Edgar Allan Poe had a love-hate relationship with his hometown. The author, who supposedly didn’t like Boston, was born in the Bay Village but died in Baltimore at age forty in October 1849. In the late 1980s a local enthusiast was dead set on marking the spot where “The Raven” poet got his start. Norman George, a Poe performance artist, decided to create a plaque to commemorate the gothic writer’s 180th birthday. The bronze tablet, made by Robert Shure from Woburn, was bolted to the building now occupied by the not-so-scary burrito joint Boloco, called “Poe-loco” by the locals, on the corner of Boylston Street and Charles Street South across from Boston Common.
In a People magazine story that chronicled the unveiling in 1989, the article referred to Poe as “Boston’s least favorite son.”
George, who recently passed, spilled to J.W. Ocker in Poe-Land that he wanted to honor his hometown hero. “When I was fourteen, my father took me down to Boston for a Boston University football game,” George told Ocker. “While we were there, we looked for Poe’s birthplace but just couldn’t find it.”
Poe tragically died in Baltimore, and the city seems to have claimed him as their own. Meanwhile, Boston has only recently embraced their “Poe-ness,” unveiling a memorial statue in October 2014, around the corner from his birthplace. The square has become a major attraction honoring the mastermind behind “The Raven” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. The offspring of two actors, the young Poe was sent to Virginia after his mother died and his father abandoned him.
He returned to the city of his birth in 1827 under financial duress. By the age of eighteen, Poe had amassed a considerable gambling debt. To raise funds and avoid his debt collectors, he joined the army under the fake name “Edgar A. Perry.” Because he was too young to enlist, Poe lied and said he was twenty-two years old. Much to his chagrin, the soon-to-be-author’s regiment was stationed at Fort Independence on South Boston’s Castle Island.
While he reportedly wasn’t happy with the homecoming, the Boston Harbor fort may have been inspiration for one of Poe’s most popular stories, according to Peter Muise, author of Legends and Lore of the North Shore.
“One day Poe noticed a gravestone in the fort’s cemetery for a Lt. Robert Massie, who had died on December 25, 1817,” Muise recalled. “After Poe commented on the misfortune of dying on a holiday, one of his fellow soldiers told him the tragic story behind Massie’s death.”
Massie was well-liked by his peers at Fort Independence. However, one of his fellow officers, Gustavus Drane, had it in for the new recruit. Drane, an expert swordsman, argued with Massie over a card game on Christmas Eve and challenged him to a duel, killing Massie on December 25, 1817. Yes, it was Christmas day.
“The enlisted men were outraged, and as they dug Massie’s grave they quietly plotted how to avenge his death,” continued Muise. “A few nights after the duel they put their plan into action. First, they invited Drane to come drink with them. Once he was heavily inebriated they led him to an unused alcove inside the fort and chained him inside. Finally they walled up the alcove with bricks, sealing Drane inside forever.”
According to lore, Poe was inspired by this real-life gruesome tale of revenge and the story was believed to be the basis for his 1846 classic “The Cask of Amontillado,” where a man takes revenge on his drunken friend over an insult and ultimately entombs him alive.
Ocker, however, said it’s highly unlikely that the poet drew inspiration from the story. “He was stationed on Castle Island and did enlist using a pseudonym in 1827. So, that part is true,” Ocker told me. “He got his start on Castle Island and published fifty copies of his first volume of poetry, Tamerlane, using a ‘by a Bostonian’ byline, but was he inspired to write “The Cask of the Amontillado” while serving on Castle Island? Probably not.”
In fact, there is even some debate about what really happened between Massie and Drane. “It does appear that Massie was actually killed by Drane,” said Muise, “but his killer was not entombed alive. Instead Drane avoided a court martial, moved to Philadelphia, and got married. He died in 1846 at the age of fifty-seven.” Massie’s remains were moved from Boston and reburied in Fort Devens.
While we may never know for sure what Poe’s inspiration for that story was, historians believe that Il Buco, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, may have also piqued Poe’s interest. The Bond Street eatery has a cavernous cellar that was frequented by the poet. The area was part of the city’s red-light district and the basement served as a saloon where alcohol, absinthe, and opium were served. Poe frequented the lower-level bar and exchanged letters with a young woman living on the third floor. Did Il Buco’s basement inspire any of Poe’s writing in 1846? It’s possible. Poe’s spirit supposedly haunts the underground space and employees claim to have seen the trailblazer’s apparition emptying bottles. If the nineteenth-century cellar dweller is still hanging out, perhaps his ghost can confirm the rumors? Nevermore.
