America’s Haunted Hotels: Charlesgate Hotel

Like prisons, hospitals and schools hotels see the entire spectrum of human emotion. Love/hate, joy/depression and everything in between perhaps this is why the Gideon Society saw fit to furnish all hotel rooms with a New Testemant because more often than one may think, hotels are one of the main places a desperate person goes to end their life and Boston’s Charlesgate Hotel is no different. When considering the Charlesgate hotel most researchers believe that the hotel was bad news from the very beginning. The hotel was designed and built by eccentric architect, J. Pickering Putnam in the late 1800s and many believe that when Putnam was designing the building he specifically chose materials that would attract and capture paranormal energies, sort of like the building in the original “Ghostbusters” movie and like the designer of that building, Putnam was consiered by many to be a person who dabbled in the darker side of magic and religion.

When the Charlesgate opened it was considered to be the most luxurious hotel on the eastern seaboard. The rich and famous seemed to flock to the new hotel and those clientele who shared in Putnam’s dabblings in the occult. Many reports came out the hotel in it’s first fifty years of black masses and satanic worship that allegedly included animal as well as human sacrifice. Although the Hotel was considered the jewel of the historic city of Boston, the suicide rate was astronomical and reports of guests witnessing what appeared to be giant black forms roaming the halls and attacking unsuspecting guests as they attempted to get a good night’s sleep in the seemingly normal hotel were commonplace.

In 1947, the Charlesgate closed it’s doors as a hotel amid rumors of scandal and reopened as the male dormitory for prestigious Boston University. For twenty-six years the former hotel played host to young men who were leaving from home possibly for the first time to attend the university. And like it’s days as a hotel the male dormitory was the site of many suicides. One such student wrote in his suicide note that he could no longer take the voices he heard in his head telling him to do wicked and evil deeds and he rather end it all before he did something he would regret for the rest of his life. Other students who lived in the dorm claimed to be attacked by large black masses that hovered over their beds as they slept. Whatever had haunted the Charlesgate was now tormenting the young men of Boston University.

After many protests of the building being haunted by something evil, Boston University, closed the doors of the Dormitory and the building that was considered to be the most exclusive hotel in Boston became nothing more than a haven for drug addicts and the homeless and it seemed to attract those who worshipped the prince of darkness. One of the most famous hauntings of the building concerns a little girl who either fell down or was discarded down an elevator shaft. Many witnesses have reported seeing the apparition of the young girl playing on the sixth floor while others have claimed to see her spirit fall down the elevator shaft and hearing her screams for help. No one is certain who this little girl was some believe she was someone who died when the hotel was in service others believe she may have been a victim of the reputed human sacrifices committed at the building.

Despite the reports of something weird going on in the building in 1981, Emerson College purchased the building and once again the buidling became the home of College students. Bizarre accidents and suicides were common place in the building. One student in deperation practically severed his head with a butcher knife in a grisly suicide while others reported being violently pushed down stairs by an unseen force and others reported seeing dark forms rushing in and out of rooms that gave whoever witnessed them a feeling of deep dread. Whatever dark force called the former Charlesgate hotel home was there to stay and was not playing games.

Today the former luxury hotel are condominiums and those who live there still report strange things but not of the caliber that those who were unfortunate to stay in the building in former years reported. Residents mostly report cold breezes when no windows or doors are open and the occassional phantom footsteps on the stairs or in their units. Perhaps whatever dark force calls the building home is laying in wait for the proper time to spring forth and make the tenent’s life a living hell.

The former Charlesgate hotel would seem to play host to all four of the major forms of hauntings, residual, intelligent, poltergeist and the worst in-human(demonic) haunting. What would possess J. Pickering Putnam to design a buidling that would attract such unwanted attention? Perhaps it was that which possessed him that prompted Putnam to create this monstrosity of consumerism for Putnam was believed to be possessed by a the devil himself.

Rick E. Hale
t_seeker@hotmail.com

Note: It is mine and my wife’s sixth wedding aniverssary, so I will be gone for about a week, however when I return I promise to bring you more haunted hotels. thanks for reading.