For many people, a chill is a thrill. This is not a statement about the weather, but a statement regarding the fun that people find, when they find themselves frightened. Chilling tales are best heard when sitting around a campfire, on a cool autumn night. I discovered this during one trip I had taken to Boston. I was not around a campfire, however it was the season of autumn and I had left my Boston hotel room and went to a pub on the corner known for their clam chowder. As I was waiting for my soup to cool, and old man of about 80 sat down on the bar stool next to me and he began to talk. This was nothing new to me, from the bars on Coronado Island to the pubs of Soho in London, I talked to old people.
Over the years my friends have questioned this, as from the time I was old enough to get into bars, whom ever is the oldest person in the joint, was the one I ended up sharing stories with, and they for many years, had stories that were so much better than mine. I have just always been fascinated by the stories people tell, the stories of the life they have experienced, and Jasper–that night in Boston, had some very interesting and chilling stories. One was of the Boston Gallows. Jasper’s story began in the 1630′s, in what is now a public park of Beantown . Many people were hanged there, and he said that if I should take a walk through the part at midnight, they would tell me their tales. I was not about to do that, at all. For while this old man was telling tall tales, they were tales he believed, you could see it in his eyes.
I believed the tales too, that night. He then told me about a time he had visited with the Lady in Black, a woman known to haunt Georges Island in the middle of Boston Harbor. He said that over the years, the ghost of the woman had garnered a bad reputation, but the night he spoke with her, he just found her sad over the loss of her husband, a soldier of the Civil War. Ghosts, for Jasper, were not scary entities, they were and are, a glimpse into history, the history of his home town of Boston, and the histories of the human spirit. As I finished my bowl of soup, I considered all that he had told me, and while I would not be walking home through the Beantown Haunted Park that night, I knew that the next night, I would belly up to that bar, ordering another bowl of clam chowder, and looking for my old friend to return with more of his tall tales.
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Tags: Beantown Haunted Park, Boston hotel, Lady in Black