Lore - Episode 55: A Way Inside

Episode Date: March 6, 2017

Folklore is more than just a collection of stories; it’s the soul of a culture or location. Without them, our world has less texture and beauty. And like the stories themselves, some places have spirits that creep in and take up residence. * * * Official Lore Website: www.lorepodcast.com Extra member episodes: www.patreon.com/lorepodcast Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support

In 1897, Boston opened the Tremont Street subway. It was a pioneer setting the stage for the future of underground public transit, and as crazy as it might seem, it's still in use today, making it the oldest subway tunnel in North America, and the third oldest in the world, not too shabby for a dark hole in the ground. It isn't a long tunnel system, but it helped people travel around the Boston Common, a massive public park in the middle of the city. Grab a map sometime, and find the Common, and then trace your finger around the southeastern

chin of the park where Boylston and Tremont intersect. That's where the tunnel passes through. Two years before it opened to the public, though, workers were digging furiously beneath that corner when they ran into something unexpected. Skeletons. Hundreds and hundreds of human skeletons. Over 900, in fact, and all of them right smack in the middle of their path. Since the 1720s, thousands of people had been buried in what would later become known as

the central burying ground. But when Boylston Street was extended past there in 1836, the city engineers ran it right over a section of graves. It's more than ironic, really. The burying ground, or at least part of it, got buried. After the skeletons were discovered in 1897, they were all moved to a mass grave, which is still nearby today. This is what happens in old cities.

When people have lived and died in one place for so long, things have a tendency to get buried and lost to time. Bodies for sure, but also the lives those bodies represented. We end up burying our pain, our tragedy, our loss, and all those hidden memories have a way of popping back up when we least expect it. Boston is one of those old cities. I know it's young by European standards, but it's one of the oldest in America, and all that age comes with a rich history, one that's full of conflict and tragedy and pain.

Pain, some say, that can still be felt today. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Boston is one of those cities that probably requires no introduction. It's central to so many of the early ideas and emotions that fueled the birth of America, and it's one of the key stages upon which that conflict was played out. Boston was, and still is, an epicenter for the rebellious spirit. Many of us know it as the setting for the Boston Tea Party in 1773, which wasn't really a party, by the way.

Three years before that, there was the Boston Massacre, which was really a massacre. These are well-known events with their own touch of darkness. The Boston's history is even darker than that. The Boston Common, that giant public park in the middle of the city that I mentioned earlier, is a great example. Sure, locals still used it for cattle grazing all the way up into the 1830s, but long before that, the Common was the popular place to execute criminals, although criminals might be a misleading term.

They hanged a good number of pirates and thieves, true, but they also killed Quakers for trespassing and suspected witches for heresy. And if tragedy leaves a painful shadow on a city, Boston has some dark spots. The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 is exactly what it sounds like. A company called Purity Distilling had a massive steel tank that contained 2.3 million gallons of molasses, which they used to make rum. In January of 1919, that tank burst. A wave of syrup, 25 feet tall, rushed through the streets at 35 miles an hour.

Buildings were pushed off their foundations. And were swept away from their parents. At least 21 people were killed. And locals say that on a hot summer day, you can still smell the molasses. Simple chemistry or the ghost of a tragic past reasserting itself. There are other echoes, too. Back to the central Bering Ground above the Tremont Street tunnel, many visitors have seen things that they have trouble explaining away logically.

The most common sighting is that of a little girl who has been seen standing among the gravestones, walking between them. This ghost, they say, is unique for one key feature. She lacks a face. Just north of the commons is another graveyard known as the Granary Bering Ground. It's one of the oldest cemeteries in town, dating back to 1660, and that means it holds a lot of history and story. The granary is home to a number of well-known individuals.

Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and the parents of some guy named Benjamin Franklin are all among those buried there. All of the Boston Massacre victims are interred there as well. The graveyard is home to much more than burials. Some say it's full of restless spirits, too. Ghost hunters love the graveyard for its abundance of orbs, those fuzzy white spots that sometimes appear in photos at night. They also claim to have recorded odd voices and unusual spikes in temperature and electromagnetic

fields. If that's your cup of tea, the granary offers a strong brew, for sure. One of the common figures cited in the granary, though, is said to be a man named James Otis. He was a well-known lawyer prior to the American Revolution, and is famous for coining that main rallying cry of the rebellion, no taxation without representation. But in 1769, he had an encounter with a British tax collector that ended in violence. During the struggle, the tax official struck Otis in the head with a blunt object, cutting him and, according to some, accelerating the symptoms of a mental illness that he'd struggled

with his entire adult life. It's said that years later, Otis was so depressed over his illness that he wrote to his sister and expressed his desire to die quickly. My dear sister, he wrote to her, I hope when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity that it will be by a flash. On May 23, 1783, Otis was standing in the doorway of a friend in Andover, Massachusetts, when he dropped dead. The cause?

