Central Burying Ground

Established in 1756 as Boston's fourth cemetery, primarily for the city's poorest citizens. During 1895 subway construction, about 900 additional bodies were discovered under Boylston Mall and reinterred in a mass grave here.

The Central Burying Ground was established in 1756 as Boston's fourth cemetery, created to alleviate overcrowding at King's Chapel, Copp's Hill, and Old Granary. It was considered the least desirable location because it stood farthest from the market center of town. Many of those buried here were poor, dying of sickness or hunger. British soldiers, revolutionaries who fought at Bunker Hill, and foreigners who perished while visiting Boston all found their way into this earth. While the cemetery holds at least five thousand burials, only 487 tombstones and 282 tombs remain.

The graves have been desecrated multiple times. In 1836, Mayor Samuel Armstrong extended Boylston Street, cutting into a corner of the graveyard and eliminating a row of tombs. The disturbed bodies were reburied in a long barrow called "The Dell," stacked on top of one another with no grave markings. In 1894, during construction of the first subway in the United States, workers digging tracks under Boylston uncovered nine hundred bodies of British soldiers who had perished during the occupation of Boston. These remains were reburied in a mass grave.

Perhaps the paranormal activity is due to the disrespect shown to the bodies buried below. At Central Burying Ground, the spirit of a woman in black mourning attire kneels at various unmarked graves, weeping for children lost to smallpox epidemics. Photographers consistently capture unexplained orbs, streaks of light, and misty figures in their images. Visitors report strange sounds, wandering ghostly figures, and silent glowing forms that follow people as they walk the dated paths.

The disruption of the cemetery connects to the haunting of the MBTA Green Line between Boylston and Arlington stations. "There are several reports of operators seeing British soldiers on the tracks on the T," said Dan Seeger of Haunted Boston Ghost Tours. The soldiers who died during the occupation, disturbed from their rest by the subway construction, may still patrol the tunnels where their bones were found.

Boston Common itself holds its own dark history. For nearly two hundred years, the Common served as a site for executions, complete with whipping post, gallows, and stocks. At least fifty Indigenous people were shot and hanged here for fighting to keep their land during King Philip's War, executed in the same place as common criminals. Rachel Wall, a pirate who admitted to piracy but claimed she never killed anyone, became the last woman hanged in Massachusetts, swinging from the branches of the Great Elm.

Central Burying Ground remains one of the most unsettling places in Boston—a repository of the forgotten dead, desecrated and disturbed, their spirits unable to rest.