When the Ghost Screams

by Leslie Rule

  Buyer Beware!

  Ghosts in the News

  Clearly Heard

  A TEARFUL MOTHER testified in a German court that a pair of psychics led her to her daughter’s killer, according to a January 4, 2005, edition of the Expatica Direct Newsletter, which translates German to English.

  Sigrid Erbe, forty-five, told the court of her heartbreak when her sixteen-year-old daughter was murdered in June 2003. Frustrated when the killer eluded detectives, she contacted the mediums. The spirit of Susanne was apparently lingering on the other side, because she came through to the psychics and fingered her murderer.

  The psychics “told me he was a Croatian man in his mid-twenties, and they told me where to look for him at a garage in Mannheim,” testified the grieving mother.

  When she passed the information along to the investigators, they took it to heart and tracked down twenty-four-year-old Mario Glavic. Just as the dead girl had told the psychics, he was a Croat and employed at a Mannheim garage. Mario Glavic confessed to the murder, saying that he was drunk and on cocaine, and though he had attacked her, he had not meant for her to die. He had struck the girl with a rock in an effort to quiet her when she began to scream.

  He may have silenced her for awhile, but in the end, Susanne’s voice was clearly heard.

  four

  Witch Hunt

  I do testify that I have seen Margaret Rule in her afflictions from the invisible world, lifted up from her bed, wholly by an invisible force, a great way towards the top of the room where she lay; in her being so lifted, she had no assistance from any use of her own arms or hands, or any other part of her body, not so much as her heels touching her bed, or resting on any support whatsoever …

  Witness my hand,

  Samuel Aves

  Samuel Aves was one of several men who signed sworn testimonies stating that they had witnessed Margaret Rule levitate. The accusation came in the wake of the 1692 Salem witch trials.

  Though few people think of Boston, Massachusetts, when it comes to the infamous witch episode, it, too, suffered from the irrational worries that the Puritans forced upon Salem.

  Margaret Rule was seventeen in 1693 when she was accused of being a witch in Boston.

  I have a special interest in her dramatic saga, because a drop of her blood runs through my veins.

  We are family.

  Born nearly three centuries apart, we, of course, have never met. Yet we are bonded by a thin thread of genetics that spans time.

  My first view of Boston was from a 747, my forehead pressed against the cool glass of the window, an airsickness bag clutched in my hand.

  A plane full of people had just heard me be sick, and I didn’t care. With a horrible headache and a stomach that threatened to rebel again, I felt too ill to care what anyone thought.

  Was it a bad sandwich from the Sea-Tac Airport, or was this an emotional response to the horrors that the city below had once inflicted upon so many people?

  I had wanted to visit Boston all of my life, but now the view from the sky made my head hurt more.

  The city looked brown and barren. I could not stop thinking of how frightening it must have been to be marched to the gallows. Were the accused witches sick to their stomachs, as I was now?

  By the next day, my stomach had settled, and I began to appreciate the historic views that Boston offered.

  I had chosen a hotel one block from the Boston Common, the haunted park where accused witches were hanged, and where ghosts are seen by visitors.

  Since 1634, the people of Boston have claimed the Common as their own. The once scrubby land of rolling hills served as a place for citizens to graze their cattle. Families were limited to one cow or four sheep apiece.

  The site, however, was not merely a peaceful, pastoral scene. It was a place of dark deeds—deeds sanctioned by law, but so horrible that the victims still cry for justice.

  Though the Boston Common retains the basic configuration of its early days, Puritans would probably not recognize it. A spider web of paved paths cuts through the forty-plus acres. Features include a bandstand, a baseball field, and the Frog Pond, a small lake that sparkles in the sunshine.

  The Boston Common may be the most haunted site in town. (Leslie Rule)

  Countless couples fall in love on the Common, babies giggle with delight as they toss nuts to the squirrels, and families picnic here. Despite the happy times, tragedy still marks the environment.

  Before my Margaret, there was Margaret Jones. A midwife from nearby Charlestown, she was convicted of casting a spell to kill her neighbor’s cow. On June 5, 1648, Margaret Jones was hanged on the Boston Common.

  As night creeps close, the trees cast long shadows upon the Common. (Leslie Rule)

  A magnificent elm tree was used for the many hangings of those of whom the Puritans did not approve. They also hung pirates and Quakers from the old tree.

  When caretakers lock the gate of the Common’s Central Burial Ground, they keep the living out but cannot keep the dead in. (Leslie Rule)

  On October 27, 1659, authorities hanged Quakers Marmaduke Stevenson and William Robinson on the Common. Quaker Mary Dyer was next in line. As she stood with a noose around her neck, and the bodies of the others dangling before her, her son convinced the men to release her. They escorted her from the city and told her to stay away. Less than a year later, Mary returned. She was hanged on the Common on June 1, 1660.

  Margaret Rule’s troubles began about three years later, on September 10, 1663.

  She and her parents, from Cornwall, England, had come by ship to the new land and lived in north Boston. Her parents had a reputation as “sober and honest.” But Margaret was judged by her own actions when she “fell into odd fits” in public. Her friends carried her home, and nosy neighbors came by to peer at her.

  Some suspected that Margaret’s affliction was caused by a “miserable woman,” who was once jailed for witchcraft. This woman claimed that she could cure people by chanting over them and the very night before had threatened Margaret.

  This view from the Boston Common shows the Little Building (at left). Do those murdered on the Common visit the Little Building? (Leslie Rule)

  When their family members were buried here two centuries ago, mourners could never have imagined the enormous buildings that today look down upon the Common and its graveyard. (Leslie Rule)

  Investigators believed that Margaret was being “assaulted by eight cruel specters.” It was alleged that the “cursed specters” demanded that she put her hand on a thick, red book and vow to become a servant of the devil.