A bolt of lightning. Not all of Boston's haunted past is limited to outdoor spaces. Like James Otis, it stands on the doorstep. And if the stories are true, much of it has walked inside. When John Pickering Putnam designed and built the Charles Gate Hotel in 1891, he was at the top of his game. As an architect, he was one of the leading designers of modern apartment buildings. As a builder, he was wildly creative, developing a number of new patents for building elements

like ventilation systems and plumbing. He was just 41 when he finished the Charles Gate. It's a massive, hulking, Romanesque revival structure at the corner of Beacon and Charles Gate, and if you drive past it today, you can't miss it. And although it's been converted into condominiums, it was originally designed to be a luxury hotel. In between, it's been a boarding house, a college dorm, and a home to a few other less savory businesses.

But tragedy moved into the hotel early on. In 1908, just 17 years after it was completed, a manufacturing executive named Westwood T. Windram ended a long struggle with depression and insomnia right there in the hotel. When a loud noise woke Windram's wife on March 14, she climbed out of bed only to find her husband dead in the closet, gun still in his hand. Nine years later, architect John Putnam himself died at the age of 70, right in the hotel he designed. And it's all that death and tragedy, some say, that's helped give birth to a new type

of resident in the building. Ghosts. Between 1947 and the 1990s, the hotel was converted into dorm space for Boston University, later on Emerson College. Many of the darker tales come from that era. In one encounter, a student opened his eyes in the middle of the night to see a stranger in his room. That's odd enough on its own, I know, but even more unusual was that this stranger was

floating above the student's bed. To make matters worse, the student discovered that he was unable to move. According to the story, the ghostly floating stranger attacked the student, who screamed in horror. A resident assistant and a handful of other students ran to help, and all of them claimed to see the same ghostly figure for just a moment. Then, it vanished. Another student reported waking up to see a black cloud hovering near the ceiling of

his dorm room. As he watched it, the dark mist moved across the room and vanished through the wall. There have been tales of unusual Ouija board encounters, unusual dreams, and strange sensations in places closest to the building's most tragic events. On their own, they are curious stories. Together, though, they paint a haunting picture. Another story-filled hotel in Boston is the Omni Parker House. It opened its doors in 1855, which makes it the oldest continuously operating hotel in

the country. In the 1920s, most of the original building was torn down and replaced with a new 14-story structure. With all that history, comes a lot of baggage. The most frequent story told in the hotel is that of a ghostly older man seen walking in the halls late at night. Those who have seen this figure describe him as bearded and dressed in Victoria-era clothing. Members of the hotel staff claim it's the spirit of Harvey Parker, the man who built

the original hotel nearly two centuries ago. If true, Mr. Parker gets around. Not only has he been seen in the halls of the ninth and tenth floors, but on at least one occasion, a guest has witnessed him inside their room. One woman who stayed in room 1012 awoke in the middle of the night to find a man standing at the foot of her bed. She locked eyes with the ghostly figure for a moment before he spoke. Are you comfortable?

He reportedly asked her. We can probably guess what her answer was. Most stories, though, are focused on the third floor. Guests there have reported hearing sounds late at night that they identify as a rocking chair, slowly creaking back and forth through the night. Other guests report that the elevator has an eerie tendency to stop on the third floor, with no one inside. The spirit they blame for that is Charlotte Cushman.

A Cushman was born right there in Boston and quickly rose to become one of the most famous American actresses of the mid-1800s. She toured most of the English-speaking world with theater productions, selling out everywhere she went, but in 1876 she was at the end of her battle with breast cancer and died of pneumonia at the Parker Hotel that February. Her ghost, some say, never checked out. In the 1940s, a traveling liquor salesman apparently killed himself in room 303, and that tragic event has left an indelible mark on the hotel.

