NEW YORK -- U.S. stock markets are closed as Hurricane Sandy nears landfall on the East Coast and will remain closed Tuesday.

The last time the New York Stock Exchange had an unplanned closing since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

There had been plans to allow electronic trading to go forward Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, but with all mass transit shut down, getting people in and out of New York was determined to be too dangerous.

European stock markets were mostly lower. Crude oil fell 32 cents to $85.96 in electronic trading.

U.S. index futures fell slightly in thin trading. Dow Jones industrial average futures fell 61 points to 12,993 and S&P 500 futures fell five points to 1,402. Nasdaq futures fell 15 to 2,643.Trading has rarely stopped for weather. A blizzard led to a late start and an early close on Jan. 8, 1996, according to the exchange's parent company, NYSE Euronext. The NYSE shut down on March 27, 1985 for Hurricane Gloria.

Since the Great Depression, the longest suspension in trading at the NYSE occurred after the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2011, when the exchange closed for four days.

Sandy, a Category 1 hurricane with sustained winds of 75 mph as of Sunday afternoon, was blamed for 65 deaths in the Caribbean before it began churning up the Eastern Seaboard. It was expected to hook left toward the mid-Atlantic coast and come ashore late Monday or early Tuesday, most likely in New Jersey, colliding with a wintry storm moving in from the west and cold air streaming down from the Arctic.

Forecasters said the monster combination could bring close to a foot of rain, a potentially lethal storm surge and punishing winds extending hundreds of miles outward from the storm's center. It could also dump up to 2 feet of snow in Kentucky, North Carolina and West Virginia.