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King's Chapel Burying Ground is located
at Tremont and School Streets in Downtown Boston. The cemetery is the
final resting place of Puritan Governor John Winthrop, and of Patriot William Dawes
Jr. The graveyard dates back to the earliest days of the colony.
In about 1810, the Superintendent of Burials moved most of the headstones, and laid them out into neat rows. A few decades later, the
markers in the center of the graveyard were also moved. Respect for the dead was not
the highest priority for many years after the Revolution.
For those who believe in ghosts, one
can speculate that restless spirits remain at King's Chapel Burying Ground.
There are two legends associated
with the graveyard. The first story is that of an African American woman who died.
A careless carpenter built her coffin too short, and to conceal his blunder,
had severed the head of her body, and placed it between her legs to take up
less space. The coffin
was nailed shut, and she was buried this way.
The second story is about a man
that may have been buried alive (c.1820):
"Some old woman was certain, that a
person, lately buried, was not exactly dead. She gave utterance to this
certainty—there was no evidence, and ample room therefore for faith. The
defunct had a little property—it was a clear case, of course—[that] his
relatives had buried him alive, to get possession! A mob gathered, in King's
Chapel yard; and, to appease their righteous indignation, the grave was
opened, the body exposed, doctors examined, and the mob was respectfully
assured, that the man was dead—dead as a door nail. A proposition to bury
the old woman, in revenge, was rejected immediately. But she did not give up
the point—they never do. She admitted, that the party was dead, but
persisted, that his death was caused, by being buried alive."
Burying people alive by mistake
occurred
occasionally until modern times. The November 6, 1874 Boston Globe
describes such an event in Montreal: "A horrible case of a person being
buried alive has just come to light. A women who died suddenly was about
being re-interred in a Roman Catholic cemetery, last Friday, when a near
relative arrived from a distance and desired to see her face. On opening the
coffin, the body was found to have turned on its side. The woman in her
struggles had bitten her arm and torn the grave clothes. Her face bore the
expression of unutterable agony."
A local legend, invented here, is
that the headstones were originally moved to ward off the spirit of the
man that was buried alive. This ghost would appear in the shade among the
walkways; in the filtered shadows of small leaves that are prevalent in the
cemetery. These rolling shadows
resemble waves along the shore of a crystal-clear lake, when narrow
wave-tops reflect onto the sand below in shallow water.
Within these shadows existed a void;
a pocket without air that visitors walked into. Flicker Man roamed
the grounds each day. Shortness of breath was an indication that
one had crossed paths with the ghost.
The groundskeeper then decided to
move the headstone of this shimmering spirit. The intent was to confuse the
ghost—that he would be unable to find his grave when darkness fell—with the goal
that he would be compelled to depart for the hereafter.
The ghost did not depart, and other markers were moved in further
unsuccessful attempts.
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