Guests in the past have complained about the constant smell of whiskey, while others claim they witnessed odd shadows in the room. Shadows, they say, that moved. Other reports claim that the bathtub would turn on all by itself. Guests have heard noises and felt cold spots, creating an environment a bit too unsettling for their tastes. Because they've received so many reports, the hotel has permanently closed the room, converting it into a storage space.

Since then, the hauntings have reportedly stopped. Clearly, these spaces have played host to the highs and lows of human life. Somewhere between the wealthy and celebrated and the tragic and painful, something has taken a hold of them. Whether it's ghosts or just the echo of dramatic story, that's ultimately up to the people who experience the effects. But the story that just might be Boston's darkest is actually set seven miles to the east, in the middle of a busy harbor.

It's easy to overlook it now, but 150 years ago, one island played host to an emotional tale filled with loss and misfortune. And some say that story has never really ended. Georgia's Island isn't large by any stretch of the imagination, but it was big enough for early settlers to use it for farming. In 1825, though, the government purchased it with another purpose, coastal defense. This little island seemed like the perfect place to build a fort, which they did. But by the time they finished building it in 1847, it was already outdated.

They called it Fort Warren, named after a local American Revolutionary war hero. And it remained in use for another century, before closing its doors just after World War II. Now, admittedly, there aren't any records that support the tale that I'm about to tell you, and I know that makes for wobbly history. But the reality is that sometimes the only evidence of something historical is the folklore that it leaves behind. It's like a shadow, in a way.

It hints that something bigger and more real is there, even if we can't see it. And in this case, it's also just a story worth repeating. During the American Civil War, both sides of the conflict found themselves with a unique problem that none of them could have prepared for. Through the course of battle, prisoners were taken, and prisoners of war needed to be kept somewhere. Sometimes, as was the case in Richmond, Virginia, an out-of-the-way place was taken over and converted into a prison camp.

Other times, old forts were used, and that's what happened in Boston. In October of 1861, about 750 Confederate prisoners arrived on the island. Some were political figures, like Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens. Most, though, were just soldiers, captured in battle. Thankfully, when compared to other prisons, like Andersonville in Georgia or Bell Isle in Richmond, the Fort Warren prisoners were treated humanely and with dignity. But they were, nonetheless, prisoners. And one of those prisoners, according to the legend, was a man named Andrew Lanier.

Shortly after his arrival, Lanier is said to have written a letter to his wife, Melanie, telling her what had happened and where he was. But when she received the letter, Andrew's wife didn't do what most of us would have done. Melanie didn't resign to waiting. She didn't weep and accept defeat. She took action. When she got her husband's letter, Melanie saddled her horse and made the journey north

to Massachusetts, eventually arriving in the town of Hull in late December of 1861. Now, Hull is important because it's on the coast, and just about a mile across the water to the north is a fort. Fort Warren, in fact. As the story goes, Melanie hacked off her hair with a knife, dressed up in men's clothing and then tucked a pistol and a hand axe into her belt. Just as an aside, can you think of anything more hardcore than that? This was clearly a woman on a mission.

She climbed into a rowboat one night in January of 1862 and made her way alone across the channel. When she arrived on the shore of Georgia's island, where Fort Warren sat waiting, Melanie hid the boat and then made her way through the dark toward the prison. And then she whistled a song in hopes that her husband would hear it and recognize her. It turns out he did, and he whistled back. Once she found the window where Andrew was waiting, she managed to slip through. A grown man could never have done it, but she was smaller and braver.

Honestly, she traveled hundreds of miles from her safe home in the south just to willingly slip inside a northern prison. All for love. What happened next is a bit of an action movie montage. It's that scene in the A-Team where they build the tank out of a bulldozer, some sheet metal, and leaf blowers equipped with artillery shells. The leneers rallied the other prisoners, and together they began digging a tunnel. Their goal was to dig all their way to the interior of the prison, overpower the handful

of guards that were on duty, and then arm themselves for battle. It was a solid plan, and they labored at the tunnel for weeks. All the while, the men worked together to hide Melanie from the guards. They each gave her a portion of their food, they kept her safe, and they dug. Each and every night, armed with that little hand axe, they dug, until the night they made a mistake, and one of the guards heard the digging. The alarm was instantly raised, the tunnel was discovered, and each of the prisoners was pulled out.

