Roaming The Crypts Below Boston's North Church

One If By Land, Two If By Sea.

As our guide spoke these words I recognized them in the dusty, high-school part of my brain, but I never could have placed where they were from. Some old poem by some old, bearded poet would've been my guess - and surprisingly I'd have been right - but I didn't know any of this until our recent trip to Boston's North Church. This phrase represented a warning, one that was memorialized in the poem Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. One if by land warned that if the British soldiers were attacking by land one light would be lit in the church's steeple, and two if by sea warned that the British were attacking by the quicker route of rowing across the Charles River. Two is the number of lanterns that hung from the steeple on April 18th, 1775, and with this warning Paul Revere and over thirty men on horseback (I'd been misled in school, it wasn't just Paul Revere himself) spread word all the way from Connecticut to New Hampshire of the British attack.

This historical church broadcast that warning over 200 years ago, and although the original steeple has long since toppled in a storm, the group who restored it only adds to the lore of the story.

The tower was our first stop upon entering the church, and because we'd signed up for the behind the scenes tour we were able to bypass the commoners and head up this rickety staircase marked no admittance.

Ascending into a steeple that had touches of both historical times and modern day, we next learned about the specialized art of bell ringing. This steeple has six bells, and you'd better make sure the phrase Master Bell-Ringer appears somewhere on your resume if you hope to put your hands on these ropes. At this church at least, ringing the bells is like playing an instrument, something each person trains at and is privileged to be chosen for. Their bell-songs are scripted, and together the band rings their music throughout the city at specific times.

Music lessons complete, it was now time for the real reason I'd taken a day off from work to come battle the crazies of Boston's rush hour.

On to the crypts.

Beginning in the 1700's it was common practice for North Church to bury its dead underneath the building, and today an estimated 1,100 bodies (nope, no exact count) are sealed in vaults that hold an average of forty bodies each. That's pretty efficient packing given the size of this empty crypt we saw, which I only dared enter because there was no door on it for Tina to seal.

Occupied crypts were marked by small doors, which lined both sides of a corridor that ran square throughout the basement.

Sometime around when the civil war was heating up the city decided maybe this wasn't the most sanitary thing people could be doing with the dead, and they ordered a stop to the practice. No more bodies were to be buried indoors. Not willing to give up the revenue stream so quickly, however - since the crypts made it easy to discard of old remains and make room for new ones, more and more often the church's larger doners - they ignored the city and continued stuffing their crypts with fresh bodies. This eventually led to the city entering the church and sealing the crypt doors with concrete, forcibly putting an end to the practice.

Although most of the concrete is gone today some crypts have only partially crumbled, revealing how the city tried to hide them so many years ago.

Exiting the crypts and returning to both sunlight and present day America, we continued our afternoon by visiting the main section of the church and its unique seating arrangement. This layout reminded me of a cubicle farm I once worked in, the memory of which gave me a nastier chill than any of the crypts.

On our way back to the car we made one last stop at a place that had caught our eye earlier, the church's cemetery, and there we found this final curiosity. Nearly every one of these old gravestones was adorned with a skull and crossbones, much like the one in this picture below. I don't yet know the significance of this (other than the obvious), but on a day whose theme ran heavy with the macabre, we couldn't think of a more fitting way to end our visit.

Links:
North Church Behind The Scenes Tours

Curious Graves - Captain Jones' Leg

Twenty-seven states in America have a town or a city named Washington, and until a few months ago I never knew that New Hampshire was part of that list. If we hadn't been on the hunt for a particular gravestone recently I would still be ignorant of that piece of trivia.

The grave we were looking for belonged to Captain Samuel Jones, a man who moved to the rural town of Washington, NH in the year 1800. Various accounts describe that in 1804 Jones was helping to move a building when an accident occurred. (The fact that two hundred years ago people were moving a building without heavy equipment is something these other authors took in stride, but I'll get my head around that one another day.) During this relocation Jones' leg became pinned between the building and a fence, mangling it so badly he had to have it amputated.

Captain Jones then did what any reasonable person would do with a limb they'd lost in a violent accident, he held a funeral for it and buried it in the town's graveyard.

We went searching for this gravestone knowing only that it was somewhere in the town of Washington. Being such a small place - population just over 2,000 - there weren't many cemeteries to deal with, so our master plan was simply to drive into town and begin searching each cemetery row by row. The only specific clue we had was that if you stood at Captain Jones gravestone and looked up you would see a large ball gravestone on top of the hill, with the punchline being that the ball gravestone is the plot-marker for the Ball family grave.

It wasn't until the third and final cemetery that we found the Ball gravestone, and we thanked them for the laugh.

With the last name Ball, what else would you choose for a gravestone?

