Ghosts of Cambridge: Haunts of Harvard Square and Beyond

by Sam Baltrusis

Overview

As one of the nation's oldest cities, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has a tumultuous history filled with Revolutionary War beginnings, religious persecution and centuries of debate among Ivy League intelligentsia. It should come as no surprise that the city is also home to spirits that are entangled with the past and now inhabit the dormitories, local watering holes and even military structures of the present. Discover the apparitions that frighten freshmen in Harvard's Weld Hall, the Revolutionary War ghosts that haunt the estates of Tory Row and the flapper who is said to roam the seats of Somerville Theatre. Using careful research and firsthand accounts, author Sam Baltrusis delves into ghastly tales of murder, crime and the bizarre happenings in the early days of Cambridge to uncover the truth behind some of the city's most historic haunts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609499471
Publisher:	History Press, The
Publication date:	08/20/2013
Series:	Haunted America
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	664,446
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Sam Baltrusis, author of Ghosts of Boston, freelances for various publications and is the managing editor of Scout Magazines in Somerville and Cambridge. He has been featured as Boston's paranormal expert on the Biography Channel's Haunted Encounters and Paranormal State's Ryan Buell's Paranormal Insider Radio.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

British Haunts

The British are coming? If you believe in ghosts, they've been in Cambridge for hundreds of years. In fact, many of the city's alleged haunts were built on the hard soil of early Puritan thought and burgeoning anti-British sentiment.

When Thomas Dudley, deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, was on the hunt for a "fit place for a fortified town" in September 1630, he took a boat from Boston and walked up a "rounded hill" and ended up in what is now Winthrop Square. According to legend, Dudley stuck his cane in the ground and announced, "This is the place." The Puritans built homes in what is now the Harvard Square area in 1631, and Newtowne, which was renamed Cambridge in 1638 after England's college town, was born.

Fast-forward a century or so, and a cluster of seven incredibly wealthy British Loyalists built lavish estates along Watertown Road, later named Brattle Street. Known as Tory Row, these palatial houses were seized by the Continental army in 1775 and used as makeshift quarters and blood-splattered hospitals for the thousands of Patriots fighting for their independence. General George Washington, who assumed his role as the leader of the troops on July 3, 1775, set up headquarters at what is now the Longfellow House, located at 105 Brattle Street.

Many of the ghosts of Cambridge have ties to the historically significant estates dotting the streets of Tory Row. For example, the house known as Elmwood was built in 1767 by Thomas Oliver, the British-appointed lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. He assumed the position in early 1774, clearly a not-so-stellar time to be a Loyalist. On September 2, 1774, a mob of four thousand angry citizens surrounded Oliver's house located at 33 Elmwood Avenue. The gun-toting protesters forced Oliver to sign a letter of resignation, and he then fled to Boston and eventually England in 1776. Elmwood was seized by the Patriots and used as a hospital during the siege of Boston. The early seeds of anti-Loyalist protest were planted in Cambridge.

With the Revolutionary War–era bloodshed and strife serving as a spooky backdrop, Tory Row became the epicenter of sorts for the eighteenth-century spiritual movement based on the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, author of the book on the afterlife called Heaven and Hell. Poet James Russell Lowell, born on February 22, 1818, at Elmwood, became a diehard Swedenborg follower and would openly speak with his Tory Row neighbors, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's second wife, Frances, about his belief in spirits. According to Longfellow, Lowell "talked in a very Swedenborgian way of spiritual sympathies," wrote Martin Duberman in James Russell Lowell. "He has been long in the habit of seeing spirits and will not consider it a disease but a very natural phenomenon." Apparently, Lowell was frequently visited by his dead wife, Maria White, a women's rights activist and poet. She passed in 1853, at the age of thirty-two, and Lowell reportedly had "a distinct vision one bright afternoon in his easy chair of Maria White's face."

