Haunted Gay Bars of Boston: the Ramrod and the 1270 Club

My last few blog posts have focused on 17th century stories about witches. This week I'm changing things up. Let's talk about haunted gay bars instead.

I should say, "Let's talk about haunted gay bars again." A few years ago I wrote about the rumor that Jacques Cabaret, Boston's famous drag bar, was haunted by a former performer's ghost and may even have been a temporary morgue to house victims of the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire. My post was circulating around the internet again recently and some people reached out to share two other Boston haunted gay bar stories.

The first story is about the stately old building at 1270 Boylston Street. It was originally built as a horse carriage factory, but in the 1970s and 1980s it was home to a gay club called simply the 1270 Club. The 1270 Club featured some of Boston's best DJs and was a popular spot for dancing. The club's three floors were filled with a diverse mix of gays, lesbians, and even adventurous straight people who came for the music. Here is a quote from a 1981 Boston Globe article hinting at the club's mystique:

The 1270 Club is viewed as a mysterious club were heterosexuals don't dare tread because they've heard it's gay. For most of the week the club does cater to a predominantly gay clientele, but the exception is Wednesday when live rock is booked and the evening often becomes one of the best around town...  (Steve Morse, "Short Cuts," Boston Globe, April 9, 1981)

After the 1270 Club closed the building was the site of several other other gay bars: Maximum Security, Tatoo, and finally Quest. Currently the building is home to the Baseball Tavern, a straight sports bar.

That's the history, now here's the ghost story a friend told me. In the mid-20th century many gay bars were controlled by organized crime, and allegedly this was once the case with The 1270 Club as well. The straight mobster who owned the club didn't care about its gay clientele as long as he made money off them. He was living the good life until one night he brought two female prostitutes home to his suburban house. The three adjourned to a room above the garage for some erotic fun, but unfortunately in his eagerness the mobster forgot to shut off his car. The next morning the mobster and the two women were found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.

According to the friend who told me this story, the mobster's ghost was sometimes encountered lurking around the 1270 Club by the staff. My friend knew someone who worked there who had encountered the ghost. I got the impression the ghost wasn't seen when the club was busy, but only before or after hours when a handful of staff were alone in the large empty building.

I don't know if the story is true, but it is interesting. The straight mobster undone by his own lust, dead and unable to profit any longer off the community he exploited, seems like a fitting ghost to haunt a gay bar. The 1270 Club was an important place for gays and lesbians in Boston when it was open, and a ghost story like this helps keep its memory alive in the community.

The other story I heard (from several people) is about the building at 1254 Boylston Street. This is just a few doors down from 1270 Boylston, so we have two spooky gay bars on the same block. This building houses the gay nightclubs Ramrod and Machine, but in an earlier incarnation it was just a gay leather bar called The Ramrod. The dancefloor at Machine is located in what was once the unused basement of the Ramrod. According to a couple informants, this basement space was used by one of the local medical schools to store human body parts. Leathermen partied one floor above a grim collection of medical specimens. Jars filled with formaldehyde-soaked body parts lined dusty old shelves in a space that today is filled with dancers, drag queens, and Ryan Landry's campy theatrical productions.

I didn't hear any actual ghost stories associated with Ramrod/Machine, just that the basement was once filled with human body parts. Which is probably creepy enough, right? It's interesting that the basements of Jacques and the Ramrod were both said to be storage areas for dead bodies, although for one it was only temporary. Is this just a folklore trope or were they actually used for this purpose?

That's all the information I have right now. I've been to both of these locations and never noticed anything paranormally weird, but please feel free to share anything you know in the comments. I always enjoy learning more about the place I live, even if the information is kind of gruesome. 

Weird New England News: Brains, A Witch House and A Scary Clown

Most of my posts on this blog are about strange and interesting things from New England's past. But strange and interesting things continue to happen here. These three stories really caught my eye over the last week.

First, did you know that Yale University used to have a secret room full of human brains? I didn't until just this week, when The Boston Globe's medical publication STAT ran an article about it. For many years, Yale's medical school dormitory had a secret hidden away in its basement. Behind a locked door was a room filled with hundreds of brains floating in jars. Students weren't allowed access to the room, but the adventurous ones who broke in came out a little shaken. As if the dozens of brains weren't weird enough, there were also photos and drawings of medical patients from bygone days. The whole experience was unnerving.

“It was like a shop of horrors,” said Christopher Wahl, who visited multiple times while at the medical school in the late 1990s. “The overwhelming atmosphere was that you’re in a place that you maybe shouldn’t be in, lit by bare incandescent bulbs with a dirty floor in an old basement that smells of formaldehyde.”

It turns out the brains were collected by Dr. Harvey Cushing (1869 - 1939), a prominent physician and founding figure in the field of neurosurgery. For many years Cushing's brain collection was used to educate Yale students until it became outdated in the 1970s. Yale administrators then locked it away in a basement storage room, from which it spooked generations of medical students. The collection is now officially displayed in Yale's medical library, which is a decidedly less creepy location.

Photos from the Harvey Cushing Collection at Yale University.

