Dreadful Places

by Aaron Mahnke

  In the southwestern corner of Illinois is a city on the edge of the Mississippi. Now, it’s easy to limit the history of a place to our American experience, but Illinois is older than that. In fact, the entire area from the Arkansas River up to Green Bay was once controlled by the French. They explored the region in 1673, and then claimed it for the French crown shortly after.

  They called it Upper Louisiana, and sometimes Illinois Country. Most of the settlers who moved into the area were French Canadians from the north, and the biggest draw for them, across this whole stretch of new territory, was fur trapping. The upper Mississippi valley was apparently a gold mine for trappers and hunters, and so they moved south to chase their fortunes.

  They built six major settlements along the eastern edge of modern-day Illinois. One of those was established near a tribe of Native Americans who took their name from a small tributary that joined the larger Mississippi. There were a lot of variants—white Europeans were rarely ever good at taking a Native American name and carrying it over to French or English in a consistent way—but everyone there began to call the place Kaskaskia.

  Before we move on, though, let me briefly explain the geography of this area. You see, Kaskaskia was a settlement built right on the tip of a small peninsula that stuck out into the Mississippi River. To the east, you could walk deeper into the Illinois territory. Looking west from the town would give you a spectacular view across the great river. That was the territory now known as the state of Missouri. Kaskaskia, in a lot of ways, was a place caught in between.

  And not just geographically. On a social level, the settlement was a mixture of French Canadian fur trappers, Jesuit missionaries, and local Native Americans. The Jesuits brought the structure, the trappers brought the economy, and the indigenous people brought…well…they’d already been there. And as with so many other stories about the early days of this country, that meant the Native Americans weren’t going to get a fair shake.

  One story clearly highlights this disparity. In 1698, about twenty-five years after the settlement was founded, a Frenchman named Jean Benard immigrated to Kaskaskia, along with his wife and daughter, Marie. Like a lot of the people who moved there, Benard was a fur trader, and the abundant resources of the area promised to make him a wealthy man.

  He set up his trading post on the edge of town, where it would be easily accessible to the trappers moving up and down the western edge of Illinois. They brought in the fur, he purchased it from them, and then he sold it to buyers outside the wild frontier. It was simple and lucrative, and before long, he had a thriving business.

  As the trading post grew, Benard brought on more help. It was common in those days of Kaskaskia for European business owners to hire local Native Americans to do the manual labor, and that was how one man in particular came to work for the Frenchman.

  History doesn’t remember his name, but the tale does describe how Jean Benard mistreated the man. He was cruel and unfair toward him, and always gave the worst of the labor to him and the other Native Americans who worked in the shop. But this man was different from most of the other Kaskaskians in the region.

  It seems that the Jesuits had worked with his family decades before, and he himself was raised to speak both his native tongue and French, which made him a valuable helper. Benard took a liking to the young man, and they formed a good working relationship as a result.

  But Jean Benard wasn’t the only person to take a liking to the Kaskaskian. Apparently his daughter, Marie, fell in love with the man, something that her father was strongly opposed to. The legend says that he fired the young Native American, and then spread word around town that he wasn’t to be hired by any of the other businesses. His goal was to drive the man to leave town in search of a job, and it apparently worked.

  Marie, of course, was brokenhearted, but there was nothing she could do. And then, a year later, a group of traders rode into town, and among them was her lost lover. He’d returned to claim her hand and take her away, to end their separation and build a new life together elsewhere. Somehow he managed to pass a message to her, and they arranged to meet in secret later that night. Once together, the couple left town, disappearing up the great Mississippi.

  It’s never that simple, though. Yes, they had a head start, and yes, they had love on their side. But Marie’s father wouldn’t be defied so easily.

  DROWNED

  The moment he learned of his daughter’s escape, Benard gathered together a large group of men, and they rode out of town to hunt the couple down. I don’t know how they knew to ride north, but that’s what they did. Maybe they assumed her lover was looking for work in one of the bigger settlements. Maybe they knew he had friends or family north of Kaskaskia. Whatever their reason was, they followed the Mississippi northward.

  It would have taken them hours, but eventually they tracked the young lovers down just outside of Cahokia. The town of Cahokia was another ancient Native American settlement that had become the site of a French outpost. Like Kaskaskia, it was home to a mix of French Canadians and Native Americans, and that made it a good hiding place for a couple like Marie and her true love.

  When Benard’s group found them, they immediately separated the couple. Marie was kept safe and watched over while the man she loved was beaten and bound with rope. They dragged him to the very edge of the river, and then began searching for a large branch or a fallen tree that they could manage. When they found one, they hauled it toward their prisoner.

  The young man was tied to the log with yet more rope. We know he spoke French, and so did Benard and his men, so there was probably a lot of conversation. It’s likely that he begged for his life, begged for Marie, begged for freedom. But the wrath of an angry father isn’t something words can sway. Not for Jean Benard, at least. So the work continued.

  When they were satisfied with their knots, the men pushed the log into the dark waters of the river. I imagine them wading out a bit, pushing it along, making sure it made it past all the debris and vegetation growing along the bank there. And then they let go, and watched as the young man drifted downriver with the current.

