Mary Greene

Mary Greene is the older sister of Constance Greene. The discovery of her remains in an alcove of a charnel pit beneath a construction site set off the events of The Cabinet of Curiosities.

Mary was born in 1862 in Carmel, New York, the first child of Horace and Chastity Greene. By the time Mary was twelve, their farm had failed and the family—which now included her brother Joseph and sister Constance—had moved to Lower Manhattan, where Horace found work as a stevedore. Four years later in the midst of a cholera outbreak, Horace succumbed to tuberculosis, and though her official cause of death was also tuberculosis, Chastity either fell or jumped into the East River afterward; her body was later recovered with grappling hooks as Mary and Constance looked on.

Without their parents, sixteen-year-old Mary tried to find work as a laundress and seamstress, but could not earn enough for the rent and the siblings were evicted. With little other work to be found, Mary turned to prostitution in order to care for her brother and sister, but she was arrested, leaving Joseph and Constance on their own. Mary was assigned to a workhouse known as the Five Points Mission—essentially a sweatshop.

Mary Greene died in 1881 at the age of 19, one of the many victims of Dr. Enoch Leng, a scientist who dissected live human subjects to extract material for his experiments. Her body, along with thirty-five other early victims, was found in an ancient coal tunnel beneath the old Five Points district over a century later. Sewn into the lining of her dress was a hastily scrawled note, written in her own blood; it contained only her name, age, and the Greene family's old Water Street address—a self-chosen epitaph of a young woman desperate not to die in anonymity.

Her remains were transferred to Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York, the twelfth in a row of unadorned graves where she and the victims discovered with her were laid to rest.