Nathaniel Hawthorne Sees A Ghost

Nathaniel Hawthorne (b.1804, d.1864)

Most people are introduced to Nathaniel Hawthorne in high school, when they're forced to read The Scarlet Letter in English class. Students would probably like him a lot more if they knew he had actually seen a ghost. Like last week's post, this story is also focused on the Boston Athenaeum.

When Hawthorne was a bachelor (probably in the 1830s), he used to spend a significant amount of his free time reading at the Athenaeum. Among the many men he frequently saw there, he took particular note of one Reverend Doctor Harris, the Unitarian minister of Dorchester's First Parish Church. As Hawthorne describes him,

"He was a small, withered, infirm, but brisk old gentleman, with snow-white hair, a somewhat stooping figure, but yet a remarkable alacrity of movement."

Doctor Harris would spend his time in the Athenaeum's reading room with the Boston Post, the local Democrat newspaper. He and Hawthorne never spoke, and were never formally introduced.

One day, a friend of Hawthorne's remarked that Dr. Harris had passed away. But when Hawthorne went to the Athenaeum that day, he saw Dr. Harris still sitting in his customary seat, reading the newspaper (which probably contained his obituary notice)! He tried to ignore the ghost, but,

"Once or twice, no doubt, I may have lifted my eyes from the page to look again at the venerable Doctor, who ought then to have been lying in his coffin dressed out for the grave, but who felt such interest in the Boston Post as to come back from the other world to read it the morning after his death."

Hawthorne was the only person in the room who seemed to see Dr. Harris. And he continued to see him every day, reading the newspaper, for the space of several weeks.

Are there any ghosts in the Boston Athenaeum today?

Towards the end of this period, he noticed the ghost began to watch him expectantly. Perhaps, he thought, the ghost had a message for him from beyond the grave, or would charge him with a task he would need to accomplish before it could rest.

Interestingly, Hawthorne didn't accept this implicit invitation to speak to the ghost. After all, he thought,

"I had never been introduced to Doctor Harris, dead or alive, and I am not aware that social regulations are to be abrogated by the accidental fact of one of the parties having crossed the imperceptible line which separates the other party from the spiritual world."

Finally, one day in the reading room, Dr. Harris's ghost looked at him with

"a sad, wistful, disappointed gaze, which the ghost fixed upon me from beneath his spectacles; a melancholy look of helplessness, which, if my heart had not been as hard as a paving-stone, I could hardly have withstood."

And that was the last time he ever saw Dr. Harris.

Mix one part Yankee reserve, one part fear of death, and voila! You get this story, which is very New England. After all, how many times do we pass by living people that we see every day without speaking to them? Would we treat a dead person any differently?

You can find Hawthorne's tale many places, but I found it on the Dorchester Athenaeum site.

The Mather Tomb: Occupant #1, Increase Mather

I restrained myself from writing about witches throughout October, and focused on monsters instead. Now it's November, and I'm free again to about witches and all things witchy.

So, here's a photo the Mather tomb on Copp's Hill in Boston. When I hear the name Mather, I think of witches. The Mathers buried here would spin in their graves to hear that, but it's true.



Increase Mather was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1639. The son of a prominent Puritan minister, he graduated from Harvard in 1656 and eventually became the pastor of Boston's North Church. He was also the president of Harvard from 1685 to 1701.

Where's the witchcraft connection? Well, as the most important minister in New England, he became very concerned when reports of witchcraft reached him. Clearly, he said, it was caused by a lack of religion in Massachusetts. (How much more religious could the colony have been? It was already a Puritan theocracy.)

To combat the rising tide of evil, he wrote An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences, which described cases of witchcraft and supernatural happenings. It was a huge hit. Even though the colony was a theocracy, people still wanted to read juicy stories about unseen demons pelting New Hampshire farmers with stones and possessed serving maids with giant tongues in Groton blaspheming God.

When the Salem witch trials began, Increase did not get directly involved. Instead, he published another tract, this time titled Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men; Witchcrafts, Infallible Proofs of Guilt in such as are Accused with the Crime, which urged people to be cautious in accepting spectral evidence during the trials.

Spectral evidence was basically psychic hearsay accepted as proof of witchcraft. For example, during a trial an allegedly bewitched girl might say, "Ahh! Goodwife Corey is biting me on the arm!" The judges would accept this as evidence even though: 1. no one else saw Goodwife Corey bite the girl, and 2. Goodwife Corey and all the other witches were restrained in plain sight of the court. Since she was a witch, it was assumed she could send her spirit to cause mischief even while restrained.

Showing some wisdom, Increase Mather thought spectral evidence was not sufficient to convict someone. He didn't show as much wisdom as one might hope though, because here's what he did consider sufficient evidence: testimony from neighbors, and "the fact that some of the afflicted girls were relieved of their fits when a concoction of rye paste, water and the hair and nail clippings of the accused witches was mixed together and set afire."

Needless to say, once the hysteria died down and it was revealed that the bewitched girls had been faking, people in Massachusetts wanted Increase to recant and admit he was wrong. He never did, either out of pride or because he was friendly with the trial judges. His reputation suffered but not as badly as that of his son Cotton, who I'll write about soon.

(I got most of my information from Rosemary Ellen Guiley's The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft. )