  We don’t know if Benard made his daughter watch it all. We don’t know if she was whisked away back to Kaskaskia before she could see it all unfold. But we do know that the man she loved shouted out from the river as he drifted away. His words, they say, carried a powerful curse.

  Benard would be dead within a year, he claimed, and he and Marie would be reunited forever. And then he added that the town of Kaskaskia itself would suffer. The French there would be destroyed, and even the dead would find no rest in their graves.

  Later that year, Jean Benard got caught up in a bad business deal. He accused another man of cheating him and challenged him to a duel. Benard lost the duel and his life. Later that year, Marie herself died. They say she wasted away from a broken heart, but her death allowed her to reunite with her lover, and nothing would ever keep them apart again.

  By the 1740s, the British were making moves to take over the territory controlled by the French. They bribed a number of neighboring Native American tribes to join them in a war against the settlers there, and by 1765, the French were run out of town. It seems Marie’s true love was right about more than a few things.

  Kaskaskia did its best to persevere, though. After the American Revolution, it became the capital of the Northwest Territory, and then in 1818 it became the first capital of the state of Illinois. But that only lasted for about a year. All along, the town kept growing, and by the mid-1800s it was home to roughly seven thousand people.

  And then the Mississippi River got involved. In 1844, a flood nearly wiped the town off the map, and very few of the citizens stayed to rebuild. Instead, they went looking for a safer place to live. The Mississippi has always flooded. It still does. And that’s made life difficult for anyone who lives along its banks. After 1844, a lot few
er people in Kaskaskia were willing to take that risk.

  In the years that followed, the great river did something extraordinary: it moved. Slowly, it began to change course, shifting to pass by the town on the eastern side, rather than to the west. What was once a peninsula was slowly becoming an island instead, and after another major flood in 1881, the shift was complete.

  Today, Kaskaskia is on the western shore of the Mississippi. Thanks to an act of Congress, it’s a little pocket of Illinois on the edge of Missouri. Not that most people would notice, though. By 1950, there were only 112 people left to call the place their home.

  WASHED AWAY

  I think there are a couple of indisputable facts buried in these stories that we would be wrong to ignore. First, people love to curse their own town, or the town of their enemies, or whatever town they had a bad day in. We like to blame others for our own misfortune, or tell stories that explain away our bad luck and tragedy. It can’t be our own fault, after all, so maybe the town itself is to blame, right?

  Second, no place is safe from tragedy. At some point, whether it takes decades or centuries, every location is going to experience its own fair share of loss and misfortune. Fires. Floods. Natural disasters or human error. No matter what the cause is, every location will eventually receive a visit from adversity.

  On their own, these are both sad truths. Together, though, they create a new world. One where cities are cursed, and the tragedies they experience are rooted in supernatural causes. Oftentimes the easiest thing to believe is also the most irrational.

  Still, some locations do seem to have an unusual amount of tragedy heaped upon them, Kaskaskia being a prime example. And it didn’t end in 1950. Even after that flood, the remaining citizens rebuilt the old Jesuit church and tried to move on. That’s all they could do, I suppose. Still, they had to wonder.

  And then, on April 4, 1973, the Mississippi rose nearly forty feet above normal levels. The north levees broke and the river rushed in, threatening much of the town. Hundreds of college students from nearby Southern Illinois University, along with residents of the mainland and dozens of prison inmates, all gathered there to lay sandbags and fight the flood as best as they could. But it was no use.

  The new church and most of the town around it were washed away. And that includes the cemetery. Local legend says that the flood of 1973 caused a number of graves to burst open, washing hundreds of caskets—along with their occupants—into the depths of the river.

  The dead, just as Marie’s lover had predicted, had risen from their graves.

  IN 1897, BOSTON opened the Tremont Street Subway. It was a pioneer, setting the stage for the future of underground public transit. And as crazy as it might seem, it’s still in use today, making it the oldest subway tunnel in North America, and the third-oldest in the world. Not too shabby for a dark hole in the ground.

  It isn’t a long tunnel system, but it helped people traveling around Boston Common, the massive public park in the middle of the city. Grab a map sometime, find the Common, and then trace your finger around the southeastern “chin” of the park where Boylston and Tremont Streets intersect. That’s where the tunnel passes through.

  Two years before it opened to the public, though, workers were digging furiously beneath that corner when they ran into something unexpected: skeletons. Hundreds and hundreds of human skeletons. Over nine hundred, in fact, and all of them right smack in the middle of their path.

  Since the 1720s, thousands of people had been buried in what would later become known as the Central Burying Ground. But when Boylston Street was extended past there in 1836, the city engineers ran it right over a section of the graves. It’s more than ironic, really: the Burying Ground, or at least part of it, got buried. After the skeletons were discovered in 1895, they were all moved to a mass grave, which is still nearby today.

