When the Ghost Screams(22)

She and her parents returned to Cornwall, where my great-grandfather was born a few generations later.

If Robert Calef had not made his levelheaded assessment, Margaret Rule could have been one of the ghosts who wander the Boston Common.

The ethereal image of a woman has been seen in the old graveyard there. The cemetery is on the edge of the Common, bordering Boylston Street. Many of the stones here are so old that the lettering has worn away.

Holly Mascott Nadler, author of Ghosts of Boston Town: Three Centuries of True Hauntings, reported a ghost sighting in the Common cemetery. On a drizzly afternoon in the 1970s, a dentist named Dr. Matt Rutger decided to wander in the tranquil beauty of the ancient graveyard and encountered “a total deviation from reality as most of us know it,” she wrote.

As the dentist attempted to read the worn lettering on the weather-washed gravestones, he was startled by a tap on his shoulder. When he swung around to see who had touched him, no one was there. According to Holly, the incident repeated itself until it escalated to a violent tug on the back of his coat collar that nearly knocked him down. The frightened dentist had turned to leave when, he said, “I saw a young girl standing motionless in the rear of the cemetery, staring at me intently.”

The girl in the white dress was eerily still. When the dentist turned to the opposite direction, the ghost “relocated.”

Holly Mascott Nadler wrote that the apparition continued to appear each time the dentist changed his path. When he reached the sidewalk, he felt a hand slip into his pocket and watched, stunned, as his keys levitated and then dropped to the ground.

I was fascinated by Holly’s account and wondered if the ghost belonged to one of those buried in the old cemetery on the Common.

Or was she the unhappy spirit of someone long-ago lynched?



Do the ghosts of executed Quakers, pirates, and accused witches wander the Common? (Leslie Rule)



A ghostly woman has been spotted on the Boston Common. (Leslie Rule)

While the formal graveyard is neatly lined by a tall metal fence, it is not the only place where bodies are buried in the Boston Common.

In the old days, authorities liked to make an example of the executed and would often leave them in public view, long after death.



Buildings along Boylston Street rest on top of the old graveyard. The tenants of the desecrated graves may be responsible for the odd noises that emanate from the basement of the cigar shop. (Leslie Rule)

The insult was too much for the relatives of the dead to stand. Some of them tiptoed into the Common in the midst of night and hastily buried their loved ones in unmarked graves.

I explored the Common in the light of day, stopping passersby to inquire if they had ever witnessed a ghost there. I admittedly got my share of odd looks.

Every other person had a cell phone pressed to an ear. I should not have been surprised that they had not noticed the dead when they barely noticed the living!

I ventured into the shops on the streets that lined the Common to continue my inquiries. In an art store on Tremont Street, I learned that an employee had witnessed a shadowy figure darting through the basement. Bouncers at a nightclub on the same street are spooked by the shenanigans of an unseen presence. Sometimes after the club has closed and the doors are locked, the sound system will come back on, the volume turned to full blast.

Boylston Street, too, has paranormal activity. The old cemetery once extended to the space that the street now occupies. A huge section of the graveyard was lopped off to make room for the street. As shovels churned up the earth, the skeletons that surfaced were plucked out and buried in a common grave. The rest of the dead reside below Boylston Street and its buildings, sleeping restlessly in their desecrated graves.

Some students of Emerson College who live in Boylston Street’s Little Building, a stone’s toss from the graveyard, believe their residence is haunted. In addition to sensing a presence there, they have noted that the elevator has a mind of its own. It sometimes stops on the floors of its choice, as if picking up invisible passengers.

While they have attributed this to the legend of a little girl who took a fatal tumble down the elevator shaft, the ghosts of the Common could also be responsible.

Stephen Smith, of L. J. Peretti Co. Tobacconists has heard the inexplicable rattle of chains in the early morning hours when he is alone in the building. The metallic clanks emanate from the empty basement, where there is no reasonable explanation for the sound.

Though he can’t say for certain that the noise is of a paranormal nature, he admitted the incidents are chilling.

Chains?

Some quick research revealed that accused witches and other prisoners in seventeenth-century New England were indeed bound with chains.