Washington Square is one of New York’s liveliest parks, with NYU students, dog walkers, street performers, tourists and drug dealers crowding its nearly 10 acres of lush sidewalks and meeting spots. But just below all this bustling humanity lurks a shocking secret: 20,000 dead bodies.
“What lies beneath that splendid, recently re-landscaped and renovated outdoor sanctuary is a bit more morbid,” research librarian Carmen Nigro wrote in a blog post for the New York Public Library.
From 1797 to roughly 1820, the eastern two-thirds of Washington Square Park was a potter’s field, where the bodies of poor and unidentified New Yorkers were unceremoniously dumped in mass graves. For just $4,500, New York City purchased the plot so impoverished locals could afford a decent spot to rest in peace.
Two hundred years later, the organization NYC Ghosts gathers a tour group every night below the park’s iconic arch to tell the spooky stories of the neighborhood. On one recent foggy evening, a lanky tour guide holding a lantern said park-goers “feel sudden cold chills on hot summer nights as they walk over the mass burials. Others have seen shadowy figures in the trees that vanish when approached.”
“This is nothing but death all around here,” another ghost hunter affiliated with NYC Ghosts told a YouTube show. “Is it haunted? Absolutely. I mean there has got to be those spirits and energy that’s still here.”
Certainly, Washington Square Park’s history is teeming with stories that would send a shiver down anyone’s spine.
