In Brief
Burial Hill rises above Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Pilgrims raised their first fort. The most-told ghosts here aren't Pilgrims but the sailors of the General Arnold, who froze to death in a 1778 blizzard and lie in an unmarked mass grave.
The Full Story
On Burial Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the ghost the tour guides keep coming back to is a sea captain, walking the rows by an old marble obelisk, watching over a grave he asked to share. They say he is James Magee, and the men under him froze to death.
Magee commanded the privateer General Arnold, a brigantine carrying a crew of around 105. At dawn on December 26, 1778, the ship ran aground on White Flats in Plymouth Bay during a blizzard, close enough to the town to be seen from shore. Residents waited out the worst of the storm, then crossed the frozen harbor on foot to reach the wreck. They found much of the crew already dead in the rigging and on the deck, frozen where the cold had caught them. The accounts disagree on the count, but more than 70 men died, and they were buried together here in an unmarked mass grave. Some of those carried ashore alive did not survive the days after.
Magee himself lived. He went on to a long career as a merchant captain and died in 1801, and by his own wish he was buried with his crew, in the same ground. In 1862 a man named Stephen Gale, from Portland, Maine, paid for the marble obelisk that now marks the site.
The hill was something other than a graveyard first. The Pilgrims raised their earliest fort on this rise in 1621 and used the structure as both watchtower and meetinghouse; a final wooden fort went up here in February 1676, during King Philip's War, and was pulled down by 1679. Documented headstone burials begin only in the late 1600s, the oldest recorded one cut in 1681. Governor William Bradford lies somewhere on the slope, along with church elder William Brewster and other Mayflower passengers, their exact graves long since uncertain.
The sailors are not the only story people carry up the hill. A witch named Mother Crewe, the legend goes, cursed a man who had evicted her: "Make your peace, because you will not live to see another sunset. They'll dig your grave on Burial Hill." He was thrown from his horse the next day and buried here, the way she said he would be.
But it's the captain people watch for, pacing the obelisk after dark. More than 70 of his men went into the frozen ground beneath it, and the story says he has never finished keeping watch over them.
