Boston's Lady in Black
by Edward Rowe Snow
In Mysterious New England (ISBN: 0-911658-86-6)
Edward Rowe Snow, who successfully ked the campaign to preserve Fort Warren, tells about the real Lady in Black - whose ghost has appeared to visitors of the Fort on 28 occasions!
Possibly the greatest unsolved mystery in New England history which includes ghosts and mystic connotations involves a girl who arrived in Boston Harbor from Crawfordville, Georgia, during the Civil War. Her name was Mrs. Andrew Lanier.
Andrew Lanier was a young Southern soldier. When called away to fight for the South in the Civil War, he hurried to the home of his intended. He asked that a quick wartime marriage be arranged, as he would soon leave for what might prove to be the duration of the conflict. After a moment of reflection, she agreed and the ceremony took place on June 28, 1861. Within forty-eight hours he departed for battle.
A few months later, Lanier was captured and sent with many other Southern soldiers to the Northern Bastille in the middle of Boston Harbor known as Fort Warren.
The fortification, located on George's Island, seven miles out to sea from the City of Boston, had a prison which was known as the Corridor of Dungeons. After a week in the Corridor of Dungeons, Andrew decided to write a letter to his bride. He told her of his capture, the location of his incarceration, and ended the letter with endearing words of his deep love and terrible loneliness.
Passed through the battle lines, the letter was eventually received by the girl. On learning of her husband's fate, she determined to leave her pleasant home, travel to Massachusetts, get to Fort Warren and, in some way, free her husband.
Mrs. Lanier got in touch with a blockade runner who agreed to take her up the coast. She then obtained a suit of men's clothes and an old pepper box pistol, after which Mrs. Lanier had her hair cut short. Two-and-a-half months later, the blockade runner set the "young man" ashore at Cape Cod. There she stayed in the home of a Southerner, and a week later she had established herself in Hull, Massachusetts, at the house of another Southern sympathizer. Now less than a mile away from George's Island, for the next few days she studied the fort through a telescope until she had entirely familiarized herself with the section of the bastion which held the famous Corridor of Dungeons.
On the first stormy night, January i5, 1862, when the rain was coming down with such driving force that it obscured all vision, Mrs. Lanier's Southern host rowed her across to the island and left her on the beach.
Crouching on the shore, she watched the two nearest sentries, soaked to the skin, methodically patrolling their posts. They strode slowly and automatically toward each other, and then, turning on their heels, walked slowly away. She estimated that there was almost a minute and a half after they turned when she could run between them.
Watching alertly, Mrs. Lanier grasped the bundle which held her pistol and a short-handled pick. At the exact moment when the two min began to walk in opposite directions, she stole toward the spot where they had met. A minute later she had reached a hiding place in a tangle of shrubbery a short distance from them. She lay there in the rain until they came back. They met and walked off again, back to back. Then she rose quickly and scrambled over the cover-face outside the bastion where her husband was imprisoned. Except for the sentries some distance away, the entire fort seemed asleep.
Standing there alone, she recalled a tune which she and her husband had used to signal to each other. She began to whistle it, softly at first and gradually louder. There was no answer. Could it be that her husband had been transferred to another Yankee prison since she had received his letter? A score of possibilities flashed through her mind.
She decided to risk everything by giving a final, shrill, piercing whistle. When she had finished she threw herself down on the banking. There was complete silence for several minutes, but finally an answering whistle came from within the fort. Looking up cautiously at the walls of the bastion, she noticed that there were narrow slits in the stone some distance above her. From one of these slits a rope of cloth emerged and dropped lower and lower until she could grasp the end.
"Hang on," cried a voice, and a moment later she had been pulled up, bundle and all, to the seven-inch slit in the granite wall. Several hands lifted her up so that she could squeeze through the tiny aperture. Soon she was in the arms of her husband.
A short time later, inside conferences were held among the six hundred Confederate prisoners inside the Corridor of Dungeons. With the arrival of the girl and the short-handled pick, they saw the chance they had been waiting for. Instead of digging a tunnel out of the fort and escaping aboard the schooner which Southern sympathizers would provide, they decided upon a bolder idea.
