New York's Island of Lost Souls: The largest mass burial site in America where more than 1 MILLION nameless adults and babies are laid to rest in trenches dug by inmates

The plain wooden coffins are lowered, one by one, from the back of a morgue truck into the hands of waiting inmates, men standing in a pre-dug trench already filled with other bodies on a small, narrow strip of land off the coast of the Bronx.New York City burial as the rest of the nation’s largest metropolis – almost wholly unaware this place exists – get ready for work.

The only other people on the island – beside the inmates and the dead – are armed Department of Correction officers, overseeing this

This is just a regular Thursday on Hart Island, essentially the city’s potter’s field – though not all who end up here, it turns out, are destitute or unknown. The bodies are collected from the city morgues several times a week, ferried to a dock at the end of a residential street by a truck driver who alternately naps and drinks Dunkin Donut’s coffee as he awaits the arrival of inmates from Rikers Island.

Then the morgue truck and the inmates take a boat across the Long Island Sound, disembarking to drive along unpaved roads to open grave sites. Trenches ten feet deep are left open, week after week, until they’re filled with 150 adult coffins, stacked three high, or 1,000 tiny pine boxes holding babies. Once the trenches are filled, the graves are covered in and eventually marked with nothing more than a stark white stake. The dead, on Hart Island, are nameless. It’s the largest mass burial site in America.

Hart Island was purchased by New York City nearly 150 years ago, and its use as a potter's field began the following year; the Department of Correction has been in charge of island burials for much of that time. New York residents being interred today by inmates earning 50 cents an hour join more than one million city residents who represent snapshots of the city’s history, from Civil War veterans to casualties of 1960s drug abuse – including child star Bobby Driscoll – to early victims of the AIDS crisis, buried 14-feet deep amidst fear and confusion about the deadly virus.

The island itself has served a range of functions, hosting at different stages a workhouse, a tuberculosis hospital, an asylum, even a Nike missile installation during the Cold War. The last occupied structure, a rehab center, closed in the 1970s, and the abandoned buildings are now crumbling and filled with rubble. Vandalism by adventure seekers – who flout the law and take their own boats or dinghies to the island – has been a consistent problem over the years.

It’s arguably easier for vandals to visit the island than it is for relatives of the people who are buried there. Unlike cities such as Los Angeles, which cremates its dead and holds an annual commemoration ceremony in the cemetery, New York buries its residents in a place that’s off limits to the public. For years, even the mothers of infants buried on Hart Island were denied permission to visit. But a New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) lawsuit in 2014 paved the way for relatives to pay their respects on the island once a month on a designated day, allowing 50 people per visit – a number that has since been increased to 70. They’re required to register beforehand, relinquish phones and cameras and sign a waiver warning that any trips are taken at their own risk – absolving the DOC of ‘exposure to dangerous chemicals, wild animals, collapsed building structures, spikes or pikes in the ground, or large or small holes.’

On one gloomy Saturday morning, DailyMail.com joined such relatives for the journey, invited by the great-great-great grandson of a man buried on Hart Island. The quiet group that gathered for the trip across the water was diverse: a 31-year-old Chinese hairdresser clutching a bouquet of flowers mourning his recently-deceased father; an elderly, flame-haired mother and her adult son, looking to pay respects to her own mother who died young; a Hispanic father from the Bronx who lost his baby 25 years ago and only recently discovered his child’s burial site.

There were no trenches being dug or filled on this weekend morning, and the relatives – all complete strangers beforehand – were accompanied the entire time by armed guards. When their visit was nearing an end, a guard offered to take a group picture – and, awkwardly, those assembled stood together, posing and then waiting their turn to grab a copy of the Polaroid before making the journey back.

They were also accompanied by frequent visitor Melinda Hunt, who has dedicated countless hours of her time to Hart Island, the people buried there and their loved ones. Ms Hunt, an artist, first became interested in the island 30 years ago, when she visited the site for a photography project – and she has been passionate about it ever since, creating the nonprofit Hart Island Project, which features an interactive map and listings of people buried on Hart Island since 1980. The website includes a clock for each person measuring the period of time they have been buried in anonymity until someone adds a story or image to memorialize their life.