Elmwood, like many of the British-built estates on Brattle Street, boasts a bevy of tales from the crypt. Why? The late Jim McCabe, a noted ghost lore expert, believed the historic homes of Tory Row are ghost magnets. "The old Yankees may have been strange in some ways, but they kept the old buildings, which has made it attractive to many visitors — even ghosts," McCabe told the Globe. "Spirits are attracted to places they lived in. I think what attracts ghosts up here is that you don't tear down the buildings." Obviously, it should come as no surprise that one of the nation's oldest cities brims with spirits of those who lived and died during its hundreds of years of tumultuous history.

Apthorp House

Built in 1760, the clapboard Apthorp House — which predates the rest of Harvard's houses by several decades — is the main residence of Harvard's Adams House master, or a senior faculty member who presides over the upper-class dormitory. According to campus ghost lore, it's also home to the ghosts of Revolutionary War soldiers, among them British general John Burgoyne, who was imprisoned there during the war. Legend has it that Burgoyne's ghost still haunts the structure.

Apthorp House was one of the largest and most distinguished colonial residences in early Cambridge, surrounded by grounds that originally extended toward the Charles River. President and Harvard alum John Adams wrote that "a great house, at that time thought to be a splendid palace, was built by Mr. Apthorp at Cambridge." Its grandeur aroused suspicions among Cambridge's gossip mongers, who claimed that Christ Church's Reverend East Apthorp harbored a secret passion to become a bishop. The son of a British-born merchant, Apthorp fled to Britain in 1764 to avoid ridicule from the city's venom-spewing Congregationalists, who labeled his home "the Bishop's Palace."

After Apthorp escaped, John Borland purchased the house and added a third floor. However, his Tory leanings didn't sit well with the anti-Loyalist movement in the days leading up to the Revolutionary War in Cambridge, and he left the house in 1775. Burgoyne, who retreated with troops after losing the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, was held prisoner in the estate. However, he had to pay rent.

Apparently, his dislike of his less-than-stellar living arrangements carried over to the afterlife. "Legend has it that Burgoyne's ghost still haunts the house," confirmed the Adams House website. "Like many subsequent tenants in Cambridge, he complained bitterly about the lack of furnishings and the exorbitant rent he was forced to pay."

Harvard's Crimson newspaper, whose office is located directly across the street from Apthorp, alluded to the "fearsome phantoms" lurking in the 250-year-old house. "I hear them rumbling about all the time," said Hannah L. Bouldin, who lived in the attic in the 1980s and claimed that Apthorp's soldier spirits helped her finish her exam. Jana M. Kiely, a former co-master at Adams, added fire to the Burgoyne myth. "General Burgoyne is still complaining about the high rent of Harvard property and wants the university to do something about it," Kiely mused.

Matthew Swayne, author of America's Haunted Universities, suggested that Burgoyne's ghost is possibly a residual apparition. "Burgoyne's anger and frustration must have imprinted itself on the psychic fiber of Apthorp," he wrote.

Apthorp House, which is surrounded by three "Gold Coast" dormitories that were built around 1900 to offer luxury accommodations for Harvard's elite, is literally in the center of what is possibly the college's most haunted corridor. "One house in particular — Adams House — is rumored to have the most ghosts," claimed Swayne in his book. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who lived in Westmorly Court (now B-17) from 1900 to 1904, was a famous Adams House alum. Oddly, there's a mysterious death associated with Roosevelt's distant relative Stewart Douglas Robinson, who tragically fell from his room at Hampden Hall, which is currently home to the Harvard Book Store.

To add some "boo" to the house's ghost lore, a novel written in 2000 by alum Sean Desmond called Adams Fall talked about the dorm's "severe Gothic quality." In fact, the murder mystery used the house as a metaphor for the protagonist's mental demise and described, in detail, the spook factor surrounding the "stone monster" structure. "A resident of Adams house's reportedly haunted B-entry, he's familiar with tales of phantom footsteps, vanished laundry, lurking shadows," Desmond wrote. "But when he begins to find himself the object of the house's cruel attentions, his world quickly begins to unravel." In one scene, Desmond's protagonist asked if Adams's B-entry was, in fact, haunted. "I know it is," responded a fictional female student. "It feels damned ... The pipes make these weird noises. And sometimes there's the smell in the hallway and closets."

