Latest / The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales / The Pumpkin Patch Burying Ground | King's Chapel, Boston MA

Transcript

The Pumpkin Patch Burying Ground | King's Chapel, Boston MA · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

• 0:13
  Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
• 0:16
  Kristin: I'm your host, Kristin.
• 0:18
  Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering King's Chapel Burying Ground, located in Boston, Massachusetts.
• 0:25
  Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
• 0:28
  Kristin: The gates stand open.
• 0:30
  Kristin: Step carefully.
• 0:31
  Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
• 0:34
  Kristin: November is a funny month.
• 0:36
  Kristin: Some people have already leapt headfirst into Christmas cheer.
• 0:39
  Kristin: Others, like myself, are clinging to the last golden threads of fall.
• 0:44
  Kristin: And somewhere in between the two sits Thanksgiving, squeezed into the middle like an afterthought.
• 0:50
  Kristin: Since this episode is releasing just a few days before the holiday, I wanted to take a moment before we descend into anything dark and historical to wish those who celebrate a wonderful Thanksgiving.
• 1:02
  Kristin: And to thank you, the listeners, for making the grim part of your day wherever you listen.
• 1:08
  Kristin: It's just me here and my poor husband, who serves as a reluctant quality control while I write, edit, and release these episodes each week.
• 1:16
  Kristin: Your lesson means more than you know.
• 1:18
  Kristin: But enough sediment.
• 1:20
  Kristin: Let's move on to what you're really here for: King's Chapel Burying Ground.
• 1:23
  Kristin: If you haven't walked the Freedom Trail in Boston, you might be wondering what King's Chapel even is.
• 1:29
  Kristin: I assure you, it's worth a stop if you're in town.
• 1:31
  Kristin: This is Boston's oldest and first burying ground.
• 1:35
  Kristin: It's wrought iron gates sheltering a patch of earth that predates the city itself.
• 1:39
  Kristin: Colonial headstones rise like crooked teeth, carved with skulls, crossbones, and winged's head.
• 1:46
  Kristin: For any lover of history or hauntings, it's an irresistible place.
• 1:51
  Kristin: Like many early graveyards, King's Chapel began with a single family plot carved out of necessity.
• 1:57
  Kristin: At its center was Isaac Johnson, whose dying wish was as strange as it was stubborn.
• 2:02
  Kristin: His wife, Lady Arabella, an aristocrat and sister to the Earl of Lincoln, survived the brutal Atlantic crossing only to die of scurvy at the raw edge of Salem.
• 2:12
  Kristin: Grifalo Johnson swiftly within weeks followed her into the earth.
• 2:17
  Kristin: Arabella was buried where she died in Salem, as was the custom in a colony too young and fragile to return its dead to their loved ones.
• 2:24
  Kristin: When death reached for him in 1630, the wealthy colonist, more devoted to his vegetable garden than to any earthly luxury, asked to be buried in his pumpkin patch.
• 2:34
  Kristin: The settlers honored his dying wish, laying him to rest in the soil he tended with such quiet devotion.
• 2:41
  Kristin: What remained of his estate, lonely land on the outskirts of a fragile Puritan settlement, became Boston's first field of the dead.
• 2:49
  Kristin: It held no name then, just the burying place, a patch of earth claimed by sorrow rather than design.
• 2:56
  Kristin: For thirty years it served as Boston's only cemetery, earning the nickname the land nobody wanted.
• 3:02
  Kristin: Graves appeared early and without order, scattered like fallen leaves across uneven soil.
• 3:08
  Kristin: There were no paths, no cemetery, no plan.
• 3:11
  Kristin: Only the blunt, inevitable truth of morality settling over Isaac Johnson's former garden.
• 3:17
  Kristin: Those earliest burials were marked with wood, fragile as the lives they honored, and every one of those markers has long since surrendered to rotten weather.
• 3:26
  Kristin: Only one stone from the earliest era still endures.
• 3:29
  Kristin: The marker of William Paddy, dated 1658, still standing, still watching, long after its neighbors dissolved back into the earth.
• 3:39
  Kristin: But the dead were not the only ones disturbed here.
• 3:42
  Kristin: Not all unrest in a graveyard comes from the wandering spirits.
• 3:46
  Kristin: Sometimes it's the living who bring the deepest disruption.
• 3:49
  Kristin: When Royal Governor Edmund Andros arrived in Boston, he brought with him a determination to anchor the Church of England in a community that crossed an ocean to escape it.
• 3:59
  Kristin: He searched for land on which to build an Anglican church, but no one, not a single soul, would sell to him.
• 4:06
  Kristin: The Baritans preferred the uncertain frontiers of the shadow of the Anglican crown, and what Andros would do next would change his burying ground forever.
• 4:14
  Kristin: So Andros did what most powerful men too often do.