  How in the world did anyone come to that conclusion?

  Did Margaret say she saw eight specters?

  What was wrong with the teenager?

  Perhaps she had epilepsy. Perhaps she had an overactive imagination. Whatever the reason, Margaret was in serious trouble.

  As I wandered through the Common, I wondered if Margaret had also walked the grounds. What did she think when she saw the enormous elm with its thick, reaching branches?

  Had she been present for any of the executions? Did she have any idea that she could soon be swinging from the death tree, a rope around her frail, white neck?

  I was about Margaret’s age when I found myself in a similar predicament. Though there was never any danger of hanging or incarceration, I, too, became known as a witch.

  Trees grow near the spot where the magnificent death tree once reined. These trees carry the genes of the famous elm, just as I carry the genes of accused witch Margaret Rule, who narrowly escaped hanging from the elm’s cruel branches. (Leslie Rule)

  I was attending Mount Rainier High School in Des Moines, Washington, when I made a silly, flip comment about my nail polish. Another girl commented on the glitter-embedded polish, and I jokingly said, “Oh, I’m a witch. They turn this way every year around Halloween.”

  Within two weeks, I could not walk down the hallway at school without someone putting a mock spell on me or sh
outing, “Witch!” To this day, there are people in my hometown who still believe the rumors that exploded from the stupid joke I made about my nails.

  The experience gave me just a little taste of how fast a rumor can grow. Is that what happened to Margaret Rule?

  According to archives, Margaret fasted for nine days. Yet she remained “fresh” and “lively” and “hearty.” When food was forced upon her, she gritted her teeth.

  In addition to swearing that they had seen Margaret levitate, people said they had witnessed unseen hands force her mouth open and pour “something invisible” down her throat. Some alleged that they saw the substance spill on her neck. Margaret screamed as if “scalding brimstone” had been poured on her.

  It was also said that Margaret looked sad, as she claimed that ghosts threatened to drown a young man in the neighborhood. It was later determined that at the exact time she made the prediction, a man had nearly drowned.

  A plaque marks the ground where the elm grew until 1876. (Leslie Rule)

  Cotton Mather, one of those who examined Margaret, noted that the specters surrounding her were identical to those seen surrounding the accused witches in Salem, months before. It has been written that if it had been up to Cotton Mather, Margaret and others would have been executed.

  Centuries of weather have washed away the names of those buried here in the Central Burial Ground. (Leslie Rule)

  Are the displaced dead displeased with their mass burial in the Central Burial Ground? (Leslie Rule)

  But Robert Calef, a prominent Boston merchant, also studied Margaret. He stated that she was either faking or under a delusion. After a few trying weeks, Margaret began to feel normal again.

  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.

  Of all the places I investigated near the Boston Common, the most haunted has room for many ghosts and a two-hundred-year-old proprietor who makes sure that everyone is comfortable.

  Do any of the ghosts who reside at the Omni Parker House hotel originate from the fatal limbs of the old elm?

  Read on and make your own decision.

  A Ghost for a Host

  James Smith stepped into the room across from the ballroom and froze. A shadowy figure had just rushed past him. He whirled around, trying to get a closer look, but the thing had vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He shuddered and went back to work.

  After working many years as a bartender at the Omni Parker House hotel, he takes the unusual happenings in stride. “We have employees who are too afraid to go to the ballroom alone,” he told me, as he escorted me to the large room with the rounded ceiling.

  James is not afraid, but he normally does not talk about the ghosts. We took the crowded service elevator as he gave me a quick tour of the most haunted spots in the hotel. The male employees who shared the elevator appeared spooked when I asked them if they had ever encountered ghosts in the hotel. They all shook their heads no, but something in their eyes told me they were fibbing.

  The Omni Parker House, a short walk from the Common, is crawling with ghosts. (Leslie Rule)

  “People say they’ve seen ghosts on the sixth floor,” James told me. It is usually a fleeting glimpse, but full-figured apparitions have been spotted there.

  James Smith is one of the few Omni
Parker House employees brave enough to go to the ballroom alone. (Leslie Rule)

  Years ago an elderly woman saw a ghost outside of room 1078. It materialized as an indefinable cloud and gradually took the shape of a man. The heavy-set gentleman with the black moustache stared at her for a moment and then vanished.

  Everyone said that she had seen the ghost of Harvey Parker. He was a twenty-year-old farm boy with barely a dollar to his name when he arrived in Boston in 1825. Seven years later he was a restaurant owner, but his ambitions did not end there. In 1855 he opened the grandest hotel the city had ever seen.

  Harvey died at seventy-nine in 1884. Many believe the perfectionist still tries to run the hotel and often helps out.

  But why would he throw teapots? Waitress Heather Alvarado was startled when she was in a storage room, and the pots seemed to leap off the shelf toward her.

  Maybe Harvey is not alone. Maybe he is surrounded by a few less helpful ghosts. The area has seen more than its share of violent death, partly due to its proximity to the Boston Common.

  Do those who were so cruelly executed there creep over to the hotel? If they do, Harvey would surely make them feel welcome. He had a reputation for playing the consummate host to the wealthiest guests or the most ordinary of citizens.

  A. Hafeez Yassin agrees that Harvey is among the ghosts who wander the hotel. He was alone in the ballroom one day, cleaning up after a party and listening to reggae music on his radio. Suddenly, the station abruptly changed, skimming over a dozen channels until it settled on a classical station. “That’s the kind of music that Harvey would have listened to,” he said.

  Another employee was exhausted after a long day but had not quite finished his work in the ballroom. He had one more table to set up. He left the room for a moment, and when he returned, the table had been magically set. He looked around astonished. No one else had been in the area.