Oddly, there's a cryptic message circulating online alluding to the spirits of Adams House. "There's a ghost who lives underneath the dining hall in a crawl space," wrote an anonymous source. "If you have a tutor let you into the steam vents, you can hear her cry."

File under: haunted house

Hooper-Lee-Nichols House

If these walls could talk. Built in 1685 by Dr. Richard Hooper as a typical "first-period" farmhouse, the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House has seen its share of tragedy. "Some very grim things happened here," said Gavin W. Kleespies, executive director of the Cambridge Historical Society. "All of these houses on Tory Row are extremely old, and very bad things happened in all of them. As far as this house, it's pushing 330 years, and lots of people have died here," he said, giving a spirited tour of the second-oldest house in Cambridge. "Is it haunted? I don't know."

Kleespies, whose office is based in the historic Tory Row home, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the structure's tumultuous history. As far as ghost lore, however, he's quick to shoot down a rumor that has snowballed since the 1980s. According to the Harvard Crimson, "The Hooper-Lee-Nichols House on Brattle Street is said to be home to the ghosts of five Hessian mercenaries who fought in the Revolution. Legend has it they first appeared in 1915, when a library was built on the site of their graves. The Hessian quintet has been playing cards in the room ever since."

Fact? Kleespies said the Hessian legend is probably not historically accurate. "There's not a lot of truth to that story," he remarked. "There have been excavations to this site, and there are all sorts of myths that have been debunked. For example, people said that the house was a stop on the Underground Railroad. However, there's no evidence to support that claim."

The historian did point out a three-year period, from 1774 to 1777, when the house was vacated by noted British Loyalist judge Joseph Lee, who fled Tory Row days after the Powder Alarm, a precursor to the Revolution, when thousands of angry Patriots from surrounding towns prepared to march toward Boston for battle. However, Lee got out before the tumult. It seems that the September 1, 1774 alarm was a bit premature.

"Lee actually moved back in 1777 to reclaim his property, and unlike many of the houses in the area that were turned into quarters for the Convention Troops, his house was spared," Kleespies said, adding that it's unlikely that the German mercenaries, known as Hessians, were buried on the property. However, Kleespies said there's no concrete proof to contradict the claim. "It's possible because there were many officers who needed places to stay. But it was never recorded that Hessian soldiers actually stayed here," he said. "I mean, they could have stayed somewhere on Joseph Lee's property, but it's highly unlikely. The property was forty-five acres at the time, so it's inevitable that soldiers camped out somewhere near the house."

While Kleespies is quick to debunk the Hessian soldier myth, he does point out the macabre periods in the house's early years, especially after its original owner, Dr. Richard Hooper, died in 1691. "As far as the house being haunted, the American Revolution may be flashy, but the original owners have a very dark story," Kleespies continued. Hooper's wife, Elizabeth, took in boarders, and the property then began to fall into disrepair until her mysterious death in 1701.

"When Hooper died, he left a formidable estate. Within one year of his death, Hooper's wife fell on bad times and petitioned to be able to serve liquor. This is the 1690s, and by the time she passes, this house is just devastated. It's completely trashed," Kleespies said, adding that her dead body was found wrapped in a sheet. "There's a whole mystery about the house from 1701 to 1716. We don't know what happened. Are there any ghosts in the house from that period? Not sure. I wouldn't say that it was a house of ill repute, but it was definitely a house no one wanted to be associated with for fifteen years."

Fast-forward to the mid-nineteenth century, when the Nichols family moved into the Brattle Street estate. In 1850, George and Susan Nichols rented and began to renovate the house, installing a roof balustrade that was once part of Boston's St. Paul's Cathedral. One of the Nichols children married a Civil War officer, and her young daughter died tragically in the house. "It was the Fourth of July, and her daughter stepped on fireworks, got an infection and died," Kleespies said. "The Nichols daughter was devastated."