They would tunnel from one of the dungeons located at an outer corner of the bastion and dig toward the inner part of the fort. They planned to come up under the parade ground, where they could break into the arsenal, arm themselves, capture the small garrison of eighty Union soldiers, and take over the fort. Then they would climb up on the parapets, turn the 248 guns of Fort Warren against Boston and besiege the city. This plan, they believed in their enthusiasm, would change the entire course of the Civil War, and victory for the South would be assured.
Beginning work on the tunnel before the guards arrived for the morning check-up, the prisoners piled earth in front of the tunnel's mouth in the dungeon. Whenever the guards appeared a group of prisoners sat down on the fresh earth, completely concealing the tunnel from view.
As the weeks went by, the tunnel was lengthened and its direction was plotted and replotted. The earth they dug was laboriously carried back into the Corridor of Dungeons by the prisoners, who used their shirts and jackets as containers. Each windy night they threw the dirt out of the narrow slits in the walls of the bastion. Finally, those who were engineering the project believed that the tunnel had reached a point between the granite wall of the fort and the center of the parade ground.
The next night the prisoners were to make the final upward thrust toward the surface of the parade ground. At one o'clock in the morning, a young lieutenant swung the pick vigorously against the top of the tunnel. The pick went through the earth and smashed against the granite wall of the keep which is inside the parade ground. The plotters had miscalculated.
Unfortunately, one of the sentries guarding the area heard the sharp sound of the pick below and suspected what had happened. He shouted a warning to the next sentry, who passed the word down the line to the guardhouse. The sergeant in charge visited the scene and heard the sentry's story. Immediately the entire fort was on the alert.
At that time, the commanding officer of Fort Warren was Colonel Justin E. Dimmock of Marblehead, veteran artillery expert, who was formerly in charge of Fortress Monroe. Ten minutes after the sentry heard the suspicious noise on the parade ground, Colonel Dimmock made a surprise visit to the Corridor of Dungeons. There he caught several of the prisoners scattering dirt outside the walls.
One by one the Southerners were taken out into the dry moat, until the Corridor of Dungeons appeared completely empty. But eleven prisoners were missing when roll call was taken. A careful examination of the corner dungeon revealed the opening of the tunnel.
Colonel Dimmock shouted down to those in the shaft. "You have failed, so you might as well come out and surrender."
The unhappy Southerners crawled out of the tunnel, all except Lanier and his wife. After a few words with her husband, the girl decided to make a final attempt for freedom. Her plan was for her young soldier husband to crawl out and quietly surrender. Afterwards, they hoped, the guards would count the prisoners. Finding them all accounted for, the guards might relax their vigilance. The wife would then appear behind the Union soldiers, cock her pistol, and order them to surrender. It was a radical plan, born of desperation.
The young husband emerged from the tunnel. The guards counted the prisoners, found that they were all present, and began moving the last of the Southern prisoners to a new place of confinement. Colonel Dimmock announced that in the morning the tunnel would be filled up and sealed off with cement. Then, just as the prisoners were leaving the dungeons, the girl sprang out of the tunnel and ordered the guards to surrender.
"I've a pistol and I know how to use it," she shouted.
Colonel Dimmock thought quickly. He advanced slowly towards the girl, his hands raised in surrender. Slowly his men followed him, forming a circle around her. Then, with a rapid motion, the Colonel hit against the barrel of the gun, knocking it to one side as the girl fired. The pistol was old and rusty, and it exploded, a fragment of the metal passed through the brain of the young husband.
Two days later the soldier's lifeless body was buried in the lonely cemetery of the fort. The following week his desolated widow was sentenced to be executed as a spy.
On the morning of February 2, 1862, the girl's guards asked if she had a final request. "Whv, yes," she replied. "I'm tired of wearing this suit of men's clothes. I'd like to put on a gown once more before I die."
A search of the entire fort revealed only some black robes which had been worn during a theatrical performance given by the First Corps of Cadets the summer before. It was in this costume that the lady was hanged an hour later. That afternoon her body was cut down and placed in the Fort Warren cemetery by the side of her husband.
