really

11:09

remind us of criminal mugshots. And there's that

11:11

feeling as well there. And what's also in

11:13

New York, there's a kind of a pre-existing

11:16

idea of having photographs like this on

11:19

display because 10 years before the morgue,

11:21

the police had started this kind of

11:23

rogues gallery mugshot

11:26

place where basically people could go and see

11:28

these photographs of, you know, this is a

11:30

petty criminal, this is a shoplifter, this is

11:33

so and so. And so people could kind

11:35

of know who the local criminals in the

11:37

neighborhood were and all this kind of idea.

11:39

So there's already a prerequisite for doing that.

11:41

So that kind of comes into it as

11:43

well. So they do, they kind of combine

11:46

medical slash criminal, but also

11:48

post Morton because he's a photograph of the

11:50

dead and the photographer himself was

11:52

really aware of that. And he writes about

11:54

the photographs in these annual reports and he's

11:56

really sensitive to it. And he's very much aware of like

11:58

we're trying to find. you know,

12:01

they're kin or trying to find out who

12:03

these people are, whereas other people maybe weren't

12:05

so sensitive about it. I

12:07

suppose as well the photographs halt

12:09

the decomposition process and so

12:11

you can identify a body for a lot longer, it

12:13

can go off display and you still have that record

12:16

of them. Just before we're going to talk about some

12:18

of these photos but I just wanted to ask really

12:20

quickly why it's in my mind. You

12:22

mentioned there that whereas the Paris morgue is

12:24

very much a tourist attraction and part

12:27

of a sort of pantheon of activities you could do

12:29

in the city. In New York

12:31

you say it's considered a ghastly

12:33

place and something that somewhere that people don't

12:35

want to go to. And

12:37

I wonder if, is that a cultural difference?

12:39

Is it a difference between the beginning and the

12:41

end of the 19th century? Is

12:44

it this association that signs slip in

12:46

in terms of criminality and that the

12:48

photographs are making that link between criminality

12:50

and the bodies in the morgue? Is

12:52

it all of that? Is it none

12:54

of that? What's going on? Why is

12:56

there that difference? You know that's a

12:58

great question because we don't know. And I

13:00

think the thing is about this

13:02

morgue, especially because it's never been studied before now, is

13:06

that a lot of these aspects, especially things

13:08

like figuring out why wasn't the display popular

13:10

there, it could be and probably was partly

13:12

because of all the reasons you've just listed.

13:14

I think there was a cultural element, there

13:17

was a social element, you've got a kind

13:19

of a different religious sensibility in

13:21

the US as compared to France. You've also got,

13:23

like you say, this is now

13:25

mid-century, we've again just come out of the Civil

13:28

War. Is there a sense of

13:30

being like, I don't really want to

13:32

go and see dead bodies on display? That's not

13:34

perhaps interesting to me or entertaining in a way

13:36

it might have been before. But then at the

13:38

same time, the Paris morgue kind of emerged out

13:40

of the French Revolution. So maybe it's also, yeah,

13:42

maybe it's more having a

13:44

kind of puritanical background culturally.

13:46

Also it was a smaller

13:49

space, it was not as

13:51

centrally located in the way that Paris was,

13:53

there's so many different possibilities. And

13:55

also what's odd in New York is that the

13:57

photography becomes much more the thing to go and

13:59

see. In Paris, that was

14:01

like sort of secondary to the bodies. You wanted to go

14:04

see the bodies for real. You weren't that bothered about the

14:06

photos. But in New York, you'll find

14:08

in sort of in the newspapers, they're often talking

14:10

about photographs and calling, yeah,

14:12

this ghastly display, this wall of the unknown

14:14

dead, who's in the photos this week? So

14:18

there is more, much more interest in the

14:20

photos and who's up there. And they also

14:22

kept photographs for a really long time. By

14:24

the end of the period, there was 600

14:26

photos up there. So the display

14:28

would get bigger and bigger and they would keep images up

14:30

for quite a long time, depending on how much space they

14:32

had. So that was a bit more of a

14:34

draw. And I mean, there still obviously were people who went

14:37

to go and see it because it

14:39

was somewhere you could go and see dead bodies.

14:41

I mean, there's occasion descriptions of like kids hanging

14:43

outside and that kind of thing. And there were

14:45

some people who wrote about the fact that people

14:47

would go there as like a ghoulish

14:49

tourist attraction, but it was never a big, big

14:52

international hotspot in the way that Paris was.

14:55

Well, we have one of those photographs

14:58

which Kat has provided for us. And I'm

15:00

going to try and give you a sense

15:02

of it. And then Kat, if you can

15:04

share the details that you know, because I

15:06

know you've done some research on this. It

15:08

is a black and white

15:10

photograph of a man who, for all intents and

15:12

purposes, if I didn't know what I was looking

15:14

at, seems to

15:16

me to be alive. There's a

15:18

liveliness about him. Despite

15:21

the fact that his eyes are closed, he seems

15:23

to be, and obviously this is just human inference

15:25

here. He seems to be a very kindly man.

15:28

There's something very light about him. What

15:30

I would ask you to imagine is a version

15:32

of Charles Dickens almost. It's very Dickensian in

15:34

how he looks. He does look like Charles

15:36

Dickens. He does. I think it's the goatee.

15:38

Yes, yeah. I think it's the facial hair

15:40

and then the receding hairline at the same

15:42

time. He's dressed relatively

15:44

well, although his clothes seem to be

15:46

quite smudged, a little bit tattered now,

15:48

but it's, you know, he's wearing

15:50

a three-piece suit. He's wearing a tie, which they've obviously

15:53

put him back into for the purposes of this photograph.

