Asylum Haunts

Boston Harbor was a literal dumping ground for the city's undesirables and those traditionally marginalized by the status quo. Asylums, or institutions built for the poor, orphaned, sick and mentally ill were commonplace on a handful of the islands throughout the harbor.

"For centuries, Bostonians used the harbor islands to sequester and provide for those suffering from physical and social ills," reported the Boston Phoenix. "Locals have grown up believing that many of these sites are haunted. They are: if not by ghosts, then by the twisted and shameful legacy of what happened in these places."

Based on the intense residual energy at many of the former asylums scattered throughout Boston Harbor, it would make sense that many of the people who lived in these buildings left behind a psychic imprint of sorts, especially if neglect or trauma was involved.

One hypothesis, developed in the 1970s and known as the Stone Tape theory, speculates that an environment can absorb energy from a high-tension event, such as an untimely death or a suicide. The theory is a possible explanation for the alleged paranormal activity reported on the islands of Boston Harbor, including lights flickering and inexplicable screams. A residual haunting is like a videotaped event that plays over and over. Residual spirits are not intelligent entities and can't interact with the living. However, it's possible that a few lost souls still linger on the islands where they were formerly sequestered.

Rachel Hoffman, investigator with the all-female team called Paranormal Xpeditions, said it's possible that an aura of disaster has psychically imprinted itself on the islands, especially those that formerly housed tuberculosis clinics, poorhouses or mental institutions. "We believe that asylums are higher in paranormal activity due to the amount of personal anguish suffered by the ill and also the nurses who were understaffed," explained Hoffman. "We oftentimes hear them going about their daily activities as if they don't know they are dead."

Hoffman appeared on Zak Bagan's Paranormal Challenge, during which her team investigated the extremely haunted Rolling Hills Asylum in East Bethany, New York. On the Travel Channel show, Paranormal Xpeditions captured a "class A" EVP of a female voice saying, "Don't touch me again" followed by the sound of a straightjacket slapping down after a bloodcurdling shriek.

"We believe it was a confrontation between a nurse and a patient," said Hoffman. "I believe it was residual activity and probably repeats itself consistently because the patient is unaware that she has died."

The veteran paranormal investigator believes that the ghosts haunting old asylums are both intelligent and residual. "We have come across spirits that are nasty in nature and tend to carry on being aggressive even after death," Hoffman said. "We also run into child spirits, which are the ones to us that tend to be intelligent and receptive. We generally bring candy or toys as trigger objects to evoke a response. Kids love candy and shiny toys and usually approach us easily, as we have a mothering nature to our crew of all females."

The asylums in Boston Harbor deviate a bit from the so-called insane asylums we've seen portrayed in pop culture, specifically on TV shows like American Horror Story:Asylum and movies like Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island. However, they did exist in other areas like Danvers, Medfield and Taunton.

Cambridge's "Jolly" Jane Toppan is an extreme example of a human monster who formerly worked and eventually died in one of those inhumane institutions. Born in 1854, Toppan began training to be a nurse at Cambridge Hospital in 1885. There she would overdose her patients with morphine and change their medical charts to hide evidence of their intake. She was known as "Jolly" Jane because of her sugary-sweet demeanor. However, Toppan got her jollies by killing her victims and jumping into bed with them after she poisoned them. She would wrap her limbs around her dying patients and get sexual gratification from feeling the life leaving their frail bodies. She left a trail of bodies at Cambridge Hospital and was moved to Boston's Mass General in 1890.

After years of murdering innocent patients, she was implicated in 1902 and was sent to the Taunton Insane Hospital, where she died in 1938. There she refused to eat because she was afraid staffers at the insane asylum had poisoned her food. From a paranormal perspective, it would make sense that the female serial killer's spirit lingers at the spot where she died.

When it comes to asylums in Massachusetts, including the handful of institutions in Boston Harbor, fact is definitely stranger than fiction.

"It's tough to invent anything more messed up than what actually happened at Massachusetts's network of public mental hospitals," wrote Scott Kearnan in the Boston Phoenix. "Our state's institutional memories are riddled with sordid tales of deplorable physical conditions, sexual misconduct and cruelly unusual torture masquerading as treatment."

Deer Island

Don't let the dinosaur egg–shaped sludge digesters from the sewage treatment facility fool you. Deer Island is marred by tragedy and stained with the blood of hundreds of innocents who were confined in one of the most horrific untold genocides in American history.

For the Native Americans quarantined on the 185-acre dumping ground, Deer Island was known as Devil's Island.

A group of native people were converted to Christianity by the Reverend John Eliot. Known as the "praying Indians," they were captured one night in October 1675 and were quarantined on the barren island, their captors fueled by fear of the impending King Philip's War. Eliot, a British minister who had fled to Boston in 1631, had painstakingly translated the Bible into their native tribal language. Many of the innocent men, women and children were holding their Bibles when they were forced to fend for themselves on what was then a desolate island in Boston Harbor.

"Deer Island became a place of internment in the winter of 1675–76 for approximately 500 Native Americans, whom Europeans had removed from their homes and villages," reported the National Park Service's website. "Many of the imprisoned Native Americans died that winter without access to adequate food or shelter."

Contrary to the NPS report, there were up to 1,100 "praying Indians" kept on Deer Island, and historians believe that more could have lived there who went unrecorded. The Native Americans, demonized by the colonists, were dropping at an alarming rate. Many of them were on the shoreline praying for God to help. No one came.

The Reverend Eliot made several attempts to deliver food, but the angry townspeople stopped him by trying to capsize his vessel. A group of men planned to massacre the natives — or, as Malden's Abram Hill worded it, they intended to "destroy ye Indians." The rogue slayers never made it out to Deer Island. However, hundreds of natives died anyway from the elements and lack of food.

During the spring...