Last Friday, I closed my laptop and prepared for my hot weekend-night plans: a candlelight crypt tour underneath King’s Chapel in downtown Boston. Romantic, creepy, or insightful? Time would tell.
King’s Chapel already has a sordid history, even before you take the whole crypt thing into account. Located on Tremont Street, the congregation dates to the 1680s and was the first Anglican Church in the city at a time when allegiances to Britain were especially unpopular. Given the whole tyranny thing, no one in Boston would sell the Anglicans any land—so, they usurped half of an existing graveyard, digging up bodies to build their church. Talk about some bad juju!
The adjacent cemetery, now known as King’s Chapel Burial Ground, is Boston’s oldest graveyard. Established in 1630, it served as the resting place for many of the Puritans who died in the initial colonization of Massachusetts, some of whose bodies were exhumed and relocated when the church was first built.
The crypt tour began in the church’s main chapel area, which is completely dark except for candles lit at the pews and central dais. Our funny and informative tour guide gave us the lowdown on King’s Chapel’s disreputable past and we sat, with rapt attention, in the box pews.
“[In this program] visitors can experience King's Chapel in the most historically accurate way,” said Gianna Russi, the director of history programming at the site. “To be able to see it all lit with candles, and go into the crypt and picture how dark it must have been, it really is such a great experience.”
Fun fact: these are the only original box pews left in Boston. (Old North Church’s have been rebuilt over the years.) Visitors are sitting right where their colonial predecessors prayed. Early parishioners would have purchased these pews to raise money for the church, our guide explained. Ideally, they would also own the crypt space below their pew, so that they could commune with their dead without having to go down to the crypt to visit—and in the process, smell them. Remember, these early Anglicans didn’t have embalming practices yet.
Anyway, now it’s time for us to see the crypt. Our group followed the guide along a side corridor out to an exterior set of stairs and toward a low, wooden door leading to the subterranean space. Inside, it's only illuminated by real candles along the floor. Our tour guide occasionally used a flashlight for safety, but mostly left us in the flickering candlelight with the 150 or so bodies that still reside in the crypt.
To be clear, this is not a ghost tour. It’s a history tour that discusses the death and burial rituals of the 17th century and the history of this particular space. It’s very respectful of the dead—which is certainly for the best, because I do not want to be caught in a dark crypt with an angry spirit.
As we walked around, learning about different graves and dwellers, a whiteboard stashed in a corner with cartoon drawings on it cut the tension in the eerie air. Spooky as the tour may be, King’s Chapel is also the site of regular worship and, clearly, Sunday School kids with a sense of humor.
“It’s still a church basement,” our tour guide said, as she ducked under a low-hanging wooden beam.
Church basement it may be, but King’s Chapel is one of only two open-to-the-public crypts left in Boston. The other is at Old North Church.
These tours are a perfect spooky season activity for history buffs, Boston trivia lovers, or scaredy cats like me who can’t handle a full-on haunted house. We may not have addressed any ghostly presences directly, but I won’t pretend like I wasn’t looking over my shoulder for the rest of the night. Here’s hoping the King’s Chapel crypt residents are able to rest in peace.
The King’s Chapel Candlelight Crypt Tours run every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Monday on the half-hour from 5:30–7pm. It’s $15 per person and $12 for students. Tickets are currently available through October 31, but Russi says she plans to extend the tours into November.