St. Raymond’s Cemetery

Located in the Throggs Neck neighborhood of the Bronx, St. Raymond’s is the borough’s only Catholic cemetery. It also gets a staggering 4,000 new residents each year, but neither of these facts is the real draw to the cemetery. It is home to the famous and infamous; everyone from Jazz heroine Billie Holiday to an assortment of bishops and even mobsters.

One of the most notorious is Mary Mallon, better known as ‘Typhoid Mary.’ She spent a total of 26 years locked up in a hospital on North Brother Island, a quarantine island adjacent to the Bronx. It was believed that she spread typhoid to 47 people over a period of 15 years. Mallon was an asymptomatic, or healthy, carrier, meaning that while she had typhoid bacteria in her system, she never suffered from any of the symptoms. She died purely from pneumonia at the age 69, still confined to her island hellhole.

Her headstone sits at St. Raymond’s, tasteful and with no trace of the scandal. It bears her proper name and date of death with the inscription, “Jesus Mercy.”