Haunted Colleges & Universities of Massachusetts by Renee Mallett

Author:Renee Mallett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

LESLEY UNIVERSITY

CAMBRIDGE

Online, in newspaper articles and in books, you can find lots of mentions of ghosts at Lesley University. The only problem is that actual details about the university’s hauntings are very hard to come by. Finding a student who will own up to experiencing a ghost on campus is even harder. But there’s a good reason why Lesley University’s Avon Hill buildings might feature a ghost or two and why they might just be so terrifying that no one wants to talk about them.

Today, Cambridge’s Avon Hill neighborhood sits in a desirable location, wedged between Harvard and Porter Squares. The addition of the Lesley University campus has added new life and color to this already vibrant area of Cambridge. But in the early days of the city of Cambridge, it sat on the outskirts of town and wasn’t really sought after by much of anyone. Because of a small hill of just about eighty feet that sat in this unused portion on the edge of the city that made it very visible to the surrounding area, it became the site of the city’s gallows.

Of course, the area instantly became known around Massachusetts as Gallows Hill. There’s no telling how many people met death on Gallows Hill during the nearly two hundred years it was put to that purpose. The most famous case to ever come to an end on Gallows Hill happened in 1755.

Two slaves, named Mark and Phillis, were found guilty of killing their master, a man named Captain John Codman. The murder was done using poison because Mark, who could read, had scoured the Bible looking for a way to complete the crime without inducing sin on himself or his co-conspirators. He had concluded that poison didn’t count as murder because no blood was shed. This belief might have been helped along by a long-standing rumor among Cambridge’s slave population that a Mr. Salmon, a notoriously cruel slave owner, had been poisoned to death by a slave without the crime ever being discovered by the authorities.

Mark and Phillis did not get off as easily as Mr. Salmon’s killer. They were quickly found guilty and sentenced to death. Mark was hanged on Gallows Hill before his body was moved to Charlestown to be left to decompose chained to a pole as a warning to any other slaves who might think of rebelling against their masters. Mark’s body would remain gibbeted in this way in Charlestown for twenty years and would become a grisly landmark of sorts. Paul Revere would even make note of Mark’s body in a letter he later wrote about his infamous midnight ride.

“After I had passed Charlestown Neck, and got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains, I saw two men on horseback under a tree,” Revere wrote in the letter.

It was an unusual punishment for the crime. Gibbeting was, as a general rule, a punishment more often used for pirates. Phillis, too, met an unlikely end for his part in the death of Captain John Codman.

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