• 4:17
  Kristin: He took what he wanted.
• 4:19
  Kristin: In 1686, he seized a corner of the Burying Ground by force, cutting into the sacred soil without permission or reverence.
• 4:27
  Kristin: Graves were disturbed, families were furious.
• 4:30
  Kristin: And from that moment on, Andros earned a place in local memory reserved for the most despised.
• 4:35
  Kristin: Still, though, he built his church.
• 4:37
  Kristin: King's Chapel rose from the stolen earth consecrated in 1688, and its blessings whispered over borrowed bones, and the old burying ground inherited its name.
• 4:48
  Kristin: And yet there's still an irony that lingers like a smirk in the shadows.
• 4:52
  Kristin: The cemetery has never belonged to the church.
• 4:56
  Kristin: The dead of King's Chapel rests on city land, untouched by Anglican authority, quietly defiant, as if reminding us that even in death, some boundaries are not so easily crossed.
• 5:07
  Kristin: By the early 1800s, Boston viewed its oldest graveyard, the way Victorians viewed old things, with a desire to tidy, polish, soften, and make death seem gentler than it ever truly is.
• 5:21
  Kristin: So the city improved the grounds.
• 5:23
  Kristin: They didn't disturb the bodies, only the stones that remembered them.
• 5:27
  Kristin: In the 1830s, workers gathered the headstones like puzzle pieces and arranged them into neat, polite rows.
• 5:33
  Kristin: They carved formal walkways through what had once been wild, intimate landscape of grief.
• 5:39
  Kristin: But beneath their boots, the dead remained exactly where they had always been.
• 5:43
  Kristin: Over 1,000 souls rest in this patch of less than a half an acre, yet only 505 headstones and 59 footstones remain to mark their presence.
• 6:21
  Kristin: Beneath the surface lie 78 tombs, though just 36 still bear a name, each stone a fragile echo of a life once lived.
• 6:30
  Kristin: Today this crowded, silent corner of the past stands protected on the Freedom Trail, honored as a National Historic Landmark, a place where history and hauntings walk side by side.
• 6:41
  Kristin: The cemetery is the resting place of Boston's earliest builders and patriots, men and women whose lives shape the city and nation.
• 6:50
  Kristin: John Winthorpe, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founder of Boston, lies in the Winthorpe family tomb near Tremont Street.
• 6:59
  Kristin: His legacy continued through his grandson, Major General Waite Still Winthorpe, who also rests here.
• 7:05
  Kristin: Waitstill is remembered for his role as one of the nine magistrates on the Court of Oil and Turmer during the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692.
• 7:15
  Kristin: Among the women of early Boston, Mary Chilton Winslow stands out.
• 7:20
  Kristin: She is believed to be the first woman to set foot on Plymouth Rock in 1620, and she rests in the Winslow tomb, a quiet witness to the city's earliest history.
• 7:30
  Kristin: The revolutionary era left its mark here as well.
• 7:33
  Kristin: William Dawes Jr., the other midnight writer who thundered down the land route through Cambridge while Revere took to the water, wrote hard to warn the Patriots that the British were marching toward Concord.
• 7:44
  Kristin: His marker still stands within King's Chapel, though his remains were quietly moved by descendants to Forest Hill Cemetery in 1882.
• 7:54
  Kristin: King's Chapel also cradles the mines that shape Boston's spiritual and literary heart.
• 7:59
  Kristin: John Cotton, the influential Puritan theologian and grandfather of Cotton Mather, the same Mather woven into the shadowed stories of the Salem witch trials rests here beneath ancient stones.
• 8:10
  Kristin: Widow Margaret Thatcher, wife of Reverend Thomas Thatcher, lies here as well.
• 8:15
  Kristin: She lived through the fevered tension of 1692, accused of witchcraft but never rested.
• 8:22
  Kristin: Standing at that uneasy crossroads of fear and faith, she carried a story that brushed close to Salem.
• 8:29
  Kristin: She was the mother-in-law of Magistrate Jonathan Corwin.
• 8:32
  Kristin: Her grave has slipped from the visible record, its inscription faded or buried deep beneath the centuries of shifting soil.
• 8:39
  Kristin: But her presence lingers here in the history of the cemetery.
• 8:43
  Kristin: And then there's William Emerson, father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, linking this small ancient burying ground to the generations of American philosophy.
• 8:52
  Kristin: Not all voices from these graves were quiet in life as they are now.
• 8:56
  Kristin: Thomas Brattle, a wealthy Boston merchant, became one of the boldest critics of the Salem Witch trials in his time.
• 9:03
  Kristin: On October 8th, 1692, he wrote a blistering letter, condemning the use of spectral evidence and challenging the Puritan establishment with calm reason dissent.