15:55

And yeah, he seems like a kindly

15:58

older man, although not that bad. old. This

16:01

is a fascinating photo and you can see,

16:03

I'm always really reticent to cast

16:05

judgment. You know the way we spoke about this in

16:08

Paris where people are just like, well, I'd never go

16:10

and see and I'd never. And when you look at

16:12

an image like this, you can see why it would

16:15

intrigue people and why it would fascinate people.

16:17

But tell us about this image, this

16:19

man. Do we know anything about him? Yeah.

16:22

So this photograph is one of hundreds of

16:24

photographs that I found in that box

16:26

in the Brooklyn archive. And

16:28

yeah, it's incredible. He does look really lifelike. And

16:30

this is something that we see in quite a

16:32

lot of the photographs is that they look like

16:34

they're asleep and you assume that photographs of dead

16:36

people, they're all going to look a specific way,

16:38

but actually it's a huge range in

16:40

how people look. And in this

16:42

case, so the photographs in this box that I

16:44

found, they have notes on the back and they

16:47

have notes saying where the body was found, if

16:49

they were identified or not, you know, signature of

16:51

the coroner at the time. And in this case,

16:53

this man was identified and we know that

16:55

he was 45 years old. He was

16:57

five for eight. Yeah, he's only 45. Yeah.

17:00

But hard living in New York is going

17:03

to age you. We'll

17:06

share this picture on socials just so that you

17:08

can see why we're reacting like that.

17:10

I mean, I thought he was maybe in his 60s.

17:13

No, he's only 45. Wow. And

17:15

there's a description of what he's wearing, his waistcoat

17:18

and his jacket and his linen and his shirt

17:20

and his boots. And he

17:22

was found at the foot of Spring Street,

17:24

which is in Lower Manhattan. And

17:26

he was brought to the morgue and I think it

17:28

was February 1870. So

17:31

again, pretty early on in the morgue's history. And

17:33

then he was identified in July of that year. So

17:36

the photograph must have been up for a while. And obviously by

17:38

that time, you know, he was long gone. He was buried. And

17:41

his name was Peter van Goethrin. There was a name

17:43

for the person identified him. We can only assume that

17:45

they were a friend or a family member. Yeah.

17:48

So we knew, know exactly who he

17:50

was in that image. And I think with these, with all these

17:52

images, obviously a lot of them weren't identified, but other ones were.

17:55

And it's incredible because you just get this

17:57

tiny snippet of somebody and you'll have

18:00

their death. We don't have anything about their

18:02

life. We don't know anything about them. This

18:05

is just this one moment, this last moment, and

18:07

that's all we have of them. It's

18:10

fascinating, isn't it, how we can guess

18:12

at elements of his life based on the

18:14

clothing that he's wearing, or indeed his facial

18:16

hair. There are little ways that

18:19

you could read maybe what social class he

18:21

was from, or potentially the kind of job

18:23

he might have done, or something like that.

18:25

But ultimately we will never be

18:27

able to colour in that whole picture,

18:29

and that's so fascinating. Cat, I'm wondering

18:31

while you're talking there, I was just thinking, does

18:34

it matter when these people are

18:37

identified? You say that in the

18:39

case of Peter here, that

18:41

he was already buried, that his photograph had

18:43

been up for a really long time before

18:45

anyone came forward and said who he was.

18:48

So what would happen if

18:50

someone was already buried and then they were

18:52

identified? Would there be a headstone, for example,

18:55

given to their grave? Are they marked in

18:57

an unmarked grave and then that's it? No

18:59

one ever visits when they're buried or

19:02

speaks about them again. What was the

19:04

purpose of identifying them? Who was it

19:06

for? Well I suppose it matters

19:08

to the people that knew him. So I think

19:10

in a case of something like this, there isn't

19:12

any suggestion that there was foul play or suspicion around

19:15

the death. If there had been then it would

19:17

be okay, and then we can try and figure

19:19

out who killed him, what happened, what

19:21

the crime was. In this case it was a

19:23

drowning, you know, maybe it

19:25

was a tragic accident, we don't know exactly what caused

19:27

the drowning to happen, but there wasn't any inference that

19:29

somebody else was involved. And so in that

19:31

sense it would matter to the people that knew him and

19:34

who were missing him, who didn't know what happened

19:36

to him. And so perhaps

19:39

the body also mattered to them, we don't know.

19:41

The body at that point would be in a

19:43

mass grave. They're probably

19:45

not keeping great records of which

19:48

exact plot. I mean even these days they

19:51

struggle sometimes to keep, I mean it's gotten a

19:53

lot better, but even yet late into the 20th

19:55

century they were struggling to figure out who was

19:57

where in the city cemetery. So the

19:59

last likelihood of you being able to get that

20:01

body back. I also, on a practical level, I don't know

20:03

if you'd want that body back. It's been like five months.

20:06

So I think it is. It's probably much more just about knowing who

20:08

he was and what happened to him and knowing

20:10

where he ended up and not having, I guess, that kind

20:12

of just empty space or that hole or that question still

20:14

in your mind if he was somebody that was in your

20:16

life of where did he go and what happened to him.

