Copp’s Hill

Copp’s Hill Burial Ground is a small cemetery, but in its time across from Bunker Hill, the cemetery has had almost 350 years to collect a prodigious number of corpses, ghosts and strange ambiance. So many bodies have been buried here that the overcrowded cemetery has long since lost track of who most of its dead are. Many of them were unearthed and reburied elsewhere to make room. Other dead had no markers of their own, like the thousands of African American workers buried there. It’s rumored that, desperate for room, the gravediggers crushed the corpses of the poor to a broken pulp that would allow mass internments to take up less space.

Other indignities plagued the graves. In 1775, the British set up their artillery in their midst, defacing markers that belonged to the Sons of Liberty and breaking other headstones in the violence of the war. In the 1800s, popular rumor accused the cemetery’s custodians of purchasing tombs from the indigent relatives of the deceased, hiding the corpses deep underground and then reselling the tombs. The cemetery’s sextons allegedly ground away the old names over and over again, leaving anonymous layers of the desecrated dead.

Many of the remaining markers have simply worn and broken with the weight of centuries, but many famous tombs remain. The best-known is that of the Mather family; spiritualist and Salem Witch Trial judge Cotton Mather is buried here with his father and son.

The Mather tomb is only one aspect of the cemetery’s occult significance. Overlooking the Charles River, the burial ground rests on one of the three hills of Boston proper, making it a natural center of geomantic power. On adjacent Bunker Hill, the obelisk captures the gaze of onlookers (see The Austere Stone of Gilead), and the historic Freedom Trail leads to its Charlestown gates. Between the tomb of the witch hunter, the cemetery’s natural significance and the resonance left by the American Revolution, Copp’s Hill Burial Ground has become a formidable place of supernatural power, but all of these influences have poured into a center of death and desecration.

By day, Copp’s Hill is merely dilapidated. By night, it has secrets and power to share.

Dead Secrets

By far, the most common reason to visit Copp’s Hill at night is to commune with the dead. Some mages do this as a regular, ritualistic practice, but others are more pragmatic — for the dead know what the living forget.

Many of the gravestones are too worn to read, and some of them have been defaced or even re-used, so the curious might need to do some historical research to find out whether or not their target is even buried in Copp’s Hill. On the other hand, not all queries require a specific person. There are countless laborers and tradesman buried in the cemetery who can provide an eyewitness account of what’s happened to Boston through the ages.

Ghosts rarely give anything away free, and most of them value services that cause them to be remembered in some way (by which they gain Essence). As a rule, the older the ghost is, the more obscure his legacy, so doing as he asks may require more investigation than finding him in the first place. Some mages just prefer to use occult force, but ghosts tend to be very, very good at avenging such slights.

Under Black Fog

Copp’s Hill is a place of power and death, hosting an underground 4-dot Hallow. But that power has a price, because countless ghosts have arisen out of their insulted graves to haunt Twilight.

One side effect of this is that at night, eyes attuned to Twilight see the names erased from desecrated gravestones sit beside their contemporary counterparts. The faint outlines of new markers appear to honor paupers’ graves or more obscure figures. In the distance, the Bunker Hill Monument glows with a faint red light.

If a mage (or other being) crosses into the Shadow Realm, the graveyard’s dimensions warp to several times their actual size. In the Shadow Realm, it takes a full hour of walking to reach the other side. Visitors are diverted by rows of black, twisted trees and hemmed in by mausoleums that don’t exist in the physical world.

Petty death-spirits roam the graveyard. They have a symbiotic relationship with the Twilight ghosts on the other side of the Gauntlet. When the ghosts terrify trespassers, the spirits benefit from the resonance of mortal fear. While the ghosts wish to be remembered, the spirits need compatible Essence to survive. Unfortunately, as Copp’s Hill has aged, it’s been regarded more as a sterile historical site than a necropolis. Conceptual-spirits greedy for Essence with the tang of scholarship have made forays into the graveyard, but the death-spirits have thus far preserved their territory. Some desperate inhabitants have devoured the invaders, creating misshapen conglomerates of remembrance and mortality. These beings shuffle along in anachronistic costume, uttering their threats in the form of historical allusions.

Mages who avoid the predators above might find a way into the Shadow Realm cemetery’s tunnels. Some of them look as if they’ve been mined for wells. Others seem to have been created to contain the crush of bodies or are the remnants of long-withered springs. Those mages searching among the roots of the black trees or for tombs with doors ajar can usually find an entrance.

Ephemeral visitors discover that the tunnels can stretch as far as the visitors can walk or crawl. Some of the tunnels are small, earthen holes that threaten to collapse if a mages moves too suddenly. Other tunnels are tall enough to walk through and, by appearance, shored up with the crushed bones of the dead; or they are the subterranean chambers of mausoleums, grander than they ever would be in the “real” world. A few tunnels even lead to the abandoned basements of the North Side’s oldest buildings.

While ghosts may wander the Twilight field above, the Shadow Realm tunnels constitute a virtual necropolis unto itself. More powerful spirits lair here in the company of mindless spirit-worms and beetles.

Why do mages dare these hazards? Beneath the ground, the cemetery’s Hallow bubbles forth power in the form of black, bitter water. In the material realm, the Hallow is an underground spring that moves from place to place, but, in the Shadow Realm, it appears in a tunnel or chamber. Mage Sight can track the location, but, unless the mage enters the Shadow Realm to collect its Mana, she has to dig or rely on Space magic. One method attracts mundane attention (and that of the Twilight ghosts), and the other disturbs the underground spirits.

Even though it would otherwise perfectly suit Moros mages, they have never been able to secure the spring or burial ground for themselves, because the ghosts will not tolerate any extended nightly presence except outside the cemetery’s very edges. Schooled by local legends or direct, frightening experience, security guards eventually learn to keep to this route on their patrols.

Otherwise, the ghosts themselves can benefit mages. Leaving aside the possibility of using Death magic to enslave the ghosts, the ghosts’ memories can provide vital clues for a cabal studying Boston’s secret history. Over the years, many mages have claimed to have met Cotton Mather’s specter, who variously fought them until destroyed, blessed them with a supernatural boon, led them from danger or told them some sort of secret about Boston’s arcane past.

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