• 9:14
  Kristin: His words still echo as a reminder that consciousness can cut through even the darkest moments of hysteria.
• 9:21
  Kristin: The cemetery also holds those who shape Boston in a quieter but lasting way.
• 9:26
  Kristin: Heckesiah Usher, the city's first bookseller, Lady Anne-Marie Craven Andros, wife of the much-hated royal governor Edmund Andros, Frederick Tudor, the ingenious Ice King, who built a frozen water empire, and James Lloyd, a U.S.
• 9:43
  Kristin: senator who died in 1831.
• 9:45
  Kristin: But perhaps its biggest claim, besides its ghosts, is written in fiction.
• 9:50
  Kristin: Elizabeth Payne lies here beneath a carved headstone that may have inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.
• 9:57
  Kristin: Hawthorne wrote of Hester Prynn's grave.
• 10:00
  Kristin: After many, many years, a new grave was delved near an old sunken one, and that burial ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built.
• 10:09
  Kristin: Payne's inscription reads simple: Here lies the body of Elizabeth Payne, wife to Samuel Payne.
• 10:15
  Kristin: Historians speculate that she, or perhaps another woman buried nearby, became the model for Hester Prim, accused of adultery, forever entwining King's Chapel with Boston's literary imagination.
• 10:28
  Kristin: At the front of the burying ground stands what many call Boston's most beautiful and haunting gravestone, the marker of Joseph Tapping.
• 10:36
  Kristin: Carved with meticulous care, this stone depicts a chilling yet poetic scene.
• 10:40
  Kristin: Death a skeletal figure reaches to extinguish a single flickering candle, while Father Time leans in, desperately trying to keep its flame alive.
• 10:50
  Kristin: It's a quiet eternal struggle etched in stone, life against death, light against shadow, the fleeting nature of time made permanent.
• 10:59
  Kristin: Here the message is very clear: Memento mori, a reminder that every spark of life is precious, fragile, and inevitably claimed by the darkness.
• 11:09
  Kristin: With all the history within, the grounds are no stranger to ghosts or lingering tales.
• 11:14
  Kristin: Perhaps the most chilling tale told here is that of the headless Madame.
• 11:18
  Kristin: An African-American woman long ago was set to be interred within the cemetery.
• 11:23
  Kristin: The carpenter who built her coffin, though, miscalculated its size.
• 11:27
  Kristin: It was far too short.
• 11:29
  Kristin: Rather than craft a proper coffin, the mortician made a grim decision.
• 11:33
  Kristin: Her head was severed and placed between her legs so she could fit.
• 11:37
  Kristin: According to legend, this desecration interrupted her passage to the afterlife.
• 11:41
  Kristin: An energy that lingers as a stark reminder of the indignity suffered by marginalized people, even in death.
• 12:02
  Kristin: Another haunting tied to this cemetery reaches back to one of the 19th century's most chilling fears, the terror of being buried alive.
• 12:11
  Kristin: In an age where medicine often struggled to distinguish deep comas or catalepsy from death itself, stories spread of coffins open to reveal scratch marks on the lids, and bodies twisted in impossible positions.
• 12:24
  Kristin: Grim evidence that some unfortunate souls had awakened beneath the earth.
• 12:28
  Kristin: At King's Chapel, local lore tells of an elderly woman who became convinced her relative had suffered that fate.
• 12:36
  Kristin: She insisted he had been buried alive, not out of love or grief.
• 12:40
  Kristin: But as the story goes to seize his property, her accusations caused a crowd to gather in the yard.
• 12:46
  Kristin: Doctors opened the grave to prove the man was, as an onlooker put, dead as a doornail, but the woman refused to yield, swearing he had awakened only to suffocate in the dark.
• 12:57
  Kristin: Even now, some visitors claim the earth still remembers.
• 13:00
  Kristin: They describe sudden waves of claustrophobia, a tightness in the chest, or a brief breath-stealing panic in certain corners of the burying ground.
• 13:09
  Kristin: A few even speak of faint scratching from beneath the soil, as not the old fear hasn't quite settled.
• 13:15
  Kristin: Perhaps the most controversial and most certainly untrue legend that tied to King's Chapel is the tale of Captain William Kid, the notorious pirate, kid who ironically spent much of his career hunting pirates for the British Crown, was tried for piracy and hanged in 1701.
• 13:32
  Kristin: Over the centuries, whispers claim that his body somehow made its way back to Boston and found a secret resting place here, in King's Chapel.
• 13:41
  Kristin: It's the kind of story that refuses to die, even when history disagrees with it.
• 13:46
  Kristin: And that story, though, comes with a ritual, one that some visitors still dare to try to this day.
• 13:51
  Kristin: On a dark moon, you're meant to tap a headstone three times and whisper, Captain Kid, Captain Kid, for what were you hanged?
