For once, in the three decades or so I have lived in Boston, I was walking back from Haymarket and the historic Harrison Gray Otis House (archit. Charles Bulfinch, 1795) in the West End — next door to Asher Benjamin’s monumental 1806-built Old West Church — was open for tours, for a few dim minutes more of the Equinox afternoon. 

The Otis House probably doesn’t seem so haunted in most people’s photos. I don’t understand why my photographs always look like they belong on the cover of a paperback reprint of some old Gothic novel.

The mansion sits on a kind of raised plinth behind intimidating iron fencing among trees and is difficult to photograph from either close up or far away. The coat of arms against the odd wallpaper in Harrison’s office belonged to the Foster family of his socialite wife Sally. It’s actually interesting to see how how these dubious accoutrements of British aristocracy were still hanging on more than three decades after the Revolution, even amongst families so closely tied to the Colonial cause. The pier mirror in the last photo is a noted piece made in Boston by framemaker John Doggett in 1807. The carving above the glass depicts the moment the heralds of Agamemnon arrive to take the captive Briseis away from the angered Greek champion Achilles — an instance from a rather different milieu than early 19th Century Boston.