As far as residual energy lingering in the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House, Kleespies said he was convinced for years that the seventeenth-century structure was indeed haunted. In fact, Kleespies said he had a few close encounters in the early '90s. "I don't know if it was because I was a lot younger and impressionable, but if you asked me back then I would have said, without hesitation, that this place is definitely haunted," he said. "Creepy stuff happened. Doors opened and closed. Objects would mysteriously move to different locations. If you were here by yourself, you would hear noises."

Kleespies, who moved to Chicago to work on his master's, returned to the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House in 2008. Since his return, he hasn't encountered anything supernatural. "I'm here all the time — I'm even here Halloween at night — and nothing seems to bother me. Maybe the house is happier? It's hard to say."

However, the Hooper-Lee-Nichols's resident fellows, who sleep near the Cambridge Historical Society's archive, have approached Kleespies with creepy tales involving ghostly encounters. Kleespies's theory? Perhaps the spirits are attracted to the library's archives.

"One of our resident fellows would swear to this day that this house is haunted," Kleespies added. "Maybe it's the archives that's haunted? I don't know. We have a lot of stuff that meant a lot to many people who are no longer with us, like locks of hair, and if this place is haunted, it would be the archives. Maybe that's what's so scary."

File under: Tory woe

Longfellow House

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the American literary icon and professor famous for his rhythmic cadences in poems like "Paul Revere's Ride" and "The Village Blacksmith," moved to Cambridge in 1854 and set up home in the so-called haunted house where he both lived and died. Longfellow set up shop at the mid-Georgian mansion, known as the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House, which was built in 1759 by Major John Vassall, a wealthy Tory Row Loyalist.

Before Longfellow, George Washington lived there for ten months between July 1775 and April 1776 and used the building as his headquarters when he was leading the newly formed Continental army. For the record, Washington planned the Siege of Boston from the Tory Row house, and according to Hugh Howard's Houses of the Founding Fathers, Washington found the stellar view of the Charles River particularly useful. His maneuvering resulted in the evacuation of 120 ships carrying thousands of British soldiers and Loyalists back to England.

It's that view that initially attracted Longfellow to the historic Brattle Street estate. Elizabeth Craigie owned the house in the early 1800s and rented rooms out to Harvard students. Longfellow became one of was a full-bodied apparition of America's founding father. In April 1840, Longfellow watched the gardener's house in the back catch fire and burn down. Locals gathered to put out the blaze, and Longfellow shuddered in awe as he noticed something odd emerge from the smoke. "In the midst of it all, I saw slowly riding under the elms on the green in front of the house, a figure on horseback," he wrote in a letter. "It seemed like the ghost of Washington, directing the battle."

Longfellow's first wife, Mary Potter, died in 1835 following a miscarriage. He soon began courting Frances "Fanny" Appleton, the daughter of a wealthy Boston industrialist. He would walk over the Boston Bridge from Cambridge to the Appletons' home in Beacon Hill. In 1906, the bridge was renamed the Longfellow Bridge in honor of the late great poet.

After seven years of courting and dealing with "periods of neurotic depression," Longfellow received a letter from Appleton that would temporarily quell his anxiety. On May 10, 1843, Appleton agreed to marry Longfellow, and as a wedding gift from his wife's father, the two moved into the historic Vassall-Craigie House. Longfellow fathered six children with Appleton.

According to lore, their Tory Row estate was teeming with spirits. "The story that this house is haunted has been current for several generations," wrote Dorothy Dudley in Theatrum Majorum in 1875. Longfellow, skeptical of the ghost lore, would muse about an encounter he had coming home one night from the Dante Club. "When he crossed the garden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him," remembered William Dean Howells in The White Mr. Longfellow. "But he knew that the only way was to advance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, and was suddenly caught under the throat — by the clothesline — with a long nightgown on it." In other words, Longfellow had a logical explanation to debunk all the conjecture surrounding the spirits inhabiting his house.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7

Introduction 9

1 British Haunts 31

2 Colonial Haunts 45

3 Harvard Haunts 58

4 Holy Haunts 74

5 Landmark Haunts 86

6 Nightlife Haunts 97

Sources 109

About the Author 111