20:19

What's fascinating, Kat, I think about

20:21

your research specifically and then

20:23

how we on this podcast

20:25

and then people who are listening discuss this,

20:28

is so much can be said about

20:31

how we live in relation

20:33

to how we treat our dead, I think. And

20:36

that occurs to me, I'm always really

20:39

fascinated and struck and sometimes, I'll

20:41

be honest, sometimes appalled about the

20:43

way the dead are treated in

20:46

Britain in terms of the length

20:48

of time that can pass

20:50

between a death and then the formalization

20:52

of the burial or, you know, it's

20:55

often weeks. And I know in

20:57

Ireland, we have a much, much quicker system and

20:59

I always feel that it helps

21:01

in the grieving process to do

21:03

that much more quickly. And obviously, these people

21:05

are missing out on that grieving

21:07

process because, as you say, the body

21:10

has gone. But what do you

21:12

think it tells us about and what

21:14

do you think the dead can tell us about

21:16

the living in that sense rather than trying to

21:18

piece together the clues about what these people were

21:20

like in life, how do attitudes

21:22

pinpoint us towards the attitudes of the

21:24

living at this point? How does it

21:26

reflect that? Yeah, I mean, I think

21:28

that, like you say, is so central to this. It's not

21:30

about trying to track down who all these individual people are.

21:33

It's like, what does this say about

21:35

society, about the living, about who you

21:37

prioritise, about who you marginalise, who

21:39

gets to matter and who doesn't. And

21:42

I totally agree, I think,

21:44

that even today, death is still

21:46

so... It's not really democratic, is

21:48

it, in so many ways, because I think that

21:51

it's expensive, the burial process is expensive,

21:53

the death process is expensive, all of that stuff. And I

21:55

think a lot of people are still really

21:58

marginalised by that. And

22:00

in the period, especially, this is

22:03

when you've got this growing interest and kind of

22:05

funeral pomp and all the money in it and,

22:07

you know, how you die and how

22:09

you are sort of how your death is memorialized

22:12

is a massive reflection of who you were in

22:14

life. And that's this big societal and cultural idea.

22:17

So you're kind of like

22:19

reinforcing that you didn't matter in

22:22

life, because not only can

22:24

you not afford a nice funeral pomp, you are quite

22:26

literally in a mass grave on an island and nobody

22:28

knows who you are. And so

22:30

this is that really reinforces that. And the

22:32

island that they ended up on, Heart Island

22:34

at the time also had a reputation for

22:36

just being awful. And

22:39

there was all these news reports of

22:41

like dogs getting into the graves and

22:44

just really awful, disrespectful, dehumanizing stuff. And

22:46

so it very much was this idea of this is

22:49

all your worth. This is all your worth. You weren't

22:51

worth much in life and you're definitely not worth much

22:53

now. And you're going to end up in this mass

22:55

grave and you're going to be disrespected. And

22:58

I think this is this idea that, you know,

23:00

if you were marginalized or you were impoverished or

23:02

you were perhaps, you know, had any

23:04

association with any criminality, that's what

23:06

you deserved. That's that, you know, you

23:08

didn't contribute socially in the way that

23:10

you were supposed to. Or, you

23:13

know, maybe you sort of quote, you

23:15

know, took handouts, they're not handouts, but, you know,

23:17

you had state assistance in some

23:19

way or you were in an institution, a

23:21

penitentiary, a workhouse or anything. So you don't

23:23

get more than this. Like, you

23:25

know, you actually owe the state. So

23:27

don't expect to get anything back. And there's this

23:30

real sense of that in the kind of cultural

23:32

moral and social ideology of the time. Let's

23:35

talk a little bit more about the

23:37

institution itself then and

23:40

the treatment of the dead, because

23:43

there aren't that many records that survive

23:46

relating to the New York walk, we do

23:48

have some photographs. And I'm going to describe

23:51

this photo that I'm looking at. And then

23:53

maybe we can talk about why those records

23:55

are a little bit patchy. So the photograph

23:57

that is in front of me is, I

23:59

believe, 1879.

24:02

And it sort of looks a little bit like

24:04

a school gym. And

24:06

on the floor, which almost

24:09

looks like it's wet, maybe that's

24:11

the damp, maybe it's just been washed, which I

24:13

suppose would be a constant thing that would need

24:15

to happen in the morgue, on

24:17

the floor level, or raised slightly up in

24:19

what look like little sort of stands are

24:22

many, many, many wooden coffins

24:25

organised in rows. But

24:27

what's really confusing me is that

24:30

at the back of this scene,

24:32

almost like a stage

24:34

in a school, again a school hall, a

24:36

school gymnasium, they seem to be what

24:39

look like, and I'm, Kat,

24:41

you're going to have to clarify this for me, the

24:44

skeletons, the reassembled skeletons

24:46

of different possibly exotic

24:49

animals. There's a, what

24:51

looks like an elk possibly, or at least a

24:53

deer, there's some kind of bird

24:55

with a very long neck that could be an

24:57

ostrich. What on

25:00

earth is going on? Well, actually

25:02

it was the animals that helped me find

25:04

this photograph, it's a weird way to start

25:06

it. But basically this is a photograph of

25:08

the dead house of the morgue, which is

25:10

basically the storage room, what all the coffins

25:12

are. And I had been looking

25:14

for this photograph for a really long time. As you

25:16

say, not a lot of stuff remains of the New

25:18

York morgue, and there's all these complications with archives, and

25:21

everything I use is stuff that basically

25:23

just kind of escaped and disappeared off

25:25

into other places and papers and architectural

25:28

plans and photographs and all these different things. It's

25:30

a real like cobbling it together. So

25:32

often I will go off down an absolute rabbit

25:34

hole for a very long time trying to find

25:36

something. And in this case, there was a man

25:38

named Jacob Reiss. He was quite a famous social

25:40

reformer effectively at the end of the 19th century.

