Haunted Boston

TELLING GHOST STORIES

It’s the perfect setting for a ghost story. The moon, a yellow orb, rises over the burial grounds at the Boston Common and the sound of rats scratching through the gravestones is audible from the sidewalk on Boylston Street.

Ten adventurous souls gathered on a chilly Monday night in October for Haunted Boston, a storytelling tour that departs from the corner of Boylston and Tremont Street at 8 p.m. every night of the week. There are seven stops and seven chilling tales of murder, witchcraft and haunting along the tour.

This isn’t your corny, bad make-up, amateur performance, though. Boston is more interesting, and spooky, if you let it speak for itself.

‘The stories are all true,’ tour guide Jeffrey Doucette said, his lanky frame all in black against the wrought iron fence lining the Common. ‘They are weird, they are creepy, some are horrific and gruesome. But they all happened.’

Doucette is an expert storyteller and Boston history enthusiast who works in publishing by day and shows his guests a side of Boston that they haven’t seen ‘-‘- the paranormal side ‘-‘- by night.

All of the stories have documented facts to back them up, Hillary Kidd, the founder of Haunted Boston, said. To find the stories, she did lots of research. ‘We looked at primary sources to make sure we were telling the truth and it wasn’t just smoke and mirrors.’

Kidd started the company five years ago. ‘I thought that for being an old city, [Boston] was really lacking in ghost tours,’ she said. All of the stories she found won’t fit in the hour and a half long tour, so the best and the scariest have stuck.

‘This is a side of Boston that you’d never know about, visitor and tour-goer Robert Gomez said. ‘It definitely speaks to how old the city is.’

Christopher Balzano, a paranormal researcher and author, said, ‘If you want to learn about a town, go and see the ghost tour. It’s a better way to learn about a town.’

Paranormal events can be used to teach about history because the events are usually rooted in historical fact, Balzano said. ‘If we have a location, and a back story, it’s much more believable. If it didn’t have physical things attached to it we would think it is an urban legend.’

‘Its people’s experiences that make a haunting what it is,’ Balzano said.

The guides of Haunted Boston weave the city’s popular history in with that of its paranormal activity. Boston Common is the oldest public park in the United States, established in 1634 after Puritans colonists bought the 44 acres from an Anglican Minister named William Blaxton, who had been part of an earlier failed expedition to colonize America.

A condition of the sale, however, was that the common cannot be owned by any individual, but can only be used by the people.

Through the years, the Common has been used for grazing livestock, recreation, protest and leisure, but on the Haunted Boston tour, guests are exposed to the intangible side of the area.

‘This is a tour that’s meant to creep you out,’ Doucette said.

THE STORIES

The ground rumbles and there is a faint shrieking as the Green Line rolls underfoot. It’s the ideal entrance for Doucette’s first haunted story about Boston’s subway.

In digging the holes for the Green Line tracks, the city came across a gruesome discovery: hundreds of mangled and haphazardly de-limbed bodies strewn along the Boylston Street side of the Common.

But who were they?

It was the mass grave of British casualties from the Revolutionary War when the red coats occupied Boston.

And the freaky part?

When the Green Line opened, trolley drivers reported seeing men in red coats on the tracks between Boylston and Arlington Street, Doucette said, and the trolleys are known to stop for no apparent reason on that same section of track.

The mass grave of British soldiers is only a fraction of the total number of skeletons resting in the Common. The bikers, joggers and couples passing through the grassy getaway may be treading on bones.

But the graves are not all at rest, and one particular tombstone was the cause of a Tuft’s University dental student’s worst nightmare in the 1970s.

While taking grave rubbings one night, the student looked up from his work to find a young shoeless girl in a soiled white dress staring at him, Doucette said. The girl disappeared, but reappeared at each corner of the burial ground within a split second.

He bolted to the police station and reported the encounter. The police officer, intrigued, returned to the burial ground to find that the student had been taking a rubbing on the grave of a young girl, who upon further investigation had suffered a painful death during a tuberculosis outbreak in the city.

Painful deaths and restless souls are the theme for the night as Doucette deftly maneuvered his way through the stories. He was informative, engaging and eerie.

There was little talking among the group walking behind Doucette to his next haunted story telling platform: the Parkman Grandstand.

Doucette launches into the story of the murder of Dr. George Parkman, a wealthy Boston moneylender known for his strict management of the money he lent.

In 1849 Dr. Parkman went missing. A week after his disappearance, a janitor at the Harvard Medical School found human bones in the lab of chemistry professor John Webster, a known client of Dr. Parkman’s money lending.

The bones were identified as Dr. Parkman’s when his dentist sat as a witness and showed that Parkman’s grotesquely unique jaw bone molding taken from a prior visit matched the jaw bone found in Webster’s lab. Webster was convicted of murder and hanged.

After the trial, to suppress Dr. Parkman’s miserly reputation, the Parkman family donated money to have the Parkman Grandstand erected in the Boston Common.

Hangings were hardly uncommon in the Common. A large elm tree called the Great Elm stood not far from the Parkman Grandstand and was used for hanging murderers, pirates, thieves and witches throughout the 18th century. The tree was destroyed in a storm, but a plaque remains where it stood.

Doucette stood over the plaque telling the story of three Boston women who were found guilty of practicing witchcraft and were hung from the Great Elm. After hangings from the Great Elm, if the family of the deceased didn’t claim the body, it was thrown in the Charles River to let nature take its course, Doucette said.

If the family wanted the body for a Christian burial, they had to come forward to admit that the deceased person did in fact commit the crime they did. However, in many cases, the family would not want to come forward to admit to the crime, so they would sneak into the Common at night, cut the body from the tree, take it to a far corner of the park, dig a shallow hole, and toss some dirt over the corpse.

‘How do we know this?’ Doucette asked his tour. ‘This park has been around since 1634 and they’ve put a lot of new additions in ‘-‘- a parking garage, monuments and of course, guess what they were finding everywhere?’ Eight to nine hundred bodies in the area, he said.

With the thought of traipsing over colonial era corpses fresh in mind, the tour proceeds through the park to the Beacon Street side for the story of the Charlesgate Hotel’s creepy past.

J. Pickering Putnam designed the hotel as a luxury apartment complex for Boston’s elite in 1890. Less than 60 years later, Boston University purchased the building for dormitories.

After the building opened, a student on the third floor reported her alarm going off at 6:11 a.m. every morning without her setting the time. They found that a woman had committed suicide in the room’s closet at that exact time when the building was used as apartments, Doucette said.

Other students reported strange happenings such as doors flying open without being touched by human hands and spectral presences in dorm rooms late at night.

BU sold the building in the early 1970s, and in 1981 Emerson College bought it to use as their premier dormitory. The paranormal events continued with the Emerson students ‘-‘- a Ouija board was once reported to plot against the unwanted dorm residents.

When Emerson sold the building in the late 90s, it was converted into condominiums, and the haunting stopped.

‘We haven’t heard a peep of paranormal activity since then,’ Doucette said. ‘Here is our theory. What did J. Pickering Putnam say he wanted the original Charlesgate to be used for? Rich people. Who are back in the Charlesgate? Rich people.’

‘The gate is now closed,’ Doucette said, spooking his followers.

The tour finished outside of the Omni Parker Hotel where Doucette bid his guests a good night and a safe walk back home through the Common.