Sound and Silence in the Brooklyn Catacombs
“Did someone die?” my Uber driver asked with a mixture of sympathy and curiosity as we sped away from Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery late on a Sunday night, long past visiting hours.
“No,” I reassured him. “I was... at a concert.”
I wondered what he thought as we drove silently under the city lights. I knew some people who were uncomfortable going to a concert where the dead are supposed to rest in peace. I myself had always been told to avoid cemeteries, particularly at night, but for different reasons.
According to Asian folklore, hungry ghosts wander the earth at night to feed. Some feed off lost objects, while others seek to possess a human spirit. Some unlucky ghosts have no mouths and are cursed with starvation. If any hungry ghosts were wandering the Green-Wood Cemetery of Brooklyn on a late hot summer night filled with fireflies and shadows, they would hopefully have at least been satiated by the sound of Bach and Purcell arias at a concert in the catacombs organized by Atlas Obscura.
