The Orphan of Cemetery Hill - Hester Fox Page 0,108
grew stronger and brighter, gradually enveloping Rose’s form until Tabby had to look away.
Her relief that Rose had found peace was tinged with melancholy for the life on earth that had been so violently interrupted. Would Rose and Caleb have married had she not been murdered? Would she have borne children? Written poetry? Become one of the most sparkling socialites in Boston? Tabby pushed the thoughts away; it did no good to dwell on what might have been.
When nothing remained of Rose except the lingering scent of flowers, Tabby slowly opened her eyes and came back to the land of the living. Ahead of her, Mary-Ruth and Alice were laughing with heads bowed closed together at some private joke. Caleb took her arm and tucked it into his elbow, and they passed out of the misty cemetery and down the hill, leaving the dead to their eternal slumber.
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Keep reading for an excerpt from The Witch of Willow Hall by Hester Fox.
Author Note
While exploring an old cemetery on the North Shore of Massachusetts, I discovered an informational plaque that mentioned a local man who had been found guilty of robbing corpses for medical research in the 1810s. Intrigued, I began researching the history of grave robbing in Massachusetts, and learned that it persisted much later into the nineteenth century than I had originally realized. While Mr. Whitby and his exploits are fictional, Harvard really did have a macabre history of employing grave robbers to provide their medical students with bodies for dissection. The resurrection men and the Spunker Club were real, and took their job of procuring the bodies of the recently deceased seriously. In 1999, construction workers at Harvard found the bones of at least eleven individuals, believed to have been deposited in a basement after dissection in the early 1840s.
I based Tabby’s “Cemetery Hill” on Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston’s North End, a quiet cemetery that sits on a hill on the historic Freedom Trail. Copp’s Hill Burying Ground is the final resting place of many notable early Bostonians, as well as over one thousand free and enslaved Black peoples (most in unmarked graves). After the end of slavery in Massachusetts in the late eighteenth century, the Copp’s Hill area became an enclave of free Black people, known as New Guinea. While these people were largely displaced by the influx of Italian and Irish immigrants, the Copp’s Hill area was still home to a small African American community through the late-nineteenth century. Today you can visit the African Meeting House on the Freedom Trail to learn more about the history of the African American community in Boston.
In 1848, the Fox sisters of Rochester, New York, became a national sensation after word of their uncanny ability to channel the messages of the dead spread across the country. Soon other mediums, such as Cora Hatch (nee Scott), would mesmerize audiences with their abilities to speak on esoteric subjects while in a trance. Boston, already a hotbed for new philosophies and movements, was soon swept up in the craze that was known as spiritualism.
Spiritualism only increased in popularity as the Civil War raged. No one in the United States was left untouched by the conflict, and many were desperate to reach loved ones who had died in battle. Even Mary Todd Lincoln visited the spirit photographer William H. Mumler, and received a photograph that appeared to show her late husband hovering reassuringly over her shoulder.
In 1854 in Lynn, Massachusetts, a spiritualist named John Murray Spear claimed to be receiving messages from the spirits of prominent men such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. These spirits advised Spear to build a “mechanical messiah” that would usher in a new utopian age of enlightenment. An angry mob ultimately destroyed the metal being. It’s a wild story, and if you’re ever in Lynn, you can still visit the tower where these events transpired.
Many spiritualists and mediums of this time period were publicly disproven or revealed to be frauds, with Maggie Fox confessing that the supernatural sounds and messages from the other side had been manufactured by her and her sisters (though she would recant this confession a year later). Mumler likewise was put on trial for fraud, and though he was acquitted, his career never recovered.
I first learned of Mary-Ruth’s profession of “watching” from a Splinter article by Isha Aran titled “The Death Midwife: Women Were the Original Undertakers” (it was published online October 23, 2015, and I highly recommend giving it