HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
A Beacon Hill library with Hawthorne's most-told ghost story and a memoir bound in its author's skin.
10 1/2 Beacon St, Boston, MA 02108
Research updated August 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
First-floor galleries, including the Calderwood Gallery: $10 adults, $8 students/military, free for children 12 and under.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Historic Beacon Hill townhouse building with public first-floor galleries
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1807 · Oldest Membership Libraries in the US · Beacon Hill Architecture · Anthropodermic Bibliopegy Collection
The Boston Athenaeum was established in 1807 by a group of Bostonians, many connected to the Anthology Society, as a proprietary library and reading room modeled on London's private subscription libraries. It moved into its current building at 10 1/2 Beacon Street, designed by Edward Clarke Cabot, in 1849, and later expanded with an added top floor. The building sits directly behind the Boston Granary Burying Ground, on Beacon Hill.
Among the Athenaeum's holdings is a slim 1837 memoir, Narrative of the Life of James Allen, alias George Walton. Allen, a career thief who died of tuberculosis at the Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown that year, dictated his life story to the prison warden and asked that two copies be bound in his own skin — one for a doctor who had treated him, one for John Fenno Jr., a man Allen had once tried to rob and who fought back. The Athenaeum's copy, tanned to resemble gray deerskin and stamped in Latin identifying its binding, is kept in a case and shown only at scheduled viewings.
The Athenaeum today functions as both a membership library and a public cultural institution, admitting non-member visitors to its first-floor galleries for a ticketed fee. It also holds major collections tied to George Washington's personal library and to Boston's 19th-century literary circle.
Sources
In an account he wrote for a friend around 1852 but left unpublished in his lifetime, Hawthorne described visiting the Athenaeum's old Pearl Street reading room in early 1842 and repeatedly seeing an elderly clergyman, the Reverend Dr. Thaddeus Mason Harris, seated in his customary chair reading a newspaper. A librarian eventually told Hawthorne that Harris had died — information Hawthorne found hard to square with what he had just seen, since the figure in the chair looked exactly as he always had. Hawthorne's essay, later titled "The Ghost of Doctor Harris," was first published in Living Age magazine in February 1900.
The Athenaeum tells the story as part of its own institutional history rather than treating it as an open claim: when the library relocated to 10 1/2 Beacon Street, the story goes, Harris's apparition did not make the move, though his portrait did and still hangs on the first floor near the room the account describes.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Ticketed access to the Athenaeum's first-floor galleries, including the Calderwood Gallery, on Tuesday through Saturday. The visit takes in the room associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne's account of seeing the ghost of the Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris, whose portrait still hangs there.
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