The Lady in Black

By Shannon Webber (Summary and Analysis)

This is the story of one crazy girl.

To be young and in love, and in a time of war no less…tragic luck. Particularly if you are referring to the Lady in Black. Her origin is actually quite sweet. She and her husband were married just weeks when he was drafted to fight in the confederate army as a lieutenant during the United States Civil War. Unfortunately for him, he was taken as a prisoner of war after Union army general Ambrose Burnside overtook Roanoke Island in North Carolina. As a prisoner of war the young man was taken to Fort Warren on George’s Island in Boston harbor. Amazingly, the young man succeeded in getting his wife a message through the underground railroad of where he was going. After receiving the message, the young woman journeyed to Hull, Massachusetts where she found a southern sympathizer who decked her out in men’s clothing and gave her a pistol. Then in the dead of night, the young woman rowed herself onto George’s Island in an ill-fated attempt to save her husband.

Upon reaching the island she quickly located her husband and they made a plan to escape via digging a tunnel. Disastrously the noise required in digging a tunnel attracted the attention of Northern soldiers on base, including the Colonel. Upon getting caught the young woman tried to shoot the Colonel but the old gun misfired and killed her husband instead.

The young woman was sentenced to death by hanging, but made one last request, to die in the clothes of a woman. Upon searching the grounds, the soldiers found black robes used by one of the soldiers in a play for the entertainment of the troops. The young woman wore the dress to her execution, and it is said that she still haunts the grounds of Fort Warren to this very day.

Edward Rowe Snow is known for this story in particular and can be seen in many video’s like this one talking about the Lady in Black. It is important to note that Snow realizes how unlikely this story actually is. Before telling the story in his book The Islands of Boston Harbor, Snow explicitly states, “I herewith offer the reader the legend without the slightest guarantee that any part of it is true” (30). Arguably one of the reasons that Snow was so vocal in the telling of this story was because of his love for the land on which it supposedly took place. It has been said that,

“Edward Rowe Snow was instrumental in the preservation of Fort Warren as a public resource, which helped to lay the foundation for the Boston Harbor Islands State Park, established in 1970. The Boston Harbor Islands National Park Area became a reality in 1996, and the islands are now managed by an alliance of state, municipal, and federal agencies, aided by the private sector” (Snow, 34).

To this day, those who travel to Fort Warren can take a Lady in Black tour led by park rangers. I personally went on one of these tours and found it fascinating that before telling the story my park ranger guide said, “I can’t guarantee that any part of this story is true.” After the tour was over I asked her about the story and she explicitly said that every guide tells the story differently.

Throughout the years people have tried to prove the story of the Lady in Black true, and certain people believe that they have even found the name of her lieutenant husband, but no such information has ever been confirmed as fact. Because this is a ghost story there will always be those who believe that it is possible or even probable; and those who believe it to be gibberish. But the real value in this story is that it was used by Edward Rowe Snow to help save an extremely important United States landmark. If it was not for the avid interest of Edward Rowe Snow in preserving Fort Warren, there is a good chance that it would not exist today. The Lady in Black may very well be a huge contorted lie, but it is one that helped preserve the fort, whose staff tell her story to visitors of the Park, and there is immeasurable value in that.

Sources

D’Entremont, Jeremy. “Edward Rowe Snow-‘The Lady in Black’ at Fort Warren, 1970.” Youtube, February 24, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW2hXzgsXF8.

Snow, Edward Rowe. The Islands of Boston Harbor. Updated by Jeremy D’Entremont. Forward by William M. Fowler, Jr. 1935. Reprint, Carlisle, MA: Commonwealth Editions, 2002.

