In Brief
King's Chapel Burying Ground in Boston is the oldest cemetery in the city. Around 1810 a superintendent straightened the headstones into tidy rows without moving the dead beneath them — and the story goes that the spirits, cut off from their graves, have wandered ever since.
The Full Story
King's Chapel Burying Ground sits on Tremont Street in Boston, the oldest cemetery in the city, and the haunting here begins with a man who tidied it. Around 1810 a superintendent rearranged the headstones into neat rows and columns. He did not move the bodies beneath them.
The stones and the dead they marked were separated that day, and never matched up again. A Boston writer named Nathaniel Bowditch put the act on the record in 1855. Ever since, the way it's told, the spirits have been confused, "and have ever since endlessly wandered" — searching the rows for graves that no longer line up with their names.
This was Boston's first burying ground, established in 1630, and for about thirty years its only one. By custom the first person laid here was Isaac Johnson, who owned the land and died the same year. Over the next two centuries it filled past capacity, then changed again: in 1686 the Anglicans, unable to get land anywhere else, took a corner of the Puritan dead to raise King's Chapel itself. A church went up on the graveyard. The granite chapel still standing was built around the older wooden one in 1749 so the services would never stop.
The names underneath read like a roll call. John Winthrop, the colony's first governor, lies somewhere in it. So does Mary Chilton, said to be the first woman ashore from the Mayflower, and Reverend John Cotton, and Hezekiah Usher, the colonies' first bookseller. So does Elizabeth Pain, a woman fined and sentenced to lashes in colonial Boston after the death of her child out of wedlock, cleared of murder but punished for negligence. Her gravestone is, by old tradition, the apocryphal model for Hester Prynne's in The Scarlet Letter.
Then there is the Headless Woman. The story goes that gravediggers built her coffin too small, so they cut off her head to make the body fit. Her name is lost. Visitors say she walks the grounds at night, mournful, looking for it.
Boston Ghosts and the tour companies report the rest: shadows between the stones, orbs and flashes in photographs, the sense of being watched. Near the chapel some say they've heard a bell ring at night, tied to a man who once feared being buried alive — when the bell sounded, the story goes, they opened his grave and found him dead with bloody fingers, having clawed at the lid.
What's certain is the math. 505 headstones and 59 footstones still stand here. More than 1,000 people are buried underneath. The numbers have never agreed, and after 1810 there's no way to make them. Whoever you're standing over, the stone above you is almost certainly telling you the wrong name.