25:43

He wrote this book called How the Other Half

25:45

Live, and he was one of the first people

25:47

in that period to sort of go into tenement

25:49

housing and slums and photograph things and kind of

25:52

just sort of reveal what was going on. And

25:55

I'd read somewhere that he'd also taken

25:57

photographs of the morgue and that

25:59

he'd done this presentation. ones called How the Other

26:01

Half Die, and they'd been these morgue photographs. And

26:03

I'd been trying to figure out where this photograph had gone

26:06

for a really long time, and I just assumed it was

26:08

gone forever. I was never going to find it. And

26:11

when I was in New York, it was about

26:13

a year ago, I'd just been in the archive

26:15

reading about an anatomy museum that

26:17

they built above the morgue. So

26:20

quite early on, they decided to take

26:22

the space above the morgue and the

26:24

top two floors, they turned into, yeah,

26:26

this comparative anatomy museum, which were all

26:28

quite popular at the time when they were

26:30

seen as these educational sites. Well, you had the sort

26:32

of the public facing ones, which were a bit more

26:34

like sort of these crazy spectacles, and

26:36

then you had this sort of more serious medical

26:39

ones. So it was for doctors in the hospital to come

26:42

and study the specimens, and they had both

26:44

animals and human remains. And

26:46

I'd just been reading about that. And then I was flicking

26:48

through this book in a shop about Jacob Reiss. And then

26:50

I saw this photograph and I was like, hang

26:53

on, that room looks really familiar. And

26:55

then I realized I'd seen a drawing of it in an illustration

26:57

of the morgue. And then I saw the

26:59

animals at the back and I looked at the date. And I was

27:01

like, oh, oh my god, it's because they're

27:04

installing new animals in the anatomy room above.

27:06

So then I contacted the Library

27:08

of Congress, which is where the photograph was

27:10

kept. And I was like, weird question, guys.

27:13

So you got any photographs

27:15

of this morgue? Because I found this picture, and I'm

27:17

convinced it's the morgue, I don't know if it is,

27:19

like, do you have any record of this picture? Do

27:21

you have any others from the series? And

27:24

it turned out that this photograph had been kind of misfiled

27:26

somewhere else and it had been labeled as a storage room,

27:28

because if you don't think about it, you

27:30

would not assume that those are all coffins and you wouldn't assume

27:32

that this is a morgue. And so, yeah, then

27:34

they showed me some other photographs from a different angle. And

27:36

then I also sent them an etching I

27:38

had that proved it was the same room because

27:40

it was a drawing that had the same ceiling, all

27:42

of that. That is how we tracked down the photo,

27:45

one of the few photographs of the New

27:47

York morgue. I adore research

27:49

stories like that so much. But I think

27:51

as well, it's just so much about the

27:56

equation, I suppose, of some human

27:58

remains with the animal. remains

28:00

and there's questions there about sort of the ethics

28:02

of storage and the ethics of display and

28:05

the morgue as an exhibition space

28:07

like the museum above it as

28:09

well. There are some other things

28:11

that I want to bring up

28:13

from the stories that come out of

28:15

the morgue. One of them is a headline

28:18

from the New York World which was published on

28:20

the 23rd of May 1894 and I'm just going

28:24

to read this and then I'm going to let

28:26

you explain this story cat because this is quite

28:29

remarkable. The headline says

28:31

used corpses for targets. Gasly

28:34

experiments made by Dr Phelps morgue

28:36

unclaimed bodies won't be fired at

28:38

again to benefit sciences. It's

28:41

a nice reassurance that it's okay they

28:43

won't be fired at again so people

28:46

are firing presumably guns at bodies. Yeah I

28:48

mean you know it must have been a

28:50

slow day in the morgue that day, gotta

28:53

keep busy somehow. So basically the morgue in the

28:55

same way that it happened in Paris but

28:57

very much in New York was also a place

29:00

for a lot of kind of medical and scientific experimentation

29:02

because you've had all these bodies that a lot of

29:04

people weren't going to claim that people didn't effectively

29:07

really care about and you

29:09

could they were just you know perfect in

29:11

the eyes of the time material to test

29:13

things out of. So this was

29:15

a case where yeah they were basically

29:17

just propping up bodies in the

29:19

store room and shooting at them so

29:22

that then they could analyze gunshot

29:24

wounds and and the

29:26

impact of bullets. So there was quite a

29:28

lot of examples of this not all as

29:30

extreme as quite literally shooting bodies in the

29:33

store room but there's a lot

29:35

of medical developments that came onto the morgue. The

29:37

first ever skin graft from a

29:39

dead person to a living person in the

29:41

US happened with a body from

29:43

the morgue. That is also just a footnote in a

29:45

medical journal you know the doctors being like I've done

29:47

this amazing thing I made this skin graft it's worked

29:49

I found a random guy in the morgue that no

29:51

one's claimed so I've just took some of his skin

29:53

and I put it on this kid and look it's

29:55

worked. Wow okay so yeah there's

29:58

a lot of you know and then also in medical journals

30:00

and things like that, people talking about how great the

30:02

morgue was, because there were so many cases that they

30:04

could analyze and there were so many different

30:07

types of bodies that would also come

30:09

in from the hospital, different pathologies, and

30:11

also violent deaths, suspicious deaths, autopsies. So

30:15

you have an awful lot going on then,

30:17

it's really clear a lot is going on

30:19

there. So I just want to tie two

30:21

pieces of that information together. All of this

30:23

happening. And then now we

30:26

have a relative sparsity of documentation

30:28

that lead us back to that.