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Ghostly Lady In Black Still Haunts Boston’s Fort Warren: Ghostly Lady In Black Still Haunts Boston’s Fort Warren By Jack Frost United Press Staff Correspondent Boston, Oct. 31 (U.P)—If the ghostly and infamous lady in black treads the ramparts in old Fort Warren in Boston harbor this Hallowe’en she’ll make an abrupt and perhaps fatal acquaintance with one of the nation’s foremost spook hunters. In the eerie area ‘twixt the ancient battlement’s black arch and the dank corridor of dungeons will be hidden Edward Rowe Snow, and historian who has spent 16 years and nine canoes chasing the sprites and spirits supposedly haunting the Boston harbor islands. Equipped with a witch’s traditional broomstick, he plans to use it cudgel fashion, evening a dozen scores with this dame in widow’s weeds who sought to slay two Union soldiers and drove a GI raving mad in the final days of World War II. Snow is entering the hunt with open mind because his research has revealed these facts: During the Civil war, one Capt. Andrew Lanier was confined with several hundred other Confederate soldiers in Fort Warren. Desperately plotting to free her love, his slim and pretty wife stole north from Crawfordville, Ga., obtained a man’s clothing from a Boston sympathizer and, armed with a pistol, contrived to reach the fort under cover of darkness in a small boat in which were several picks and shovels. Reaching the corridor of dungeons where the southerners were confined, she crawled through a grating to her husband’s cell. With others the couple sought to tunnel to freedom but the clink of a pick brought the roundsman and all were placed in chains Mrs. Lanier drew her pistol, fired at Colonel Dimmick who commanded the fort, but accidentally killer her spouse instead. Ultimately she went to the gallows, garbed in a black dress that was found among the fort’s stores. Some months later a blanched sentry ran screaming to the parade grounds from his lonely post on the fort’s coverface with a wild story of a lady in black who tried to throttle him. He was suspected of too frequent visits to the company’s store of rum and placed in irons. Twenty years later a poker game in the ordnance storeroom was hastily concluded when a rock, hurled by an unseen hand, rolled noisily down a corridor and brought up against the table. Once a woman’s footprints were found in the snow, coming from nowhere and leading to the same place. An old soldier told of a woman’s highpitched voice warning him from a cell block. Less than three years ago while World War II was in progress, a GI was found on the coverface, babbling incoherently. He was dispatched to a nearby mental hospital. One recent afternoon, Snow, seeking respite from his labors on his latest book, “A Pilgrim Returns to Cape Cod,” decided to visit the fort. During his stroll his foot slipped through a water-worn bit of masonry, uncovering a black passageway that led down through what was apparently a solid granite wall. With a hastily procured rope, Snow lowered himself down the aperture, so narrow that at times it seemed he might be trapped and become a ghost himself. Fifteen feet below the fort’s bastion a horizontal passage, 90 feet long and scarcely high enough to crawl through, led toward the black arch, a grim chamber wherein Mrs. Lanier was sentenced to die. “If there is a ghostly lady.” Snow said, “that’s where she’s hidden all these years. There was the smell of death in the passage. There were marks that could have been footprints, although the opening I came down apparently was the only way you could get into the passage. But the most curious thing I found was a broken shovel. It was rusty and of ancient design. It looked much like one of those brought to the fort in Civil war days—by the lady in black.” ~ Source: Newspapers.com ~ Creator: The Daily Herald (Provo, Utah) ~ Date: October 31, 1946

Ghost Story of the “Lady in Black” Still Causes Jitters at Fort Warren: Ghost Story of the “Lady in Black” Still Causes Jitters at Fort Warren Boston, Oct. 17—(AP)—Just in time for the Hallowe’en trade comes from Edward Rowe Snow, historian of Boston harbor, with word that the ghost of the “Lady in Black” is still causing jitters among the soldiers at Fort Warren, a lonely outpost on George’s Island. Snow declares that the name of the restless shade who reputedly has been roaming the ramparts ever since Civil War days, has been streamlined to “The Black Widow”, but he maintains that belief in the lady’s presence is still so strong that a sentry refused to go on guard duty not long ago. Her Ladyship is supposed to have been a southern belle, who was shot as a spy after she tried to free her Confederate soldier husband from a dungeon at the fort during the war between the states. The story goes that when she heard of her husband’s imprisonment, she got passage on a sloop from her home in Dixie and landed at Hull, a mile or so from the fort. One dark, rainy night, she dressed as a man, rowed to Fort Warren in a dory, eluded the sentry and got to her husband’s dungeon. They stared to tunnel their way out, but miscalculated their distance and broke ground inside the fort. In the struggle that followed, the lady, who was carrying a gun, shot her husband by mistake. She was sentenced to be shot as a spy, so the yarn goes, and for her last request, asked that she be allowed to die in the dress of a woman. Since the fort was strictly stag, the only garment the boys could dig up was a flowing black gown used during an amateur show. Since her death, strange doings have been going on by the dark of the moon, according to the legends that Snow has dug up. Through the years, he says, sentries have reported seeing a ghostly form, clad in a flowing gown, meandering atop the ramparts. A few years ago, soldiers reported finding several dainty footprints in the snow—coming from nowhere, and going nowhere. ~ Source: Newspapers.com ~ Creator: The Daily Times (Salisbury, Maryland) ~ Date: October 17, 1941

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Shannon Webber (Summary and Analysis), “The Lady in Black,” Histories or Stories? The Power of Historical Narratives, accessed April 25, 2024, https://dh2020.rawhistories.com/items/show/1.

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Published on Jan 28, 2020. Last updated on Feb 15, 2020.

The Lady in Black

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