But we still didn't find the Capt. Jones' grave, and worrying it was turning out to be a myth I began convincing myself that the Ball's gravestone had still been worth making the drive for. There were farther away sections of this cemetery, though - as in across the road and down the street, beyond where it was supposedly located - but going all in with our search we spread out to cover them as well.

It was there that I stumbled across this smaller stone, and it had me at "Capt."

We later realized that the author we'd been relying on had never visited the site himself, because Jones' gravestone and the Ball family gravestone are nowhere in sight of each other. That was okay though, half the joy has always been in hunting these treasures out the hard way. My excitement from seeing it after two hours of searching was far greater than it would have been if I'd simply strolled up to it by GPS. After taking turns posing and chuckling over the fact that it actually does exist, Tina and I had a very satisfying 90 minute drive home.

Yes, we drove a 3-hour round trip to find this gravestone

Related Links:
Curious Graves - Persecuted For Wearing The Beard

Searching for the Paddock Mineshaft - Part 1

Had video of it not existed online I would have considered it the stuff of legends. A tunnel leading hundreds of feet into the mountain, another inaccessible one dropping 50 feet into the earth before disappearing sideways into the darkness. These were mineshafts I'd expect to find in the hills of Arizona, not in our little corner of the country, and I was determined to find them. But other than the video - which smartly kept their location secret - I'd only been able to muster up a single lead, directions to an old mining road in northern New Hampshire where we were to park at a red/white trim cabin, find a trail alongside it, and locate the mineshaft a quarter of the ways up the mountain.

Let's start with the basics - mountains are big, and even finding a giant hole in the earth is daunting when you don't have any idea where you should be looking on one. But deciding that the bigger the reward the bigger the challenge we were willing to undertake, a handful of us made the 2-1/2 hour drive north early one Sunday morning. We found the cabin and trail next to it, but within minutes were hit with our first pickle. The trail branched off, and not just once but several times. Figuring our best odds would be sticking to the main trail, we followed it up as we scoured the mountainside for the opening. Even after well past the quarter-way mark we stuck with it, and the longer we searched the more convinced we became that it was probably back down off one of the side trails. Partly out of frustration and partly to show off that look, I'm not tired, I ran the final portion to the summit. There was nothing even resembling a mineshaft.

With four of us in the group our next idea was to police-sweep the face of the mountain as we worked our way back down. Spreading out to where we could just see one another we bushwhacked through thorns and muck, occasionally calling out in the hopes that something looked promising. Nothing did, and we eventually found ourselves right back on the bottom trail, sweaty and dejected. We'd been at this a couple hours now and decided to start heading home and try our luck another day. My friend Dave had a little more ambition than the rest of us, though, and as we trudged back to the car he made several quick off-trail searches, never giving up. It was on one of these dart-offs that we heard him call out how beautiful it was, and that's how minutes later we found ourselves standing at the entrance to the Paddock mineshaft.

Although we went on to explore the entire tunnel that day, what happened next put an end to my picture taking and turned my beautiful iPhone into a $600 paperweight. As you watch this video listen for my buddy's eerie premonition, as well as my daughter Madison's true priorities at the end when all hell broke loose.

This cesspool sits stagnant for months on end and is home to the digestive tracks of countless frogs and other small animals, and I'd just spent a ten count marinating in it. The gang helped me out and I was able to bypass it and continue into the mine, and although later they wouldn't let me into the truck until I'd taken a water bottle shower, the day was still a great success. So much so that we revisited the site just a few weeks later when I was able to properly document the visit, starting with our extremely careful crossing of the mouth.

For all you arachnophobes out there, the waterhole wasn't the only deathtrap waiting for us at the entrance. We counted probably two-dozen of these spiders along the opening, and each one guarded a white nest that I don't ever want to know what contained. If one of those things had popped open I was ready to jump back into the sinkhole for safety.

Once you're about 50 feet deep the tunnel is mostly dry, and unless your name is Barry you can safely walk along without having to worry about cracking your head.

It doesn't take long before the fading entrance has you feeling completely cut off from the outside world. In addition to arachnophobes and cesspoolophobes, claustrophobes are another group that would do better to stay home the days we go on these expeditions.

Abruptly we reached the end of the tunnel, and it almost hit me as a letdown. There were no ancient treasures, no lost city of gold, just a rock wall where a hundred years ago men had stopped digging and packed up their tools forever.

The Paddock mineshaft was a fascinating discovery, and one that only get's better. After reviewing our pictures that night, Barry noticed differences between the opening of our mineshaft and the opening of the mineshaft on YouTube. We contacted the group who posted that video, and after comparing notes pieced together the fact that these are two completely different shafts about a mile apart. We had found a tunnel they didn't know about, and their tunnel was still waiting in the woods to be explored.

And you know what that meant ... another trip to the Paddock Mines would soon be in the works.