When the last man was yanked free, Melanie jumped out of the darkness and drew her pistol, pointing it at one of the officers. Before she could pull the trigger, though, the man slapped the handgun aside, and it fired as it struck the stone floor. There was silence for a moment. No one spoke, not the guards, not the prisoners. It was as if the shot had silenced them all, and for a moment, there was no sound except for the slowly diminishing ring of the gunshot.

And then, Andrew Lanier toppled over, a red, bloody wound in his gut. The pistol had found a target, after all. Melanie would follow her husband soon enough, it turns out. For her crimes, she was sentenced to death, but before they could execute her, she asked for more appropriate clothing, something more feminine, something befitting a lady. All they could find, though, was a large black robe. Melanie Lanier, they say, was hanged in that black robe. After all she'd been through, after all she'd done, she was finally reunited with

her husband. Death, as is so often the case, turned out to be the great connector, bringing the lost and separated back together again. Of course, it could all be fantasy. The tale of Melanie Lanier is one that defies historical research, only appearing for the first time in a 1944 book about the fort. There's no record of a woman ever being hanged in the prison. No record of a tunnel, nothing that can definitively prove the legend's accuracy.

But stories have a way of pointing toward the truth, and while that truth might or might not be the tale of one woman's love for her husband and how she gave everything to set him free, it might be something else. It may be the story, like so much of folklore, was born out of a need to explain things. You see, ever since the 1860s, people on the island have frequently reported odd sightings, shapes that seem to slip past the corner of their eye. Police have seen these things there, as have tourists and historians, even researchers from MIT.

Dark shapes outside the fort, moving against the walls, as if something were trying to find a way inside. Sharks, according to the reports, that resemble a figure, dressed in a long black robe. Admittedly, there are a lot of cities around the United States with histories full of tragedy and suffering. But few have seen so much across such a broad space of time. Boston is unique in its dark, unfortunate beauty. Every city has a ghost story, though, or a collection of them.

There is common as the people who tell them, people who believe, deep down, that something darker is going on under the surface of the place they live. Think of it this way, our houses are really nothing more than walls and floors all contained in a closed space, but that's not what makes a house a home. It's the people inside, the personal touches, the familiar objects. They transform a building into a home. One of the things I find fascinating is just how many important figures called the Omni Parker House home, if only for a while.

The hotel has literally experienced a nearly endless parade of history, right through its hallways. Uncle Chi Min worked there for a year in 1912, and before Malcolm X stopped calling himself Malcolm Little, he worked there as a busboy in the 1940s. The hotel has had countless famous guests and some that were more infamous than others. John Wilkes Booth stayed there just eight days before he killed Abraham Lincoln. He came to Boston to visit his brother, also an actor, but while he was at the Parker House, he slipped over to a nearby firing range to practice using his pistol.

The most famous guest at the Parker House, though, might just be Charles Dickens. He'd been to Boston before, way back in 1842, but he was a struggling author back then, and so when he arrived in 1867, things were very different. By then, he was a literary superstar. He lived at the Parker House for over five months, beginning in the fall of 1866. While there, he performed his novella, A Christmas Carol, for sell-out crowds, and all that performance meant he needed to practice. According to the hotel, Dickens would stand in front of his mirror for hours on end, working

through his performance, trying to get it just right. Two years later, Dickens died back home in England, but some say that Boston, and specifically the Parker, always had a special place in his heart. Perhaps he left a bit of himself there, because that would explain another of the hotel's odd stories. The mirror that Dickens rehearsed in front of has long since been moved to another location in the hotel, out in a public area, and because of that, it requires regular cleaning. A few years ago, one of the hotel workmen was walking through the hall when he noticed

that the mirror had condensation on it, the sort you might expect if someone had leaned in and breathed really heavily on the glass. So he stopped and pulled out a cloth from his pocket and then proceeded to clean the mirror. When he was done, he turned around and looked to see if anyone was nearby, someone who might have done it, but the hallway was empty. When he turned back to the mirror, the fog had returned. He cleaned it a second time and then watched in horror as it appeared once more, just a

few inches from the first spot. It was as if someone were standing at the mirror with him, breathing on the glass, but there was no one else there. As you might imagine, the man refused to ever clean the mirror again. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marsette Crockett. Lore is much more than a podcast. There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season

of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place.

The World of Lore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.