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 For many years Cushing's brain collection was used to educate Yale students until it became outdated in the 1970s.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.

Secrets of the Skull and Bones Tomb

A few months ago I was in charming New Haven, Connecticut for a conference. I managed to visit not just one, but two fantastic cemeteries while I was there. I also saw a few other interesting sites, but had mostly forgotten about my trip until this past Thursday when I was in CVS.

I was stocking up on Halloween candy, but as I strolled down the magazine aisle something caught my eye. It was a magazine called Secret Societies, a special edition of History Classics put out by Harris Publication. Here is the cover:

Creepy! How could I resist? I bought it. The magazine covers a broad array of secret societies, from the mundane (like the Knights of Columbus and the Shriners) to the violently disturbing (the Manson Family, the Heaven's Gate suicide cult, and the People's Temple).

It also covers Yale's Order of the Skull and Bones. I had taken some photos of this society's headquarters while I was in New Haven, and this magazine seemed like a sign from the cosmos that it was time to share them.

First of all, let me say that Skull and Bones is not a violent cult like the Mansons. I just wanted to get that out of the way. However, it's not just your basic fraternal order like the Knights of Columbus either. It is an incredibly exclusive college social club whose alumni include President George W. Bush, his father (the other President Bush), and Secretary of State John Kerry. Other notable alumni have included President William Taft, conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr., and actor Paul Giamatti. You can see a longer list of members here. Lots of politicians, professional athletes, business moguls and media stars belonged to Skull and Bones when they were Yale students.

Paul Giamatti - he knows the secrets of Skull and Bones!

With such high-powered alumni, speculation about the Order is naturally rampant. The group has been very good about keeping its rituals and activities secret, however, and only members are allowed into the Tomb, the group's ominous looking headquarters on the Yale campus. But here is what is known publicly about Skull and Bones.

The Tomb on Yale's campus

Skull and Bones was founded in 1852 by Yale seniors William Huntingon Russell and Alphonso Taft (father of President Taft). Every spring, fifteen juniors are offered membership on what is known as Tap Night. The juniors are awakened in the middle of the night by a knock on their door, and when they open it they find a stranger shouting "Skull and Bones! Accept or reject?"

Most juniors do accept the offer. After all, according to rumor new members are immediately given $15, 000 and told they will have a lifetime of financial security. I don't know if those rumors are true, but I would accept just to find out what happens inside the Tomb.

New members are put through an initiation ritual that allegedly involves lying in a coffin and reciting their personal sexual history. That sounds kind of tame, but it does involve the symbolism of death and rebirth, and probably builds a certain level of trust among members. Keeping with the rebirth symbolism, members are given new names. Some names repeat for each crop of new initiates. For example, the tallest junior is renamed Long Devil; the shortest Little Devil.

The devilish nicknames fit the spooky atmosphere surrounding the Order. The interior of the Tomb is supposedly decorated in high Gothic style, with lots of bones and armor adorning the halls. The spookiness is also fed by the rumor that members of the order stole Geronimo's skull from his grave and keep it inside the tomb. Another rumor says they also have the skulls of Martin Van Buren and Pancho Villa. It's important to note that the Apache tribe says Geronimo's bones still comfortably reside in Oklahoma. No word on the remains of Martin Van Buren and Pancho Villa...

The Order's insignia is also a little creepy (see above). The number 322 probably refers to the year that the Greek politician and orator Demosthenes committed suicide.

Naturally Skull and Bones has inspired a lot of conspiracy theories. Just look at that list of members! And why all the secrecy! Something weird and sinister must be going on. In the 2004 presidential election, both final candidates were Bonesmen (George W. Bush and John Kerry), which is downright strange. Maybe Skull and Bones actually runs the country!

