New Haven Green

Between 5,000 and 10,000 colonial-era bodies lie buried under New Haven Green, where Yale students now throw frisbees. The headstones were moved to Grove Street Cemetery in 1820 but the bodies stayed, and when Hurricane Sandy uprooted a 120-year-old oak in 2012, human bones were found tangled in the roots.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy ripped a 103-year-old oak tree out of the New Haven Green. Under the roots, resident Katie Carbo spotted a skull tangled in the root system.

Nobody was surprised. Between 5,000 and 10,000 people are buried under the Green, depending on who you ask. The bodies have been there since the 1600s, and they never left. Just the headstones.

New Haven's founders started burying their dead on the Green in 1638, the year they settled the colony. For the next 174 years, this was the town cemetery. Six generations of colonists went into the ground here, stacked in layers. Governor Francis Newman complained in 1659 that the burial ground was unhealthy for the living. He died the following year and was buried there himself. The last person interred on the Green was Martha Whittlesey in 1812.

The dead accumulated. An 1849 excavation near the monument for John Dixwell, one of the judges who condemned King Charles I to death, found sixteen bodies in a twelve-foot space just two feet below the surface. Connecticut state archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni noted that the organic material could range from perfectly intact bodies to nothing but rusting coffin nails, depending on soil acidity. The point is: they're down there. All of them.

When yellow fever swept through New Haven in the 1790s, the town finally accepted that burying people in the center of the city wasn't working. James Hillhouse, Yale's treasurer, bought six acres on Grove Street in 1796 for a new burial ground. By 1820, the gravestones had been moved to Grove Street Cemetery. The bodies stayed put. The town simply paved over the dead and turned the Green into a public park.

Today, Yale students throw frisbees and eat lunch on top of somewhere between five and ten thousand colonial skeletons. Three churches sit on the Green. Under Center Church, a crypt preserves some of the oldest remains, and visitors can actually go down and see them. The rest lie scattered beneath the grass, unmarked, their headstones standing in rows at Grove Street Cemetery two blocks away, identifying graves that no longer exist.

The notable dead include Isaac Allerton, a Mayflower pilgrim. Theophilus Eaton, the first governor of New Haven Colony. William Jones, his deputy. John Dixwell, the regicide judge who fled to Connecticut after signing King Charles I's death warrant and hid here under an assumed name. Benedict Arnold's first wife is down there too.

The ghost reports are old and surprisingly specific. Yale President Timothy Dwight published an account in 1814 of a friend who dressed as a ghost to scare a blacksmith's apprentice on the Green, only to watch the sixteen-year-old chase the apparition back to a grave and demand it return to the earth. In the 1890s, a group of drunk Yale students encountered a white figure on the Green. When they called out to it, it answered: "Yes, Lord, I'm coming!"

People still report shadowy and misty figures on the Green that vanish when approached. Given what's underneath, the surprise would be if nobody saw anything.

The Green is beautiful in daylight. Elm trees, park benches, the three churches in a row. It looks like any New England town center, and it functions like one too. Farmers' markets. Concerts. Graduation ceremonies. The living use it constantly, and the dead are two feet below them, sixteen bodies deep in some spots, stacked like a city that never stopped growing downward.

That oak tree that Sandy pulled up had been growing for over a century. Its roots had been threading through human remains the entire time. The bones they found weren't a discovery. They were a reminder.