The Charlesgate Hotel

The old Charlesgate Hotel is one of the most haunted buildings in Boston. Over time the building has taken on legend status, making it difficult to separate the truth from the mystic that surrounds it. The buildng was built in 1891, supposedly by the Mafia, although there has been no connection between the original contractor and architect and organized crime. From the outside you can't see the eight floor, where some of the illegal activity was supposed to have happened. There are several areas that are boarded up or filled in, revealing hidden rooms that were once used but that you can not see unless you follow the slight cracks in the wall. One such room on the sixth floor was the sight of a suicide. Walking through the halls, checking out the rooms and then comparing it to the original blueprints (on file at the Boston Public Library) shows many inconsistencies and points to potential areas of hauntings.

After serving as a hotel it was sold and sold again until it eventually became a BU dorm. The lore began with the influx of students. BU sold the dorms and it became a tenament, serving some of the worst tenants in Kenmore. At that time, students began to move in as well, often charged far more than the other people livining there, creating an interesting mix of college kids and sketchy "adults". Emerson bought the building in the 1980's and renovated it.

Some of the legendary spirits that walked the halls are very old. In the basement there are the spirits of horses that died when there were stables there. There is a little girl that haunts the elevator where she died. Often people had séances and weird things would happen and more than once magic and black magic had been practiced in the dorm rooms. But there were other strange things that went on. Often at night there was scampering in the ceilings, too small to be people, but too big to be rats. There would be voices and light problems. Some student would see a gurney roll by their room.

In the 1970's there was an alarm clock that would go off at 6:11 am although it was not set. The room was a sight of another suicide. Another time 3 girls moved into a room on the 6th floor. Although each of them wanted the big closet upon moving in, they all had unusual sensations when they approached it, deciding it was better to let someone else use the closet. Research discovered another suicide in that closet. Once a student woke up to see a spirit hovering over him. The ghost was also seen by the RA who ran in to see why the student was screaming.

It was a hotbed of activity, and if you used a Ouija board anywhere in it, you'd get results. (See the Federal Government story) One night we got an answer to some of the activity. We contacted a spirit that called itself Zena (this was long before the TV show). Zena was not a normal spirit because it had never lived. It was more of a spell that had been cast on doorways by one of the original builders to protect those inside. They saw everything and tried to help people. They told me of a spell placed on me by someone that was later confirmed by two psychics who had no idea what I was going in for. It knew things only the people themselves would know, and made a believer out of more than one skeptic that would try the board.

After we left the dorms it was sold again, and one person who lives in the building says he never has had anything happen. I think back to a rule of Ouija boards though. If a spirit is on the board and it is not cleaned, and it is destroyed somehow, the spirit is said to escape. If there was something in those walls, I wonder what might have happened when the gutted the place out to make the condos.

In Octomber,1987, a former student named Tracy Libby wrote an article for FATE Magazine that can be used for further research.

Recently, while taking photgraphs for a new book coming out I evaluated some of the artwork at Charlesgate. I had lived in the building for two years, but I had never noticed the faces, some obvious and other not so obvious, around the windows and in the rest of the metalwork. There were also scratches which appeared random, but upon zooming appeared to spell things out. Some of the expressions I found, hidden in the beauty, were "No Exit", "Hell"and "Gone".

Some updates for this story come from:
Ghosts of Boston Town by Holly Mascott Nadler