But then again maybe not. I think a simpler answer is just plain old social hierarchy. Yale is an elite university, and the elite class sends their children to be educated there. When they graduate they achieve positions of prominence and run the country. The Order of Skull and Bones doesn't have any particular power, but the people who become members come from families that do. George W. Bush would have been president even if he weren't a Bonesman and even if he went to another Ivy League school. He comes from a long line of politicians and used those connections to become President. I don't think any secret Skull and Bones rituals guaranteed him the presidency.

But Paul Giamatti - he's another story...

More Weird New Haven: Grove Street Cemetery

Here's my second post about some strange and wonderful things I saw a few weeks ago in charming and historic New Haven, Connecticut.

In addition to visiting Midnight Mary's grave at the Evergreen Cemetery, I took a guided tour of the Grove Street Cemetery, which abuts the Yale campus. Grove Street Cemetery is a beautiful neo-classical style burying ground, which means many of the monuments are inspired by the art of ancient Greece and Rome. You won't find many Victorian angels here, but you will find some unusual monuments, like this Roman tumulus (mound) style vault and Grecian sphinx.

New Haven's first settlers buried their dead under and around Center Church on New Haven Green. This practice continued for 160 years until a yellow fever outbreak led the city's leaders to create a newer, more modern burying ground in 1796. The markers from the old burying ground were moved to Grove Street, but not apparently the bodies. Every now and then a corpse pops up from under the Green, as happened recently when a large tree fell in a storm, revealing a skeleton entangled in its roots.

One of the original settlers' graves relocated to Grove Street Cemetery.

New Haven was a prominent mercantile city and has one of America's best universities, so Grove Street is the resting place for many famous people. On our tour we saw the graves of Noah Webster, Eli Whitney and Glenn Miller, to name just a few.

Our tour guide did not tell us any ghost stories, but did address a couple urban legends that surround the cemetery. First, she emphatically denied that any secret tunnels connect the cemetery to the nearby Yale Medical School. Apparently there is a popular legend that in the 19th century enterprising medical students dug tunnels into the cemetery so they could steal cadavers for their experiments. Interestingly, two miles of steam tunnels do lie underneath the Yale campus, and go very close to the Grove Street Cemetery. One of the tunnels is rumored to lead to a basement filled with brains in formaldehyde-filled jars. Again, this is just a rumor, and the steam tunnels are locked and dangerous as they are indeed filled with steam. Don't go trespassing! You will be covered in burns as you are dragged off to jail, which wouldn't be good.

Back to our tour guide. Second, she said she was not able to comment on whether any of Yale's secret student societies conduct rituals in Grove Street Cemetery. She did say, however, that at times she has seen students wearing robes doing something in the graveyard. She left what they were doing to our imaginations, and I in turn will leave it to yours.

I have a good friend who lived in New Haven for many years. He told me that he had heard rumors that someone was leaving sacrificial offerings at the cemetery's dramatic front gate. What did those offerings consist of? He didn't know. I'm sorry I don't have anything more specific to share with you, but sometimes uncertainty makes these urban legends even more interesting.

The entrance to Grove Street is very, very dramatic, and I can see why aspiring young occultists might want to leave some offerings at the foot of those Egyptian-style pillars with their ominous inscription. The gate was not built for any occult purposes, however. Egyptian revival was the architectural vogue when it was constructed in 1845, and it was a style the builders felt was not offensive to any Christian denominations. The inscription "The Dead Shall Be Raised" probably strikes a lot of modern people as a quote from a horror movie, but is actually from Corinthians in the New Testament.

If you are in New Haven definitely visit Grove Street Cemetery. It's beautiful, peaceful and full of history. And if peace and beauty aren't your thing, you can ponder some of those rumors and urban legends instead.

The Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son

Dr. Isaac Calcott arrived in Providence, Rhode Island in June of 1769. Well-dressed and in his thirties, Dr. Calcott claimed he could treat nearly thirty separate disorders, including "scale heads, St. Anthony's fire, vapors, King's evil, and deafness."

I don't know what most of those ailments are, but apparently they were quite Common in Colonial New England, because Dr. Calcott traveled through the region for the next four years, advertising his "Art of Curing" in all the local newspapers.