  This is what happens in old cities. When people have lived and died in one place for so long, things have a tendency to get buried and lost to time. Bodies, for sure, but also the lives those bodies represent. We end up burying our pain, our tragedy, our loss. And all those hidden memories have a way of popping back up when we least expect it.

  Boston is one of those old cities. I know it’s young by European standards, but it’s one of the oldest in America. And all that age comes with a rich history. One that’s full of conflict, and tragedy, and pain. Pain, some say, that can still be felt today.

  LOW-HANGING FRUIT

  The city of Boston probably requires no introduction. It’s central to so many of the early ideas and emotions that fueled the birth of America, and it’s one of the key stages upon which that conflict was played out. Boston was—and still is—an epicenter for rebellious spirit.

  Most of us know it was the setting for the Boston Tea Party in 1773, which wasn’t really a party, by the way. Three years before that, there was the Boston Massacre, which was really a massacre. These are well-known events with their own touch of darkness. But Boston’s history is even darker than that.

  Boston Common, that giant public park in the middle of the city that I mentioned earlier, is a good example. Sure, locals still used it for cattle grazing all the way up to 1830, but long before that, the Common was the popular place to execute criminals. Although criminals might be a misleading term. They hanged a good number of pirates and thieves, true, but they also killed Quakers for trespassing, and suspected witches for heresy.

  And if tragedy leaves a painful shadow on a city, Boston has some dark spots. The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 is exactly what it sounds like. A company called Purity Distilling had a massive steel tank that contained 2.3 million gallons of molasses, which they used to make rum. In January 1919, that tank burst.

  A wave of syrup twenty-five feet high rushed through the streets at thirty-five miles an hour. Buildings were pushed off their foundations. Children were swept away from their parents. At least twenty-one people were killed. Locals say that on hot summer days you can still smell the molasses. Simple chemistry, or the ghost of a tragic past reasserting itself?

  There are other echoes, too. Back in the Central Burying Ground above the Tremont Street tunnel, many visitors have seen things they have trouble explaining logically. The most common sighting is of a little girl who has been seen standing among the gravestones, sometimes walking between them. This ghost, they say, is unique because of one key feature: she lacks a face.

  Just north of the Common is another graveyard known as the Granary Burying Ground. It’s one of the oldest cemeteries in town, dating back to 1660, and that means it holds a lot of history…and story.

  The Granary is home to a number of well-known individuals, Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and the parents of Benjamin Franklin among them. All of the Boston Massacre victims are interred there as well. But the graveyard is home to much more than burials. Some say it’s full of restless spirits as well.

  Ghost hunters love the graveyard for its abundance of orbs, those fuzzy white spots that sometimes appear in photos at night. They also claim to have recorded odd voices and unusual spikes in temperature and electromagnetic fields. If that’s your cup of tea, the Granary offers a strong brew, for sure.

  One of the common figures sighted in the Granary, though, is said to be a man named James Otis. He was a well-known lawyer prior to the American Revolution, and is famous for coining the main rallying cry of the rebellion, “No taxation without representation.” But in 1769 he had an encounter with a British tax collector that ended in violence. During the struggle, the tax official struck Otis in the head with a blunt object, cutting him and, according to some, accelerating the symptoms of a mental illness he had struggled with for years. It’s said that years later, Otis was so depressed over his illness that he wrote to his sister and expressed his desire to die quickly: “My dear sister, I hope, when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of
time into eternity, that it will be by a flash.”

  On May 23, 1783, Otis was standing in the doorway of a friend’s house in Andover when he dropped dead. The cause? A bolt of lightning.

  But not all of Boston’s haunted past is limited to outdoor spaces. Like James Otis, it stands on the doorstep, and if the stories are true, much of it has walked inside.

  NO VACANCY

  When John Pickering Putnam designed and built the Charlesgate Hotel in 1891, he was at the top of his game. As an architect, he was one of the leading designers of modern apartment buildings. As a builder, he was wildly creative, developing a number of new patents for building elements including ventilation systems and plumbing.

  He was just forty-four when he finished the Charlesgate. It’s a hulking Romanesque Revival structure at the corner of Beacon Street and Charlesgate East, and if you drive past, you can’t miss it. And although it’s been converted to condominiums today, it was originally designed to be a luxury hotel. In between, it’s been a boardinghouse, a college dorm, and home to a few other less savory businesses.

  But tragedy moved into the hotel early on. In 1908, just seventeen years after it was completed, a manufacturing executive named Westwood T. Windram ended a long struggle with depression and insomnia right there in the hotel. When a loud noise woke Windram’s wife on March 14, she climbed out of bed, only to find her husband dead in the closet, gun still in hand.

  Nine years later, architect John Putnam himself died at the age of seventy, right in the hotel he designed. And it’s all that death and tragedy, some say, that helped give birth to a new type of resident in the building: ghosts.

  Between 1947 and the 1990s, the hotel was converted into dorm space for Boston University and, later on, Emerson College. Many of the darker tales come from that era. In one encounter, a student opened his eyes in the middle of the night to see a stranger in his room. That’s odd enough on its own, I know, but even more unusual was that this stranger was floating above the student’s bed.