Tag Archives: old house

Boston Tour Ghost

Age: 49

In the spring of the year 2000, I was on tour with my band Del Rey, alongside our friends’ band, Planes Mistaken for Stars, all up and down the east coast for a few weeks. And on this tour, we had a show one night at this place called the Middle East in Boston. We do the usual, we both play our sets, great show, hang out afterwards. The night gets, you know, a little bit later, and it’s time to head out and find a place to crash. We usually all get hotel rooms together, or, you know, crash in somebody’s house on couches and sleeping bags or wherever we can. This particular night, me and one of the guys from the other band, Jamie, uh, were also friends with another guy who was an old roommate of ours back in Chicago, who now lived in Boston and wanted he and I to come stay at his house and like hang and catch up or whatever in a non-punk rock show venue. So after the show, Jamie and I get in the car with our old friend, his name’s Jody, and go to stay at the apartment that he’s now living in in a neighborhood in Boston. As we get to his apartment, this is late at night. Uh, it’s a really old neighborhood in Boston, and the apartment buildings that are on the street all look very, very old, probably like they were originally built in sometime in the late 1700s. So we go up to this, uh, upstairs apartment in this old building, and we’re getting ready to just hang and chat a little bit before we crash. We’re all kind of hanging out in his room, listening to music, talking, smoking cigarettes. And he tells us about all the weird things that have been happening in his apartment. He’s telling us about a picture in the hallway that consistently falls off the wall and onto the floor, in the middle of the night. He’s telling us how this happens on a regular basis. It’s every other night this happens and only at night. And how every time he puts it back on there, he checks the nail, he checks the picture, it’s not too heavy, it’s sturdy, it’s solid. There’s nothing about this picture that should be falling off the wall. Yet it continues to happen. He goes on to explain that other weird things have been happening in this apartment. Things are left in one place but then found randomly in another spot that he knows he didn’t move them to. Things go missing. He hears weird noises, he hears weird voices. Uh, daytime, nighttime, uh, doors open and shut. He kind of continues just telling us about, you know, this list of weird sort of odd happenings in this apartment that he notices are just really regular and starting to creep him out. About two to three minutes after he finishes telling us about these things that are going on in the apartment, something happens. So, we’re sitting in his room, where he’s telling us these stories about the things happening in his apartment. We’re listening to music on a stereo. The door is completely shut, and it shut all the way to where it’s latched inside the strike plate inside of the doorway, whatever you call it. So, it’s caught, so you can’t just push the door open. So, as we’re sitting there, a couple minutes after he finishes telling us this, the doorknob turns, unlatches, opens the door slowly as we all watch it. The three of us each saw that doorknob turn, unlatch and open inward. About the exact same time as that’s happening, the stereo receiver dial, the volume dial, turns itself down all the way to off, which we all also saw in unison. So, these two events happened right before our eyes, and right after he had just finished explaining, all of the weird, creepy, ghostly things that have been happening in this apartment. So we flipped like every light on, run out into the main living room area, kind of just look at each other in shock and disbelief, and awe, and, you know, made sure we all we saw what we saw there, right? So, after a little while, we had to kind of calm down, sort of try to laugh it off or whatever. We had to get some sleep because we had to get up and get off to the next city the next morning. But that’s one, uh that I’ll never forget and it’s uh, I guess a story that all three of us will remember for the rest of our lives.

Context: When is this story told? To whom? Where does it take place? 

The story is told on Tuesday, April 28, 2026 to me by Michael. The story actually takes place in Boston, Massachusetts in the spring of 2000.

Their thoughts: What does the teller think of the story?

Michael mentions that this story still sticks with him to this day and I think he likes re-telling the story because it seems to have really had an impact on him. He also mentions that he has had conversations with the same people who had this experience with him multiple times over the years. As someone who has previously said has a good number of ghostly or creepy stories, he chose this particular one based on his feeling that it was one of the more memorable as well as creepy experiences in his life. 

Your thoughts: what do you think of the story?

I think this story is interesting because it seems to be related to this old late 1700s apartment building in Boston, and hints at something ghostly that could possibly have been happening for over 200 years in this place. I also like that there were three people all experiencing the same odd events simultaneously. I think that might make it more compelling, and even creepier. I also found it interesting that the two ghostly experiences that happened, the door opening and the stereo volume being turned down, both happened after his friend just finished telling them about all the other haunted and ghostly types of things happening in the apartment.

