Boston has a ghost who checks on hotel guests, another who keeps reading after death and a baseball curse that required an entire postseason to get rid of. Our supernatural residents apparently have responsibilities.
These four Boston legends have something better than an anonymous online sighting behind them: a story you can trace to a book, an institution or the people who keep telling it. That doesn’t make the ghosts real. It does make the tales worth passing along, with the history and the haunting kept separate.
Boston legends at the Parker House
Harvey Parker founded the Parker House in 1855. According to the hotel’s ghost stories, he never entirely stopped looking after it.
Omni’s account of the hotel’s hauntings includes a story from longtime bellman John Brehm, who said he had heard about Parker’s ghost when he started working there in 1941. One guest reportedly saw an older man with a dark mustache outside a tenth-floor room before the figure disappeared.
It is a remarkably polite haunting. Instead of chasing visitors out, the founder supposedly takes an interest in how they are getting along. The hotel has repeated the story as part of its own lore, which is different from providing evidence of a supernatural visit.
Parker’s documented guests are interesting enough without adding apparitions. The hotel’s historical account records the Saturday Club, whose members included Emerson, Hawthorne and Longfellow. A room full of those personalities hardly needed a ghost to become memorable.
The Lady in Black at Fort Warren
Fort Warren on Georges Island held Confederate prisoners during the Civil War. Its best-known legend concerns a woman who supposedly tried to break her husband out.
In the version told by the Boston Harbor Islands Partnership, Melanie Lanier arrives in disguise, carrying a pistol. The escape fails, her husband is killed and she is sentenced to hang. She asks to die in women’s clothing, and black robes are found for her. The story leaves her wandering the fort in those robes.
The failed rescue and execution belong to the legend. The fort’s military and prison history does not depend on them. Visitors can see the stone corridors and defensive structures without treating every ghost-tour detail as a Civil War record.
If you want to hear the tale where it is set, consult the island’s visitor information and ferry schedule before planning a trip. A good ghost story is no reason to assume a boat is running.
The Athenaeum reader who missed his own death
Nathaniel Hawthorne supplied Boston with a haunting suited to a library. In his account, the Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris continued appearing in the reading room after he had died.
The Athenaeum’s history of the Harris family recounts Hawthorne’s story of seeing the minister in 1842, apparently reading his own obituary. Hawthorne hesitated to speak because they had never been introduced. Death was one complication; manners were another.
Hawthorne later wrote the anecdote down for a friend. It was published after his own death, in 1900. The setting was the library’s earlier home on Pearl Street, rather than its present address on Beacon Street.
The Boston Athenaeum says the ghost did not accompany the library when it moved, although a portrait of Harris did. A visitor looking for him today has a much better chance with the painting.
The Curse of the Bambino
Boston’s most widely shared haunting had a scoreboard. The Curse of the Bambino blamed the Red Sox’s long championship drought on the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees. It gave generations of disappointment a single explanation, however little an actual baseball game needed one.
The wait was real: Boston went from its 1918 World Series title to 2004 without another. The Society for American Baseball Research’s account of the clinching game records the ending. After recovering from a three-games-to-none deficit against the Yankees, the Red Sox swept the Cardinals.
On October 27, 2004, Boston won the final game 3–0. Keith Foulke fielded Edgar Rentería’s ground ball and threw to first. No ritual required. Just the last out.
