Newburyport - Should you encounter any particularly adventurous tourists in Newburyport this summer, the types who might want to see one of the more unusual historical sites in the Clipper City, suggest they leave the pizzazz of downtown and walk east on Water Street until they come to … Charles Street?
True, at first glance this small, quiet street doesn’t look much different than any other in Newburyport’s South End. A line of neat houses takes up one side; the James Steam Mill retirement home takes up most of the other.
But 138 years ago, something happened on Charles Street that made headlines across the country — and unexpectedly made Newburyport an extremely famous place to be.
That something was a ghost.
It all started in the fall of 1870. Back then, one of the buildings on Charles Street served as a schoolhouse for boys. According to reports of the day, the school was bleak and bare, its tiny, single classroom smelly and unpleasant. Apparently, it also housed a ghost.
This poltergeist first made its presence known by banging on the floorboards whenever the students began their morning prayers. This banging, described as “thunderous,” would then be heard coming from behind the classroom walls, and sometimes from the teacher’s desk itself. At first, the teacher blamed the noises on the wind, or the frost, or even rats. But these excuses did little to calm the fears of her students.
More ghostly things began happening as the school year progressed. One time a young boy’s hand was seen pressed against an outside window, disappearing as soon as the teacher went for closer inspection. Another time the class saw a young boy’s face pressed up against the same window, looking in at them, again, only to vanish when the teacher tried to get a better look. Soon enough, hats and coats hung on hooks by the students in the morning would later be found thrown on the floor. And no matter how many times they were put away, brooms and dustpans stored in a stairway would be found, scattered everywhere.
On more than one occasion, the lid of the school’s heat stove elevated in front of the entire class. The school’s doors would open and close mysteriously, even with the teacher and some of her larger students trying and failing to stop them from moving. The bell on the teacher’s desk would frequently ring on its own when no one was around. It was also reported that the schoolhouse would be buffeted by high winds even in the calmest weather. During real storms, the classroom would be lit by an eerie yellow glow.
The teacher during these strange times was Miss Lucy Perkins. According to an 1873 pamphlet titled "The Haunted Schoolhouse of Newburyport," she was in her early 20s, was "strongly framed and full of vigor," and did not believe in spiritualism, a fad of the times. Sober and straightforward, through all this, Miss Perkins’ behavior showed nothing but courage and concern for her students.
Yet it was she who had the most frightening encounter with the ghost. One day a student saw someone in the school’s vestibule, staring in at the class. On investigation, Miss Perkins discovered a pale, slight boy standing in the far corner of the entryway, “the picture of death on his face.” She said his clothes were in “evident preparation for burial.” In other words, he looked like a corpse.
The boy noiselessly glided past her and began ascending the stairs to the school’s loft, looking over his shoulder, keeping her in sight at all times. A brave woman, the teacher followed him into the attic where, after a while, he simply melted from her view. As it turned out, Miss Perkins and her students would see this boyish vision many more times over the next two years.
All this became too much for the locals and soon enough parents were pulling their kids out of the haunted school. Even the janitor was affected, refusing to go into the schoolhouse alone. Reports of the Charles Street ghost made it into the local newspaper, then into the Boston media and soon enough, people across the country were reading about the young phantom of Newburyport.
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Proving that nothing really changes, the Newburyport city fathers decided to form a committee to see if the Charles Street ghost was real.
The committee included a selectman, a deacon and a newspaper editor, but right away, people questioned its motives. No less than The New York Times reported that while the selectman and the deacon wanted to prove there were no supernatural events, the newspaper editor was most likely “reluctant to spoil a fruitful theme of thrilling paragraphs by metaphorically slaying the ghost that laid such entertaining journalistic eggs.”
It was said that the school’s students were pressured to admit the whole thing was a hoax. Even the esteemed poet Oliver Wendell Holmes got involved, supposedly attempting to bribe one student to admit he was the source of the strange happenings. Years later this student did in fact confess, but a lot of the evidence, eyewitness and otherwise, discounted that the Charles Street Schoolhouse haunting was some elaborate prank. As supernatural expert Jill Stefko wrote of the case: “It would not be possible for one person to cause all the events at the schoolhouse.”
After some hemming and hawing, the committee eventually declared that no ghost existed. But its findings convinced no one and were immediately discounted. Public sentiment remained with Lucy Perkins and her students, simply because so many people had seen evidence of the haunting with their own eyes.
In 1875, the weird happenings stopped just as quickly as they began. The ghost went wherever ghosts go and things in the schoolhouse returned to normal. The old building was later converted to a residential house and latter day owners reported no unusual goings-on within.
But the Charles Street ghost did put Newburyport on the map back then, and on the lips of newspaper readers across the country. As another report put it, no citizen of Newburyport could travel anywhere in the United States for years afterward without being asked about the Charles Street ghost.
Which got us thinking. In these times of woeful economic uncertainty, with sky-high gas prices possibly reducing the number of travelers visiting our fair city, maybe recruiting another poltergeist wouldn’t be a bad idea, if just to keep the tourist trade humming.
For as The New York Times concluded back in 1873: “Newburyport enjoys the sudden notoriety which it has achieved. Visitors are gathering in hopes of sharing the privilege of gazing upon the schoolhouse ghost. Newspapers are making the name of the quiet New England village familiar all over the continent. And Newburyport, proud of its sudden fame, hugs the youthful spectre to its bosom and will not lightly listen to any scheme that would deprive it of its precious spook.”
(Original headline: Strange doings on Charles Street )
