The Crypt

When most people think of church crypts they tend to think of ornate, echoing chambers beneath sprawling cathedrals, with marble, effigy-topped tombs lining the arched walls.
You won?t find those in Puritan-built Boston. No, our crypts - at least the ones that are open to the public - are tiny, cramped, and essentially served as mass graves and charnel pits during times of disease and graveyard overflow. They?re dark, they share their space with pipes and water heaters, and are slowly crumbling from the weight of the structures above them. They were designed for practicality, not beauty, but what they lack in elegance, they make up for in the macabre.
The tour guide unlocked a heavy iron gate that led down into the bowels of King?s Chapel. We walked down the steps and ducked to avoid the large pipes overhead. We found ourselves in what easily could have been any old basement were it not for the arched brick tombs lining the walls.
There were only four of us on the tour, not including the guide. Myself, my aunt, and a woman and her small daughter, maybe five years old, with the most striking blue eyes.
The guide stood in the center of the room as she began her narration, telling us when and why they began burying people in the basement instead of the adjoining burial ground, and about the various families interred down there. We learned about the ?Strangers Tomb?, which housed homeless and other unclaimed bodies and which had eventually become a charnel pit of sorts. We laughed at the guide?s story about how she once went down to the basement to use the bathroom, spotted her own reflection in the mirror through the open door, and jumped out of her skin.
She then led us over to a crypt labeled ?COOLIDGE? and shone her flashlight on a missing brick in the center. She handed the flashlight to me and told me to take a look. I crouched down and peered inside.
Aha. The name Bells and Bones Tour didn?t disappoint.
The light gently illuminated the interior of the crypt. It was a mess. Three wooden coffins, including one of an infant, were stacked on top of each other on a sagging shelf against the far wall. The shelf on the left wall had apparently collapsed under the weight of the large coffin it once held, which lay in a splintered mess on the floor, its contents plainly visible.
The top of a skull could be seen, as could the head of a very large femur. Both were pearl-white under the beam of the flashlight.
It was incredible. I was viewing, with my own eyes, what was once a person, deceased for more than 250 years, no more than five feet away from me. It?s one thing to view skeletons in a museum. It?s quite another to view them in their place of burial, untouched by the hands of man for centuries.
I so wanted to take my time and fully absorb the scene in front of me, but I knew I should be courteous so I reluctantly stood and handed the flashlight to my aunt.
Once we?d all had a peek, we reconvened in the center of the basement, and the guide resumed her spiel. The little girl looked bored. I sympathized with her - I was unable to focus on anything the woman was saying, my mind fixed on the bones I?d had to tear myself away from prematurely.
She tugged on her mother?s hand. The woman bent over so her daughter could whisper into her ear, and a moment later the blue-eyed child pulled away and walked back over to the hole in the wall.
I watched as she cupped her hands against the bricks, trying to block out as much light as she could to get the best possible view. I turned back to the guide and tried to pay attention as she elaborated on the history of the chapel.
Then there was a tiny noise behind me. A giggle. I turned. The girl was alternating between giggling and whispering into the hole. It was?odd, but nobody else seemed to notice. Little kids do weird stuff, after all. Still, a slight chill ran through me as I turned back to face our host, hoping she wouldn?t think I was being impolite.
Then the scratching started. I turned around again, but the sound wasn?t coming from the girl - her hands were still cupped, motionless, against the bricks.
It was coming from the hole.
Finally the others noticed and the guide fell silent. We all just stood there for a moment, unmoving, questioning one another with our eyes. I shivered again, compulsively.
Then my rational brain took over and a word popped out of my mouth.
?Rats.?
The mother gasped, as though the prospect of rats was more frightening than the otherworldly alternative I?m sure we were all thinking about, and all but sprinted over to her daughter, grabbing her hand and yanking her from the wall.
She remarked on how cold it was over there as she rubbed her hands up and down her daughter?s arms, ushering her back over to the center of the room.
The little girl began rubbing her brow and complaining that her head hurt, and when her mother tipped her chin up to make sure she hadn?t bumped her head, she gasped.
The child?s pupils were completely dilated and fully encompassed her irises; not even a millimeter of blue could be seen. The guide shone her flashlight directly into her eyes, but her pupils remained fixed. It was like staring into the abyss. We all took turns ?examining? her, offering our uneducated opinions, and while we knew that fixed pupils were usually bad news, we agreed that since she was conscious and coherent, she was probably okay, and the issue would likely remedy itself once we got back out into the sunlight.
The little girl then uttered four words that will always chill me to the bone.
?He?ll come with us.?
That lit a fire under our ***** and as calmly as possible we hightailed it out of that ****ing basement, the guide running right along after us and locking the door as we got up to street level.
As we had all reassured the concerned mother, the girl?s pupils slowly returned to normal, and her usual blue irises reemerged, seemingly brighter than ever, like the sun after a week of rain. Pretty soon she was bothering the stressed woman for food, and the two of them decided to forgo the bell tower part of the tour in favor of finding an early dinner. It was about 4PM, after all.
As my aunt and I climbed up to the bell tower to ooh and ahh at the largest bell ever cast by Paul Revere?s foundry, I couldn?t stop thinking about those bones. They consumed my thoughts. I had to see them again.
My aunt went home to New York two days later, and a week after that I was taking one of my usual walks around Boston when I found myself outside King?s Chapel. After a lengthy debate with myself I decided to buy tickets for the tour. I was determined to get a picture of those freaking bones.
I was surprised to learn that the crypt was closed to the public. Recognizing the woman at the front desk as the tour guide from a week before, I asked if it had something to do with the little girl. She swallowed hard and tried to maintain professionalism as she whispered to me that they had received a visit from the Boston PD the day after the incident.
Apparently the little girl and her mother, who had been tourists from Ohio, had retired to their hotel room after they ate dinner that evening. The girl had taken a long and unexpected nap and had woken up at about 8PM, at which point she attempted to strangle her mother. Her mother fought her off easily and called 911. The girl was transported to Mass General, where she died suddenly, at 11PM, as they prepared her for an MRI.
An autopsy performed the following day had been unable to determine the cause of death, although the coroner wrote in his report that the condition of the body and the timing of rigor mortis suggested she had died at roughly 4PM the previous day.


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