A crew of Brown University archaeologists did find the remains of two charred human skeletons in the early 1900s. Also, folklorist Edward Rowe Snow claimed that a skeleton wearing a military uniform buried in the bowels of Fort Independence was found in 1905. In The Islands of Boston Harbor, Snow wrote that Castle Island was cursed. According to pre-Revolutionary War legend, an English gentleman lived on the island with his daughter. The daughter had two suitors: One was British and had been picked by her father and the other was a colonist. She was smitten with the American boy, and the British man, enraged, challenged his competition to a duel. The Brit won, killing the young local. In a true Romeo and Juliet twist, the girl is said to have committed suicide in response to her beloved’s death. “The British officer, heartbroken, rushed down to the dock and plunged into the channel, crying he would put a curse on all who ever came near the island,” wrote Snow. “Some sailors still believe that many shipwrecks near the Castle are to be blamed on this curse.”
Snow said Castle Island was known for its bizarre suicides, including a man who jumped to his death in 1903 and a Somerville man who shot himself in the head in one of Fort Independence’s casemates.
Castle Island is also known for its sea serpent sightings. “They were seen in 1819, 1839, and 1931,” added Muise. “There were a lot of sea serpent sightings off the North Shore, particularly in the nineteenth century, but sadly only a few have been seen in the harbor. Maybe it was just too busy or too polluted to sustain giant sea monsters?”
SALEM, MA—It’s arguably Salem’s crime of the century. The murder of Captain Joseph White, an eighty-two-year-old shipmaster and slave trader, riveted the nation in 1830 and inspired literary giants like Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The crime scene, a three-story brick mansion built in 1804 and located at 128 Essex Street, is believed to boast a residual haunting, a psychic imprint of sorts, replaying the savage murder of White, who was whacked over the head with a twenty-two-inch piece of refurbished hickory, also known as an “Indian club,” and stabbed thirteen times near his heart. According to several reports, a full-bodied apparition peeks out of the second-floor window. A female spirit rumored to be White’s niece, Mary Beckford, who served as his housekeeper in addition to being his next of kin, is also said to haunt the Essex Street house. Beckford’s daughter, also named Mary, was formerly part of the household in the 1820s, but moved to Wenham with her husband, Joseph Jenkins Knapp, Jr.
As far as the murder, it’s a complicated puzzle that has been twisted over the years. Captain White’s grand-nephew, Joe Knapp, learned that the retired merchant had just completed his will, leaving $15,000 to Mrs. Beckford. Knapp believed if White died without a will, his mother-in-law would inherit half his fortune of $200,000. So, Knapp and his brother John hired a black sheep from the respected Crowninshield family, Richard, to slay the captain in his sleep for a mere $1,000. Knapp had access to White’s Essex Street home, and in April 1830, he stole the will and left the back parlor window unlocked. Beckford and her daughter Mary were staying in Wenham.
Richard Crowninshield slipped into the mansion at night “entering the house, stealthily threaded the staircase, softly opened the chamber door of the sleeping old man.” He killed him with a single blow to the left temple, according to an account in the April 1830 edition of the Salem Observer. Crowninshield hid the murder weapons under the steps at the former Howard Street meetinghouse. The bludgeon, a hickory-stick club, was “fashioned to inflict a deadly blow with the least danger of breaking the skin. The handle was contrived as to yield a firm grasp to the hand.”
As far as the crime scene, White was in his bedchamber lying diagonally across the bed on his right side. Blood strangely didn’t ooze from the thirteen stab wounds because he died from the bludgeon and no valuables in the house were missing. Because there was no theft, police detectives were baffled at first. The Knapp brothers falsely claimed they had been robbed by three men en route to Wenham, which added some initial confusion to the murder mystery.
A gang of assassins in Salem? Yes, there were three, but it was the Knapp brothers and murder-for-hire crony Richard Crowninshield, who later hanged himself with a handkerchief tied to the bars of his prison cell before he was convicted. The Knapp brothers were then put on trial.