Although there were plenty of local physicians in the area in the 1700s, Dr. Calcott was part of a wave of itinerant doctors and healers who appeared in New England at this time. Most were men and came from Europe, although one Native American woman traveled through Essex County claiming to cure cancer through herbal treatments. Like Dr. Calcott, most also advertised through newspaper ads, but some relied just on local word of mouth.

These traveling healers were denounced by the more established doctors and often advocated highly unorthodox treatments. In addition to herbal treatments and elixirs, electrical devices were frequently used, often in front of a paying audience. These electrical demonstrations were part medicine and part entertainment.

Dr. Calcott didn't perform in front of an audience, but he did use a particularly strange technique. Here is an account of how he cured six year old Elizur Belden of blindness:

"Mrs. Belden holding the Child in his Lap, Dr. Calcott ... Licked the eyes, first putting his Tongue into one Eye and then into the other Eye of the Child - it was soon done, - and instantly the Child saw, and ever after continued to see well."

That account was written by Ezra Stiles, the President of Yale, after talking with Elizur Belden's parents many years after the cure. The testimony is reliable. The licking seemed to be effective, but why?

The modern scientific mindset would probably chalk it all up to psychosomatic illness, but Isaac Calcott claimed he had special healing powers because he was the seventh son of a seventh son. In many parts of Europe it was (and still is) believed that the seventh son of a seventh son has special abilities. Often these were healing powers, but in some places seventh sons could also predict the future and find lost objects. Wikipedia has a short but interesting article on this belief. In contemporary America, the seventh son motif is still popular in genre fiction.

The licking was also probably considered effective because spit was known to be a fluid highly charged with personal power. The average person's spit was often used in simple folk magic, but as the seventh son of a seventh son Dr. Calcott's saliva was obviously quite powerful. Jesus spit in a blind man's ear to make him hear; Dr. Calcott licked a blind boy's eyes to make him see.

Unfortunately the old adage "Physician, heal thyself" seems to apply to Dr. Calcott. Despite, or perhaps because of, his amazing powers Calcott was an alcoholic. Once, in Middletown, Connecticut, the good doctor was so drunk that two young boys were able to tar and feather him. He was last seen practicing his medical magic in 1773 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire before disappearing from the historical record.

I found this information in Peter Benes's article "Itinerant Physicians, Healers, and Surgeon-Dentists" in Medicine and Healing. Volume 15 of the Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.

Harvard Should Consult Its Magic Books

Last week the media was full of news about Harvard losing a big chunk of its endowment due to the recession. Some writers were gloating, while others were concerned about possible layoffs among the Harvard staff. I definitely have sympathy for the Harvard staff, since I work at a university myself.

I guess the money managers at Harvard didn't consult the stars for guidance, the way some earlier Harvard staff might have.

According to D. Michael Quinn, author of Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, divination and practices we now consider "occult" were a standard part of the curriculum at New England colleges before the 19th century. Harvard students learned how to use astrology as part of their medical training, and a working knowledge of astrology was crucial for anyone getting a BA or Master's degree. Harvard students wrote theses on astrology and alchemy as late as 1771, and many Harvard student continued practicing alchemy into the 1800's.

Not to be left out of the Ivy League magic, students at Yale studied astrology and alchemy as well, and Yale's president Ezra Stiles experimented with alchemy and studied the Cabala.

Three interesting points here:

1. Yale and Harvard were founded to train Christian ministers, but the faculty clearly saw no conflict between the occult and Christianity. How times have changed!

2. Pundits like Harold Bloom have complained that universities no longer teach students canonical works. Does this mean faculty should start teaching Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy again?

3.Early Mormonism and the Magic World View is a great and very informative book, with lots of detail about how occult practices were woven into the everyday lives of early Americans. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was born in Vermont and D. Michael Quinn shows how some of Smith's religious practices were influenced (or even identical to) magical practices in New England and New York. I think this book is one of the reasons Quinn was kicked out of the Mormon Church.