30:30

Is that an administrative thing? Were these

30:32

deliberately destroyed? What's the gap between what

30:34

was happening then and what we have

30:36

access to now? It's a

30:38

couple of different factors, depending on how

30:41

suspicious you want to be, basically. Let's

30:43

say very. Let's say very. Okay, let's

30:45

go with the deep conspiracy theory. So

30:47

one of the problems I have is that

30:49

the hospital where the morgue was located, Bellevue

30:52

Hospital, is still around today, has a,

30:54

I want to say notorious

30:57

history. Quite a lot of

30:59

bad and dark things happened there. I had

31:02

a very notorious psychiatric division. Sometimes

31:04

I would come across clippings in the

31:06

newspaper about nurses murdering a patient. There

31:08

was lots of bad stuff happening at

31:10

Bellevue and they technically

31:12

have an archive. But if you ask them,

31:15

they will say that they do not. And

31:18

I had somebody once give me a list of stuff

31:20

that had been in a catalogue at the archive that

31:22

they now also are like, no, no, no, I don't

31:24

know what you're talking about. We don't have that. And

31:26

then there's also the factor of Hurricane Sandy and stuff

31:28

did probably get destroyed

31:30

during Hurricane Sandy. So that can also be

31:32

something where you're like, oh no, everything's gone.

31:34

Sorry. Don't look at us. So

31:37

that's a factor. And then

31:39

there's also a factor of things just

31:41

gradually getting destroyed for normal

31:44

reasons, history, time, storage, things get lost.

31:46

It's been hundreds of years. Most people

31:48

don't think of keeping morgue registers as

31:50

a priority. I obviously would, but I

31:53

think, you know, a lot of stuff

31:55

disappears for reasons that aren't nefarious. And

31:58

then there's also the police side of stuff. So anything. that's

32:00

linked to police in New York. Quite

32:02

a lot of stuff did just get thrown in

32:04

the river, so there was a bit of a

32:06

thing where after a case was finished, apparently they

32:08

sometimes did, just used to throw all the files

32:10

in the river. That would happen. There was also

32:12

just an incredible amount of corruption in every

32:15

part of the morgue

32:17

and the municipality and politics and everything

32:19

in New York in this period, so

32:22

I think people were also just destroying

32:24

their own records too. So

32:26

yeah, it's a complex web of

32:28

reasons why a lot of stuff is missing, which

32:31

means when I do find stuff like finding the

32:33

photographs, that was incredible. I mean, they

32:35

also had been at the back of a warehouse for a

32:37

really long time and it took the archive a year to

32:39

track them down for me. Not because they'd

32:41

gone missing, but just because they have so much stuff. Yeah,

32:45

so the complex journey I would say

32:47

to researching this morgue. Hey

33:08

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33:11

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33:13

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33:15

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33:26

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sign up at greenlight.com/podcast. One

34:55

of the things that strikes me with a bit of 18th century

34:58

knowledge about death, dying, and the business

35:00

of death is that this

35:02

will open up inevitably an

35:04

opportunity for some, let's

35:07

say, illegal or immoral, at the very least,

35:09

practices to unfold. And I think Maddy is

35:11

going to lead us into one of those

35:13

examples. And then when we come back, we'll

35:16

discuss with Cat in a little bit more

35:18

detail. Here's

35:22

an arithmetic problem for you. Pencils

35:24

and paper at the ready, please. Albert

35:28

N. White held the

35:30

solemn office of the keeper of the New

35:32

York morgue for 25 years. Then,

35:36

one night, he died of a heart attack.

35:40

White had helped usher more than 50,000 corpses

35:43

through the morgue, for which

35:45

he'd received a modest stipend of $700 per

35:48

annum. Reports

35:51

often found him asleep in his chair while

35:53

the bodies came in. But

35:56

on his death, it was discovered that

35:58

his estate was worth around $100,000.

36:02

Clearly the dead had been enriching white

36:05

beyond all lawful measure.

36:08

One doctor admitted buying corpses from

36:11

white. He said they

36:13

were delivered on express wagons packed

36:15

in wicker baskets lined with zinc.

36:18

He said he paid white $6 per

36:21

corpse. Another doctor

36:23

said he paid $3,000 to white for

36:25

a bulk deal at an average price

36:27

of $10 per corpse. $6 a

36:32

body here, $10 there, 25

36:34

years on the job and

36:37

tens of thousands of dead souls

36:39

to plunder. Just

36:41

how many bodies did Morg keep

36:43

a white sell to the voracious

36:45

anatomists of New York City? Well,

36:50

can I just say

36:53

as someone who is numerically very challenged,

36:55

that I've come out in a cold

36:57

sweat having to read that narrative. But

37:00

I followed your instruction. I did write

37:02

some of those numbers down. Oh wow.