A few take-aways from this story. First, New England is filled with colleges and they are all sources of rich folklore and strange stories. Second, brains locked in an unmarked basement room are scary; brains in a library's display are educational. It's all about the setting I suppose. Finally, apparently even medical students find old medical photos creepy.  

Next up in the weird news parade, a historic witch house in Framingham, Massachusetts is being restored. The house in question was once the homestead of Sarah Clayes (Cloyce), a woman who was accused of witchcraft in Salem's 1692 witch trials. Although Clayes's two sisters, Rebecca Nurse and Mary Easty, were both executed, Clayes survived the trials and fled to Framingham after they ended. Many other Salem families followed.

Photo from the Boston Globe.

The house, located on Salem's End Road, dates from the 1770s. This makes it too recent to be the actual house Clayes would have lived in, but it seems that the foundation is from her home. The property has been abandoned for at least fifteen years and a historic preservation trust is now working to restore it. After it is renovated the house will be sold to a private owner (with restrictions to preserve the building). Real estate around Boston is very expensive, but if you have a few million dollars this could be your chance to own a piece of New England history.

The article points out that Sarah Clayes was not really a witch, just another innocent victim caught up in the witch hunt. Despite this, the house is known in Framingham as the Witch House. Perhaps this is because supernatural, legendary witches resonate more with us than accused witches, and also because the "Witch House" sounds better than the "Accused Witch House." The Witch House is located close to a large park that supposedly contains caves where Clayes and other Salem escapees sheltered before building their homes. I have visited the park and maybe found the caves, which are known as the Witch Caves (not the Accused Witch Caves).

Finally, a scary clown popped up in Vermont this weekend. If you recall, last year America experienced a huge scary clown craze in the summer and fall. The first craze of this kind occurred around Boston in 1981, but last year's was much larger and more widespread. Was our nation's collective unconscious trying to tell us something before the November election? Clowns have continued to scare our nation since then with the release of the movie It and the current season of American Horror Story.

Happily, the clown in Marlboro, Vermont was not a supernatural monster or part of a secret conspiracy. Instead, he seems to have been a costumed Halloween partygoer who got intoxicated and wandered into the wrong house, where he passed out. When the police arrived to investigate they found cocaine on his person and arrested him, which is not something to laugh at.

Grave Robbers, Resurrection Men, and Med Students

I recently finished Colson Whitehead's excellent new novel The Underground Railroad. I can understand why it won the Pulitzer. It's an interesting mix of history, fantasy, adventure, and social commentary. It also gruesome and upsetting, which you'd expect from a novel about slavery.

Most of the novel takes place in the South, but one very short chapter deals with a 19th-century Boston medical student who moonlights as a grave robber. The city's medical schools need dead bodies for dissection class, and very few people are willing to leave their corpses to science. It's the perfect opportunity for an ambitious young man with bad morals...

After finishing The Underground Railroad I decided to look into grave robbery in old New England. Whitehead's book is fiction, but he incorporates a lot of fact into it. Does he accurately portray the local grave robbing business?

The answer is yes, more or less. In the 18th and 19th century, Boston medical schools were given the corpses of executed criminals by the government to dissect. Unfortunately, the stream of executed criminals was not enough to satisfy the schools' demand for fresh corpses. To increase their supply, medical professors turned to grave robbers euphemistically called "resurrection men." The resurrection were more than happy to dig up freshly buried bodies and sell them to the schools.

Surprisingly, legal penalties for resurrection men were quite light. They often got away with just a slap on the wrist. They had to worry more about being beaten by an angry mob of mourning relatives than being arrested by the police. It seems strange, but grave robbing did not become a felony in Massachusetts until 1815, when the legislature passed a bill called "An Act to Protect the Sepulchers of the Dead."

To avoid angry relatives (and later the police), resurrection men sought out corpses that no one important cared about. The graves of paupers, the insane, and the homeless were all good sources of revenue. African-American cemeteries also made good targets for the resurrection men. Corpses from the lower social levels of society could be taken more easily.

Since the penalties for grave robbing were originally light, sometimes even faculty and students from medical schools tried their hand at it. It saved them from having to pay the resurrection men and seems to have been viewed almost as a fun activity. For example, at Harvard Medical School a secret student society called the Spunkers Club routinely robbed graves in the years before the Revolution. Sam Adams's son was a member, as was William Eustis, who later became U.S. Secretary of War. The Revolutionary War later provided a steady stream of bodies; George Washington himself complained from his headquarters in Cambridge about the theft of a soldier's body. Happily, the Spunkers Club is no longer in operation.

It is now illegal to pay for a human body in the United States, and medical schools rely on donations. You can read more about the process in this National Geographic article. WARNING: It has photos of actual corpses. You can read more about the Spunkers Club at the History Channel. No photos of corpses there.

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FYI, I will be speaking about the monsters of Cape Cod on Saturday, May 13 as part of the Provincetown Paracon. Other speakers include Adam Barry and Amy Bruni from the TV shows Ghost Hunters and Kindred Spirits, and there will be a special Traveling Museum of the Occult and Paranormal as well. I hope you can make it!

Me and Paracon organizer Sam Baltrusis talking about the event on What's New Massachusetts.