Memorate: A Coworker’s Ghostly Encounter

Context:

Informant N is the collector’s supervisor in the technology department of USC SCA. He is 27 years old and grew up in Denver, Colorado until age 7, when he moved to Sandpoint, Idaho. His father’s family is from the “deep south,” and his mother was “an army brat” who lived mostly near the east coast. N’s family has been in the US “since the mayflower,” and his ancestry is mostly German, Northern English, and Welsh. He now lives in Los Angeles, CA and is a singer/songwriter, as well as an employee of the film school’s technology services.

Text:

Informant: “Okay so when I was a kid, my mom – in the first floor, this was like a three story house, the house was like a hundred years old if not more. Um, classic brick style home, it was in Denver. And there was a doctor who lived in the house with his um… I think she was a distraught person, probably back then. Like she probably had some mental illness that was untreated and you know, back then they kind of skewed those people into obscure…”

Collector: “What year was this?”

Informant: “Oh this was like 30s (…). So she was a well-known pianist at the time and she eventually committed suicide in the house and the house was also a historical site. So the house is old, there have been people who lived there who had some musical connection and there was the suicide and you know… There was a couple times growing up where I would hear the piano play and my sister would hear the piano play while we were upstairs and my mom wasn’t home playing the piano nor was my dad or whatever, or we had a babysitter at the time. So there was just a couple weird moments in that house where the piano would be playing and we’d go downstairs and it would stop playing so whether that’s true or not I don’t know but I remember it and my sister clearly remembers it and to this day it’s very bizarre to me and it makes me feel a little… (*informant trails off*)”

Collector: “How did you find out about the woman who died?”

Informant: “My parents – my mom found out about it after they bought the house. The history of the house.”

Collector: “From who?”

Informant: “I think from a neighbor’s family or something. (…) It was like a local thing so it was kind of weird. (…) The piano that was in the house was over a hundred years old at the time.”

The informant also mentioned that his sister, who was 8 or 9 at the time of the piano incidents, is “still perturbed” by them to this day. He also mentioned that he experienced what he called “typical ghost stuff” – that he would hear dogs barking at nothing, and that one of the room’s in the house (his sister’s room) was specifically colder than others. His family checked and made sure that “the piano wasn’t a player” piano (a self-playing piano), and noted that the music he heard was notably classical, and that the woman who had died was a classical pianist.

Interpretation:

N’s ghost story seems pretty typical upon first glance, but I find it interesting because of both his personal context and folkloric trends in memorates. For one thing, the informant seems to truly believe that all of this happened and that something supernatural was going on because his sister also experienced it. He mentioned her multiple times throughout the story and when he was providing more context, and we’ve talked a number of times about how people tend to believe what their peers, family, friends, etc do. What’s more, his family heard about the woman who supposedly died in the house from a neighbor, making this particular figure almost a local legend. While I wouldn’t label her a full-on urban legend for lack of popularity or name, the story about her being mentally unstable and her death in the house is legend-like. She has the traits of one as a woman believed to be mentally unwell and responsible for a haunted area. The apparent ghost is not necessarily true, but there is a negotiation of sorts about whether to believe it for the informant, his family, and his neighbors. This woman’s story lines up with a lot of what we know about ghosts – having unfinished business of some sort (to play music for others), hauntings that happen when things don’t go as they should (her suicide), and the idea that ghosts’ have property even after death (the piano). This story is definitely a memorate for the informant, who seems unsure whether he believes in ghosts entirely, but is fairly convinced that something happened in this house, and still finds it inexplicable and bizarre 20 years later.

La Casa Matusita C

Nationality: Peruvian
Age: 62
Residence: San Francisco, CA
Performance Date: December 17,2012
Primary Language: Spanish

The American embassy used to be situated in a building directly in front of the Matusita house, and it is said that the legends were all invented and fostered by the American mission so as to prevent people from entering the Matusita house and using it as a site to launch terrorist attacks on the embassy itself (during the late 80s unrest due to the communist Sendero Luminoso).
This version is corroborated by multiple  facts. First, my mother and her coevals heard of the Matusita stories only in the early nineties, and second, as a consular officer herself, she once heard from her peers at the Ministry that the Matusita legends were a product of “Hollywood at its politically finest”.