In Brief
The Charlesgate, an 1891 apartment hotel in Boston's Back Bay, kept a ghost named Elsa for half a century — a child said to have fallen down the elevator shaft. Two colleges turned it into dorms, and students swore she haunted the halls. The real Elsa never died there.
The Full Story
The Charlesgate, an old apartment hotel at the corner of Beacon Street and Charlesgate East in Boston's Back Bay, kept a ghost named Elsa for the better part of a century. The story went that she was seven, the daughter of the man who designed the building, and that she chased a ball into the open elevator shaft and fell.
Her father, the architect, was said to have set a decorative tile bearing her likeness near the elevator, so she'd always be there. Students who lived in the building for decades reported her. One group swore she came to them over an Ouija board one night, spelling out "ha ha ha" over and over.
Here is the part the legend never mentioned. The architect was J. Pickering Putnam, who built the place in 1891 as a utopian cooperative inspired by a popular novel of the day, with a shared dining room and a central garden. He named the building for Charlesgate Park, the stretch of Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace where the Back Bay Fens meet the Charles River. And he did have a daughter named Elsa. She lived a full life and died in 1979. As Emerson College put it, plainly, when it went looking: "The daughter of J. Pickering Putnam did not die in the Charlesgate."
She never died there. And students reported her anyway.
Boston University ran the building as a women's dormitory from 1947 until the early 1970s. Emerson took it over for dorms from 1981 to 1995. Across both eras the accounts stayed the same: doors slamming after a burst of cold air, alarms going off at the same time each morning though no one had set them, music from machines that were unplugged, toilets flushing in empty stalls. Another figure turned up too, a Man in Black, seen lurking by the elevators, the one students were afraid to meet late at night.
There was one real death in the building, though it was never the one the legend told. In March 1908, a resident named Westwood Windram, a shoe-findings manufacturer who couldn't sleep, shot himself with a revolver while his wife sat in the next room. He was real, documented in the Boston Globe at the time. The falling child was not.
The building is condominiums now, 56 units, residential and quiet. The tile, the falling child, the father's grief, none of it happened. Elsa Putnam grew up and grew old somewhere far from here. But for fifty years, the people sharing her father's hallways kept reporting a little girl who, by every record, was alive the whole time.
