HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

In honor of Halloween, I’m going to be sharing eight of my favorite Boston ghost stories this week. From haunted houses and inexplicable premonitions recorded by Cotton and Increase Mather in the years leading up to the Salem Witch hysteria, to Nathaniel Hawthorne encountering his friend in the reading room at the Athenaeum for weeks after the friend’s death, to the apparition that only seems to appear in Boston’s most venerable gay bar when only one person is there to see it, we’ll cover nearly four hundred years of paranormal claims. And if you’re wondering why parts of the recording aren’t up to our usual standards, it’s because I was recording this after midnight, and I fell asleep in the middle of recording multiple times.

Please check out the transcript and full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/208/

And support the show on Patreon.

• The haunted house in Increase Mather’s Remarkable Providences.
• A vision of a murdered brother in Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World.
• Benjamin Russell encounters a “ghost” at King’s Chapel Burying Ground.
• Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, my favorite Boston ghost story.
• Peter Rugg’s author fights a political duel.
• Peter Rugg is the subject of a Ghost Busters cartoon.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne encounters a friend at the Athenaeum.
• Our piece about the true story behind the Lady in Black originally aired as part of our show about the Confederate prisoners on Georges Island.
• Access to the Boston Globe archives seems to be broken, but you can read about the 1884 Mission Hill ghost on Celebrate Boston.
• A haunting at Jacques, which originally aired as part of our show about Boston’s first pride.

Wondering about the upcoming changes to the show? Check out this week’s bonus episode.

The Greater Boston Challenge is a fun little book full of challenges to test your knowledge about Boston. There are fun quizzes about local history, sports, crimes, neighborhoods, businesses, and other topics, with each topical chapter containing a 75 question quiz and a bonus crossword puzzle. You can test yourself against the book, or even better, challenge your friends to go head to head.

It was written by Gordon and Ann Mathieson, who also created a board game about Cape Cod. A Quincy native, Gordon has also written 11 volumes of mostly young adult fiction, most of which are set in the Boston area.

For the final Boston Book Club, we are also highlighting some other Boston history (and history-adjacent) podcasts.

• Revere House Radio
• The Channel Story
• Last Seen
• Old Dirty Boston
• Greater Boston
• Old North’s 99% Sure
• Fiasco season 3
• Revolution 250

This week’s event is a partnership between the History Project and Historic New England. On November 12, they’re teaming up to present a program called “Looking for the first gay American novel: A forgotten book by Sarah Orne Jewett.” You may recall hearing Sarah Orne Jewett’s name from our episode about so-called Boston marriages, where 19th century women engaged in long-term, deeply committed, monogamous relationships that may or may not have been sexual. Jewett and Annie Adams Fields lived together on Charles Street at the foot of Beacon Hill and hosted the most amazing, star spangled salon nights you can imagine.

The History Project is the premier New England organization cataloging and recording the LGBTQ History of Boston and beyond. Working with Historic New England, they’re turning to Sarah Orne Jewett in their search for the first “gay American novel.” Here’s the description from the Historic New England website:

The popularity of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1978-2014), and Hanya Yanagihara’s recent hit A Little Life (2015) indicates the profound connection people feel with LGBTQ+ fiction. But who authored the first gay American novel? Scholars have proposed origins for the tradition in Margaret Sweat’s Ethel’s Love-Life (1859) and Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend: A Tale of Pennsylvania (1870).

However, Professor Don James McLaughlin of the University of Tulsa makes the case in this virtual talk that A Marsh Island (1885), a little-known novel serialized in The Atlantic by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), is significant for being the first novel to explore major, now-familiar facets of a burgeoning modern gay American consciousness.

The talk will begin at 5pm on Thursday, November 12. Tickets will be priced on a sliding scale, starting at $25 and going down from there according to need.