37:05

Don't get excited coming out. Just all it

37:07

has is the numbers she said that we're going to recount

37:10

over again just to make sure that they're right. So

37:12

it was 25 years. He would have seen

37:14

through 50,000 bodies. His actual

37:20

salary was $700 per

37:22

year. But

37:25

when he died, his estate was worth $100,000. And then

37:30

after his death, some doctors came out and said

37:32

he was selling corpses to them for somewhere between

37:34

$6 to $10

37:38

per corpse and that he was

37:40

bulk selling for $3,000. That tipped

37:43

me over the edge, the bulk

37:45

buy. It's shocking, but

37:48

it's not surprising. We've looked

37:51

a lot at body snatchers and,

37:54

as you say, Anthony, the business of death, the money that

37:56

was to be made in the 18th and in the 1970s.

38:00

centuries in dealing

38:02

with anonymised

38:04

bodies, people who'd

38:06

slipped from the public record

38:09

in some way, the marginalised, the people who were

38:11

maybe living on the street, who

38:13

died in ways that meant

38:16

nobody would miss them. And this is

38:19

often what happened. And also, especially in terms of

38:21

the 18th century, of course, once you were buried

38:23

in the ground, whether you were a duchess or

38:25

a pauper, you might be snatched. So there was

38:27

a sort of, I suppose, a

38:29

social democracy happening there, a sort

38:32

of an evening

38:34

out, I suppose, of hierarchy. But

38:37

this is obviously happening on a slightly

38:39

more institutionalised, organised scale at this point

38:41

in the New York morgue. So Kat,

38:44

what's going on? Wait, wait,

38:46

Kat, don't answer just yet, because

38:48

exciting developments unfolding as we speak.

38:50

I did the maths. I did the maths.

38:52

I'm so impressed. It is my estimation, based

38:54

on his estate being worth $100,000, that you're

38:57

looking at him having

39:01

sold, I averaged the price of about

39:03

$8 per corpse, that he will have

39:05

sold somewhere around the 12 to 12

39:07

and a half thousand bodies

39:10

in order to. So

39:12

that's probably like what? A

39:15

quarter? Well, a little quarter

39:17

of the bodies that have passed through the morgue.

39:20

Kat's nodding because I feel like you probably have done some

39:22

of this. Listener's kind of

39:24

just saying, Kat looks so unsurprised by

39:27

that. Yeah, she's like, yeah, that sounds about right. Sorry,

39:30

I'm just, it's

39:32

actually startling. It's incredible. Yeah,

39:35

because also, I mean, if we're really going to get

39:37

into the accounting here, he's got expenses, you

39:39

know, he's got expenses of the wagon,

39:42

transporting. He's also not the only person involved in

39:44

this. So, you know, he's probably sold even more

39:46

because if we think about it, you know, he's

39:48

got some overheads. He's got other

39:50

people to pay off. There's a lot of other people that are

39:52

also in this business. This is not

39:55

a one man, one

39:57

man show, although obviously when he goes to trial, they

39:59

are very much. pretend that it's a one-man

40:01

show, which is why he never does go to

40:03

prison because there's too many other people involved.

40:05

But yeah, like you say, I think,

40:07

you know, body snatching, bodies

40:10

are valuable in this period for medical

40:12

study and people will go to whatever

40:14

lens to get them. And

40:17

if there are people who are vulnerable or

40:19

marginalised or who it's much easier to just

40:22

take their bodies and do what you want

40:24

with them, people are going to absolutely take

40:26

advantage of that. And in this case, they

40:28

certainly did and where better to operate this

40:30

than literally out of the morgue. If

40:32

you're the keeper, you can manage

40:34

this. And there's, you know, there was some newspaper accounts

40:36

about how he, we had the official register and then

40:38

he had his own personal register of

40:41

where the bodies were supposed

40:43

to go and then where they actually went. That's interesting

40:45

that he was keeping his own records. Oh, yeah, I

40:47

think I mean, he's over 25 years, he was good

40:49

at it. You know, I don't

40:51

think you could run what is essentially

40:53

a commercial enterprise for that

40:55

long without, you know, really having some

40:57

good business skills there. And I

40:59

think he definitely did. And there was absolutely quite a

41:02

lot of other people involved. And they also people knew

41:04

about it. There's it interesting is that the trial happened

41:06

in the 1890s right at the end. But he there

41:08

was, you know, there's

41:11

mentions of these dodgy dealings in the

41:13

morgue in like the 1870s. There's this

41:16

whole Senate document, which actually is about other messed

41:18

up stuff happening at the morgue to do with

41:20

necrophilia and theft and embezzlement corruption and, you know,

41:22

you name it that happened at the morgue. And

41:24

there's kind of a bit of a subtext there

41:26

where you're like, oh, yeah, there's

41:28

there's a hint that people know that he's

41:31

taking a tip. But he's,

41:34

you know, he's maybe good at what he does in other

41:36

ways. They're overseeing it. And they're overlooking it as a bit of

41:38

a like, okay, you know, that's the price of it, like a

41:40

little bit of a gratuity. And I think

41:43

what happens with the trial is more that the hires

41:45

up are pissed off that he's the one that's making

41:47

loads of money off it, because he's just

41:49

a lowly morgue keeper. It's not fair that he's getting rich.

41:51

You know, if you think about the class element of this

41:53

and the social element, it's fine for

41:55

the doctors and everybody to get rich off this. It's

41:57

fine for people who are perhaps of a higher class.

