HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
Revolutionary-Era Fortress on Telegraph Hill
60 Farina Rd, Hull, MA 02045
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free public access to the park grounds. Water tower museum has separate seasonal hours.
Access
Limited Access
Uneven masonry, stone stairs, hilly grounds
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1777 · Revolutionary War Coastal Defense · French Smallpox Burial Site · World War-Era Coastal Battery
Telegraph Hill in Hull, Massachusetts, has been fortified since 1777, when American forces constructed Fort Independence to protect the southern approaches to Boston Harbor. The original star-shaped earthwork was later supplemented and rebuilt in masonry, and the post was renamed Fort Revere in honor of Paul Revere, who served as an artillery commander during the Revolution.
In 1778, roughly 200 French soldiers, captured by the British in Nova Scotia and exchanged south to Fort Independence, contracted smallpox at the fort. Most died and were interred on the grassy slope below the hill, an event that anchors much of the site's later folklore.
The fortifications were maintained, expanded, and modernized through successive periods, seeing use as a coastal defense installation through both World Wars before formal decommissioning in 1947. The site is now Fort Revere Park, with surviving batteries, a magazine, and a brick water tower that houses a small military history museum during seasonal hours.
Sources
Reports from Fort Revere center on the interior masonry passages and the underground portions of the fortifications. The most consistent account describes whispers, sometimes in what witnesses interpret as a foreign language, in the tunnels below the upper batteries. The French smallpox burial of 1778 is the most-cited historical anchor for these accounts.
The second recurring report is of shadow figures: dark forms that pause in doorways or move along interior walls, sometimes seen by multiple witnesses standing in the same room. The fort's design, with multiple openings into single chambers, produces unusual sightlines that visitors find disorienting even by daylight.
Local lore holds that small objects thrown into certain doorways at the far end of the fort have come back out, an account that originates in user-submitted reports rather than documented investigation. The diagonal stone stairs leading down into the lower works are described in several accounts as awkward to walk, a quirk of original 18th-century military engineering rather than evidence of anything supernatural.
Notable Entities
Explore the surviving stone batteries, magazine, and water tower atop Telegraph Hill. The interior fortress passages are where most visitor reports of shadow figures and whispers occur. The grassy slope below the hill is the burial site of approximately 200 French soldiers who died of smallpox in 1778.
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