As time passed, the guards at the fort were shipped away, and recruits arrived to take their places. But the key men, eight in number, stayed on. One of them, a private named Richard Cassidy, had witnessed the execution of the Southern girl and it was his duty night after night to patrol the cover-face where she had been hanged. The other men joked with him, warning him to watch out for the "Lady in Black." He laughed with them, but actually he was not too pleased with his duty.
One night, seven weeks after the execution, Private Cassidy came running toward the guardhouse, screaming at the top of his voice. Finally, he was calm enough to tell his story. He had been patrolling his post and was thinking about the execution when suddenly two hands came out of the night and fastened around his throat. He squirmed and twisted until he faced the being who was trying to choke him and saw to his amazement that it was none other than the Lady in Black. Then he summoned all his strength, broke free from her grasp and ran for help.
The guardhouse rocked with laughter as Cassidy finished his story. but it was no laughing matter to Cassidy either then or the following morning when they sentenced him to thirty days in that same guard-house for deserting his assigned and official post.
Ever since that night, it is said, the Lady in Black appears from time to time. In the winter of 1891 four officers walking out through the massive sally port looked ahead into the fresh snow and saw several foot-prints made by a woman's slipper. As no woman was then living at the fort, they held the Lady in Black responsible.
During World War II, one unfortunate sentry went stark, raving mad when ordered to patrol the area where the execution had occurred. He was placed in the island hospital to recover, but his condition went from bad to worse, and he was finally taken to an institution, where he is to this very day.
A few years after World War II ended, non-commissioned officers were allowed to have their wives and families living at the fort. One woman, known for her practical jokes, heard about the Lady in Black and decided to play a prank on her next-door neighbor. She removed her false teeth, smudged her face with charcoal and let her long, black hair down over her shoulders. Completely dressed in black, she threw a huge black shawl over her head and started for her neighbor's back door.
Not realizing what a terrible sight she presented, the prankster knocked on the door and, as it was opened, she bared her toothless gums and screamed. Her neighbor gave a single horrified glance and slumped to the floor in a dead faint. It was fully half an hour before the poor woman recovered her senses. During that time this modern Lady in Black vowed that if her friend recovered she would swear off practical jokes forever.
A more recent story involving the Lady in Black occurred in 1947. It was told to me by Captain Charles I. Norris of Towson, Maryland. Captain Norris was alone on the island one night, reading in the first-floor library of his house on the post, when something tapped him on the right shoulder. He turned, but there was no one in the room. As he began reading again, he felt another definite tap on his left shoulder. Again there was no one to be seen. Then the upstairs phone rang. Leisurely putting down his magazine, he climbed the stairs and picked up the telephone. A man's voice said, "Operator speaking. Number, please."
Captain Norris asked the operator who it was that had been calling him. "Why," answered the operator, "your wife answered and took the message, sir!"
"My wife!" cried the startled captain. "My wife is not on the island."
Captain Norris was completely bewildered and went downstairs to sink exhausted into a chair. There were no more manifestations, but he decided that only the Lady in Black could account for the tapping and the mysterious telephone call.
Since 1946 thousands and thousands of interested visitors have gone ashore at Fort Warren and walked through the Corridor of Dungeons. Although the graves of the Lady in Black and her husband have long since been moved from the island, one of the commanding officers had a spurious tomb built into the floor of one of the casemates at the Corridor of Dungeons. Originally planned as a surprise to the lady guests at an officers' dance, the casket, which is merely a great wooden box set flush in the dirt of the casemate, proved such an overwhelming success that it has been allowed to stay there ever since.
Whenever newcomers enter the Corridor of Dungeons, the ritual first performed at the officers' dance is repeated. A small soldier, or perhaps a girl, is dressed in black and taken up to the casemate ahead of the others. The "Lady" of the particular occasion is placed in the coffin and the lid is closed over her. The unsuspecting guests enter the case-mate and gather around the story-teller, who, with proper embellishments, tells the tragic history of the Lady in Black. At the end of the story, and usually with a flourish, the narrator swings open wide the cover of the casket, whereupon, with a blood-curdling scream, the Lady in Black leaps to her feet. Visitors who have been fortunate enough to see this performance are never likely to forget it.