42:00

our higher status than Albert Napoleon

42:02

White to be getting rich. But for this guy

42:04

to get rich in their eyes, that's not

42:06

really appropriate. And he also has the most crazy life story. I've

42:08

been trying to track him down and he's just like... Yeah,

42:11

I was going to ask, apart from like side

42:13

note, Napoleon, fantastic middle name without giving him too

42:16

much airtime because he sounds like a pretty dreadful

42:18

person. But how does one become keeper of the

42:20

New York Mall? What was his story? How he

42:22

became the Mall keeper, I have no idea. And

42:25

I really do want to, when I have more

42:27

time fully dig into that. But as I do

42:29

know about him, he was born in Canada. And

42:32

then he changed his

42:35

name, moved to the US, joined the Civil War. And

42:38

then after the Civil War somehow ended up in

42:40

a job in the morgue. I don't think it

42:42

was particularly hard to get a job at the

42:44

morgue. I'm also going to say that, but I

42:46

think that... There weren't many candidates. Yeah, I think

42:48

if you needed some work and maybe you were

42:50

quite like a physical guy and you could, I

42:52

mean, it was quite a physical job and you

42:54

were fine with sort of managing dead people all

42:56

day. I don't think the interview process was probably

42:58

that stringent. And so then he joined the morgue

43:00

there and then he had quite a few children.

43:02

And then I found that his wife died

43:05

of an illegal abortion in the

43:07

1880s, which in itself is

43:09

a whole odd thing

43:12

to have happened. You know, when we think about how

43:14

dangerous abortion was in that period and how it obviously

43:16

was very much illegal. And she

43:18

was married and already had children. And they obviously

43:20

at this point clearly had a fair amount of

43:22

money because he's been selling bodies for 15 years

43:24

already. So there's an interesting element

43:27

there of like, okay, what's going on here? How

43:29

has this happened? And then

43:31

he remarries six months later, her 16 year

43:34

old sister, either it's her sister or

43:36

it's a young woman that was living in their house. She's

43:38

referred to as the sister, but we don't know exactly who

43:40

she is. And then he has some more children.

43:43

I don't know why I didn't

43:45

expect his terrible behavior to extend to

43:47

his domestic life, but there we go.

43:49

Yeah, Albert Napoli. And also what's interesting

43:52

about him, probably no surprise there, but

43:54

all the pre trial, there's all these,

43:56

you know, the interview him now and

43:58

again in the newspaper. and he comes

44:00

up a lot because he's the kind of jolly

44:02

morgue keeper and he's a great character and oh

44:04

he's a great guy and there's this whole, I

44:06

don't know they portray him in the press as

44:08

this sort of cheerful hearty morgue man. Cat

44:13

before we wrap up I

44:15

want to ask first of all we've talked

44:18

about a lot of the unclaimed

44:20

bodies from the morgue end up in an area

44:22

called Potter's Field and I want to ask is

44:24

that a place that is still a grave

44:27

site today can people go and

44:29

visit it and then I also

44:31

want to ask we've spoken a little bit about was

44:34

it Peter I think the man in

44:36

the photograph who was dead but

44:38

are there any other stories that have come out

44:40

of the New York morgue that have really stayed

44:43

with you or that you'd like to mention? So

44:46

in terms of the Potter's Field it's basically

44:48

Potter's Field is the term for you know

44:50

a proper graveyard, the city cemetery and

44:53

in New York this is a place called Heart

44:55

Island which is still there today. Over a million

44:57

New Yorkers are buried there and it

45:01

yeah it still operates like that today. There

45:03

was a big shift a couple of years

45:05

ago so until about two or three years

45:07

ago it was still run by the Department

45:09

of Corrections so it was still run quite

45:11

literally by the prison department. The bodies were

45:13

interred by incarcerated people from Rikers Island being

45:16

paid 50 cents an hour like it really

45:18

the system from 150 years ago had just

45:20

continued and then there's been a huge amount

45:22

of activism around the island for the last

45:24

maybe 20 years. There's a great organization called

45:26

the Heart Island Project who have done so

45:29

much work in raising awareness

45:31

for the island and for the people who were

45:33

buried there but it's still functioning and it got

45:35

taken over by the Department of Parks again a

45:37

couple years ago and so the legislation has been

45:39

shifting all the time then obviously during Covid as

45:41

well but they're trying to make it

45:43

more accessible and so that people can go and visit

45:46

and I went there a couple of years

45:48

ago which was a just yeah a very

45:51

kind of an incredible experience to see what

45:53

it's actually like and there's

45:55

also been quite a lot of work being done to

45:57

kind of lift the stigma of ending up. mass

46:00

grave on this island and the fact that it shouldn't

46:02

be a huge stigma and that

46:04

a lot of people again can't afford or

46:06

don't want to pay for burial

46:09

for this kind of traditional

46:12

individual burial. But yeah, Heart Island is

46:14

still there, still there in the Long

46:16

Island Sound. And there was

46:18

obviously a lot of attention on the island during Covid

46:21

because a lot of bodies were temporarily interred on the

46:23

island when they were managing the rising death toll. And

46:26

that's also when a lot of attention was put

46:28

on the island and people realized that incarcerated people

46:30

from Rikers Island were still being used to bury

46:32

the bodies. And then that shifted.

46:34

And so now there are independent outside contractors.