• 14:00
  Kristin: Local lore insists that if the captain is listening, he may just answer.
• 14:04
  Kristin: Some claim to hear faint voices drifting through the stones, or a glimpse of brief wavering figure at the edge of their vision.
• 14:12
  Kristin: Others describe a sudden chill, or the sense of a watchful presence lingering just behind them, as though the pirate keeps at the shadows, unseen but not entirely gone.
• 14:23
  Kristin: As we mentioned earlier in the episode, the headstones of King's Chapel didn't always stand in those tidy, orderly rows.
• 14:30
  Kristin: In 1810 and again in 1830, they were shifted and rearranged to tame the grounds into something neat and symmetrical, but the bodies beneath were never moved.
• 14:40
  Kristin: The stones changed places, the dead did not.
• 14:44
  Kristin: Local legend says that this quiet upheaval unsettled the spirits, leaving them wandering through the yard in search of the markers that once bore their names.
• 14:53
  Kristin: A simple act of tidying became, in the old stories, a kind of spiritual disorientation, a cemetery whose map no longer matched the souls within it.
• 15:02
  Kristin: Angering or creating a shift where spirits are restlessly lost.
• 15:07
  Kristin: Physical sensations are common, ice-cold spots on otherwise warm days, invisible hands brushing or grabbing, sudden chills, and overwhelming feelings of dread.
• 15:35
  Kristin: Among the more curious apparitions is the little girl in white, a young figure in a tattered dress who appears to watch visitors, following them silently through the graves, sometimes reaching out with cold, tiny hands.
• 15:48
  Kristin: Her identity is unknown, perhaps a child lost during colonial times.
• 15:53
  Kristin: Another hot spot is the stranger's tomb on the grounds, an unmarked grave where spirit activity is particularly strong.
• 16:00
  Kristin: Figures have been seen emerging from this area at dusk, vanishing into the shadows, leaving visitors with a lingering sense of unease long after they've departed.
• 16:10
  Kristin: King's Chapel Burying Ground remains very much alive, according to many who visited.
• 16:16
  Kristin: The life here is quieter, measured in footsteps, whispers, and the occasional creak of old stones.
• 16:22
  Kristin: It's open daily to the public from morning until late afternoon.
• 16:26
  Kristin: The cemetery is free to wander, managed carefully by Boston's Historic Burying Grounds Initiative, within the Parks and Recreation Department.
• 16:34
  Kristin: It's a major stop on the Freedom Trail, drawing history buffs, ghost hunters, and skeptics alike.
• 16:41
  Kristin: Tours invite visitors to peer beyond the surface.
• 16:44
  Kristin: The Bells and Bones Tour offers exclusive guided access to King's Chapel, including the 18th-century crypt beneath the chapel, holding 21 tombs, and the famous 1816 church bell built by Paul Revere.
• 16:58
  Kristin: Available during Harbor Fests, these tours blend history with the eerie ambiance that permeates the grounds.
• 17:05
  Kristin: Multiple companies, Ghost City Tours, Ghost and Gravestones Boston, and U.S.
• 17:10
  Kristin: Ghost Adventures offer haunted cemetery tours, each weaving stories of the wandering dead and restless spirits.
• 17:17
  Kristin: Paranormal investigators regularly conduct EVP and EMF sessions, seeking voices and energies that refuse to remain silent.
• 17:26
  Kristin: King's Chapel is also firmly tied to the Freedom Trail, a two and a half mile journey through Boston's historic heart.
• 17:32
  Kristin: Though Greenery Burying Ground boosts more infamous names like Paul Revere, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams, King's Chapel is widely regarded as the more actively haunted of the colonial cemeteries.
• 17:43
  Kristin: In 2011, the cemetery underwent careful restoration by the Walker Cleosing Design Group.
• 17:50
  Kristin: Trees were pruned, signs replaced, headstones reset again, and cobblestone walking paths were added.
• 17:57
  Kristin: Yet some say that disturbing the grounds even in these small ways only stirred the spirits anew, renewing the spirits and energy that has always lingered here.
• 18:06
  Kristin: The cemetery has long inspired storytellers, historians, and the curious.
• 18:11
  Kristin: It's appeared in countless paranormal television shows and documentaries, and its tales of injustice, tragedy, and the supernatural have left a mark on literature.
• 18:21
  Kristin: Today the ground serves as a symbol of colonial Boston and in the thin veil between history and haunting.
• 18:28
  Kristin: A beloved pumpkin patch filled with graves, ghosts, and possibly a pirate.
• 18:33
  Kristin: For now, the stories of King's Chapel slip back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
• 18:39
  Kristin: Yet they're never silent for long.
• 18:42
  Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil into King's Chapel burying ground, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
• 18:49
  Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.