Tomb of Joseph Barrell in the crypt of King’s Chapel in Boston

GENERAL INFORMATION

The 45-minute King’s Chapel Bells and Bones Tour is my favorite tour given at Boston National Historical Park, and one of the best tours I’ve been on at any National Park. Participants get to visit the crypt in the basement as well as the bell tower and upper balcony of the church, which gives you a great view of the nave and alter below. Without the tour you are limited to exploring the ground level only. Keep in mind that you do have to walk up and down stairs, for there is no elevator.

From April through October, tours are typically given four times a day on Mondays through Saturdays and twice on Sundays. At other times of the year, tours are held only on Fridays through Mondays. The guide told me that tickets are fairly easy to come by during the week, but on the weekends they tend to fill up. There were only four people on the tour I took on a Wednesday in early August.

There is a fee for the Bells and Bones Tour, and tickets are sold inside the church on the day of the tour. For the latest fees and the current schedule, visit the King’s Chapel Guided Tours web page.

TOUR DETAILS

The crypt at King’s Chapel is right out of an Edgar Allan Poe story. It’s in a dark and creepy basement, which is essentially the church’s storage room. There are exposed pipes, furnaces, old clothes, supplies, vacuum cleaners, etc. It is way too dark to get any decent photos; the tour guide has to shine a flashlight on the points of interest. Before electricity, families had to bury loved ones by candlelight. We’re talking about a pitch-black room, so no matter how many candles are lit, it’s still creepy.

Between 100 and 150 people are buried in the King’s Chapel crypt. There are twenty-one tombs, ten along each of the side walls and a large tomb against the back wall. All but one is a family-owned tomb (needless to say, wealthy families). Charles Bulfinch, the renowned architect of buildings such as the Massachusetts State House in Boston, as well as the man behind renovations to the United States Capitol building in the early 1800s, was buried here in the Anthrop tomb (his mother’s family name), but he was eventually moved to Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge at his son’s request. The church kept records on which family owned a particular tomb, but did not keep records of who is buried inside. A few tombs still have family names on them, but most just have a number.

The exception to the family-owned tomb is the Stranger’s Tomb, the aforementioned large tomb against the back wall. This was open to anyone who could pay for the burial. Long-time church employees such as maintenance men were also buried here.

Burials stopped around 1850 when Boston passed a sanitation law prohibiting burials in a building occupied by the living. Embalming didn’t become a standard practice until the Civil War, so in the early days rotting bodies were placed in the coffins. According to the church record, most of the tomb entrances were bricked over during the 1890s to keep down the dust (back then the floor was dirt).

The tombs are small rooms with wooden shelves on each side wall. New coffins could be placed on an empty shelf, thus allowing for the storage of many bodies. Most all of the people in the King’s Chapel crypt have long been forgotten, but every now and then a relative shows up. Nobody demands that the tomb be unsealed so wreaths and flowers can be laid, they only just recall that their “great-great-grandparents were supposedly buried down here.”

Now here’s the cool thing about the crypt tour. A steam pipe was run through one of the tombs, and over the years the moisture weakened the bricks and a few fell out, allowing people to look inside. The pipe was eventually moved, but one of the bricks was never replaced. The surprising thing is that the tour guide will give you a flashlight and allow you to look inside (you can’t take any photos). If you ever wanted to know what was inside an old tomb, here’s your chance. The tomb in question belonged to the Coolidge Family, relatives of the future president Calvin Coolidge.

Taking a look inside a tomb in the King’s Chapel crypt, Boston National Historical Park

So, what do you see? As it turns out, the shelves inside collapsed long ago. At the back of the tomb is an infant coffin lying on top of an adult coffin that remained intact, but these are lying on a pile of broken coffins. On the other side is a broken coffin with some bones hanging out. Oddly enough, there’s not an entire skeleton, just a few bones, like what you’d find after coyotes had eaten the corpse. It’s as if the rest of the bones turned to dust, or perhaps they are smashed up underneath the broken wood. The guide has photos that also show what is thought to be an old wig that some guy was wearing when he was buried.

Back in the 1970s, workers accidentally punched a hole into the Stranger’s Tomb—the condition was the same. The workers took photos, which the guide shows you, and you can see skulls and such. If the coffins in two out of two tombs that have been viewed are all busted up, most likely that’s what the rest of the tombs look like.

Anyway, I thought this was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, but it still felt sacrilegious. King’s Chapel doesn’t advertise that you’ll get to see the bones of some poor sap whose coffin fell off a shelf, and if it did I suspect the tours would be booked solid. As I said, I loved it, but I wonder how it ever got approved.

While the crypt is certainly the highlight of the tour, don’t forget that you also visit the bell tower, and as an added perk, the second floor balcony where you get a bird’s eye view of the floor below.