46:37

In 2020, they were still using incarcerated

46:39

labor. And that's an interesting thing with the morgue and

46:41

this network as well is that historically

46:43

that was also part of it is that

46:45

the morgue and the pet entry institutions and

46:48

the workhouses and the asylums and the prisons

46:50

were all under the same department. So you

46:52

would literally have people in the workhouses building

46:54

coffins, sewing shrouds, sometimes going to the morgue

46:56

to help. So there was this whole going

46:58

to the morgue to help being sent to

47:00

the morgue. So yeah, you'd have

47:02

people effectively building their own coffins and sewing their

47:05

own shards in that period. And they also used

47:07

clothing from

47:10

the unclaimed dead that was

47:12

in not great condition. They would shred it and

47:14

make it into carpets for prisons

47:17

and asylums and workhouses. So

47:19

yeah, it's a real circular economy system

47:22

going on. Yeah, it's a sort of closed

47:24

loop circuit, isn't it, that you can get

47:26

stuck in. And it's a hopeless situation that

47:29

in the 19th century, at least there was

47:31

no escape. And it's shocking that echoes of

47:33

that system and the

47:35

infrastructure are still in place, at least

47:37

were in 2020. That's it's really,

47:39

really remarkable. But even though there are

47:41

these echoes, the morgue itself is

47:44

closed today, isn't it Kat? So when

47:46

did that happen? When did that institution

47:48

close its doors? Yeah, so they

47:50

went, as I said, during the period from

47:53

the 1860s to the 1910s, they

47:56

would try and reform it every 10 or 15 years and

47:58

then it would just fall into And

52:00

then a few days later at the end of

52:02

his shift, the doctor in charge

52:04

of doing the autopsies brought the baby

52:06

out and unwrapped it and discovered that it

52:08

was made of candy. What? So

52:11

this was just a

52:14

candy baby. We don't really

52:16

have any more details than that. A life-size

52:18

candy baby. What?

52:21

And apparently it was just...

52:24

When you say candy, Kat, just

52:27

for British... any Brits listening,

52:29

what do you mean by candy? Do you

52:31

mean a chocolate baby or do you mean

52:33

made of sugar? I'm

52:36

guessing sugar. We don't

52:38

have many details. I'm actually

52:40

imagining a jelly baby, but larger

52:42

is kind of how I pictured it

52:44

and maybe more life-coloureds.

52:48

Yeah, who knows how this ended up

52:50

happening. And apparently in the register it

52:52

just says, like, unidentified candy baby. So

52:55

I imagine that the policeman got quite a lot

52:57

of... You'd never live that down.

52:59

Yeah, you would not live that down. But there were also cases of

53:01

this. It was one about paper skeleton ones. And

53:04

sometimes it was people kind of playing jokes in

53:06

the morgue and other times it... Yeah, it was

53:08

actual mistaken stuff because you'd also have mistaken identity.

53:11

Sometimes by accident, sometimes people trying to

53:13

commit bigamy. So, you know, there

53:15

was a lot... Insurance fraud also obviously came

53:17

up with that too. But yeah, the candy

53:19

baby was a story with, I

53:21

suppose you want to say a happy ending in

53:23

the morgue. Who made it? How did it end

53:25

up there? The most pressing question I want to

53:27

know, did anyone eat it? You know

53:29

what? I don't know. I just also don't know if you

53:32

would want to at that point. No, and I... I'm not

53:34

sure how fresh it would be. That's fun. I

53:36

love a jelly. Like, love a jelly. Not jelly

53:38

babies actually. I really don't like jelly babies at

53:41

all. It's like you're not out. But jelly sweets.

53:43

I know. Jelly sweets I do. And I, even

53:45

I, in my desperation, wouldn't eat that. I don't

53:47

think that's... That's probably not

53:50

something... But do you know what I love

53:52

about that? And this is what I love about history generally. Somebody,

53:54

somewhere in the city of New York,

53:56

knew exactly who made that candy baby.

54:00

exactly why they made it. And they have

54:02

gone to their grave with them and maybe

54:04

one or two other members of their friends

54:06

or family circle knowing all the details about

54:09

that. And we are left with this ridiculously

54:11

tantalising tale. And sometimes it's better for us

54:13

not to know, sometimes it's just more human

54:15

for us not to know. So I love

54:18

that we can't piece everything

54:20

together in that case. I think that also happens

54:22

a lot with the morgue, especially with the stuff

54:24

that I only get from news sources, where I'm

54:26

like, what? Like, what are you

54:28

talking about? There was another story about

54:31

this, this couple that fell out of a pasta

54:33

again, why these details were in the newspaper, like

54:35

the way she cooked macaroni and she stormed out.

54:38

And then he went to the morgue and

54:40

he like looking for her and they misidentified

54:42

someone as her. But then there's this

54:44

weird bit in the newspaper report about this like odd

54:46

exchange between him and the morgue keeper that sounds like

54:49

fake poetry. Anyway, and then she comes home a couple

54:51

of days later, and he's like, I thought you were

54:53

dead. And she's like, No, I'm not. And

54:55

then she's also like, where's my wedding dress? And

54:58

he's like, I buried you in it. And she's

55:00

like, what, what have you done? And then

55:02

yeah, this that in itself is just a whole

55:04

other tabloid story. And it turns out he'd buried

55:06

a human made of macaroni. One can only hope

55:09

for the second instalment if someone turns into a

55:11

fake. I love macaroni too. Yeah.

55:14

Well, Kat, we will get you, we'll have to

55:16

get you back to tell the story of the

55:18

people with the duck coming. We need

55:20

to know that one. Yeah. But thank you so

55:23

much for coming on after dark today. And thank

55:25

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55:27

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55:33

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55:39

you. That's after dark history hit.com. See

55:42

you next time. Welcome

55:51

to another round of boardroom or

55:53

Miro board. Today we talk retrospectives

55:55

with agile coach Maria. Let's go.

55:57

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Boardroom or mirror board? Boardroom. In

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she's done it. For a

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