Daniel Webster, giving arguably one of his most famous legal orations, served as the Knapps’ prosecutor and called the affair “a most extraordinary case” and a “cool, calculating, money making murder.” The Knapp brothers, admitting they had planned the crime and fabricated the robbery story, were convicted. Meanwhile, it’s believed that Edgar Allan Poe was inspired by Webster’s speech and penned “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a classic short story involving the guilt and retribution associated with the grisly murder of an older man. Hawthorne was also entranced by the trial and explored similar themes in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.
Thousands gathered in downtown Salem to watch the public executions. John Francis Knapp was hanged on September 28, 1830, in front of a blood-soaked haunt from Salem’s past: the former Witch Gaol, or witch dungeon, currently located at 10 Federal Street. His brother Joe, considered to be the mastermind behind the crime, met a similar fate three months later in November. The infamous murder weapon, the custom-made “Indian club” that measures more than twenty-two inches, is owned by the Peabody Essex Museum. Unfortunately, the macabre artifact isn’t on display today, but visitors can tour the refurbished mansion.
Every major city has one: a murder house. Salem’s is the Gardner-Pingree House. And, yes, it’s supposedly haunted.
“There were two guys from Oregon who came here to debunk things and they captured on video what seems to be a man looking out of the window,” recalled Tim Maguire from the Salem Night Tour. “Of all of the places we visit, we get the most photographic evidence from the Gardner-Pingree House. I’ve been inside the house a few times and I feel more of a presence of a woman. There’s definitely a female presence there.”
During a Graveyard Getaways tour I organized for a small group of investigators and paranormal enthusiasts, our crew was able to go inside the Gardner-Pingree House after visiting nearby Howard Street Cemetery. The consensus, which aligned with Maguire’s observation, was that the structure had an intense, inexplicable energy.
“When I walked into that house it felt like a very inviting home,” explained investigator Nicole Hellested. “As the tour continued, I started to feel like I was being watched. When we made our way up to the second floor I was overwhelmed with heaviness. I felt uneasy when I walked into the bedroom where the murder took place. I stepped in and then immediately out. I had a feeling that I shouldn’t be in there and I needed to get out.”
When asked if she believed that the Gardner-Pingree mansion is haunted, Hellested said yes without hesitation. “The house has a horrifying history and I think the spirits there want to keep it safe and protected,” she added.
Russ Stiver, a veteran investigator and a sensitive to the paranormal, agreed with Hellested. “I almost had to leave the location because of the overwhelming energy present,” he said. “It wasn’t negative by any means, but very strong and protective over the house.”
Stiver said he experienced a fight-or-flight reaction as the group inched toward the scene of the crime. “I didn’t start to get anxious until I went to the second floor and toward the bedroom,” he recalled. “I felt dizzy, sick to my stomach, and disoriented.”
Brian Gerraughty, a skeptic among the group of investigators and sensitives, said he even felt strange on the second floor of the Gardner-Pingree House. “I didn’t feel any negative energy entering the house or on the first floor at all, but there was an innate sense of foreboding going up to the second floor and especially entering the bedroom,” he told me. “But I’m not a sensitive in any true respect.”
Psychic imprint from the past? Paranormal investigators such as Adam Berry from Kindred Spirits believe that residual energy associated with heinous crimes, specifically murders, has potential to leave a supernatural imprint. “Anytime there’s a traumatic event, it could be left behind,” Berry said. “If you walk into a room and two people have been arguing, fiercely, you can feel that weirdness that they’ve created or energy they emit spewing at each other. I do think there’s a form of energy that can be left behind from a traumatic event or any kind of murder or suicide in a room. The theory is that maybe that energy goes into the walls and lingers there.”
According to several reports, the historic murder repeats itself spectrally on the anniversary of Captain White’s death. There are also many sightings of a male phantom, believed to be White or possibly one of the Knapp brothers or even Richard Crowninshield, gazing out of the second floor of the Gardner-Pingree House as the living frolic up and down Essex Street. If the mansion’s male spirit truly has a calendar, his next scheduled appearance is April 6.
As for the city’s penchant for historical coincidences, the family home of White’s murderer, the Crowninshield-Bentley House, was literally moved next to the crime scene in 1959. Yep, the murderer’s house was placed next-door to the murder house. Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.