Ranger as Maggie Poppins.
The red eyes are a result of a photo flash — or are they?!
Unearth Boston’s historical demons
Sites of fright
Boston Commons
The area used to be a site for hangings. Stories say that when workers dug the Boylston and Park streets T stations, they found more than 300 bodies under the subway stops.
Omni Parker Hotel
Considered the most haunted hotel in Boston, there have been reports of ghosts and strange laughter, phone calls and cigar smoke coming from vacant room 303 – where a depressed salesman killed himself years ago.
Paramount Deli
The final Boston Strangler killing occurred right above this Charles Street restaurant. In the 1960s 18 women were brutally murdered in an 18-month period. Though a man was convicted for the murders, DNA tests later proved he did not commit the final murder. The full story remains untold today.
Meet Maggie Poppins, long-lost sister to Mary. Maggie is a British nanny too, but she really took care of her kids.
Her motto is “a spoonful of cyanide helps the sugar go down.”
Unsurprisingly, Poppins didn’t make it to heaven after she died. Instead she’s spending her afterlife leading Boston’s Ghosts and Gravestones Frightseeing Tour eight months a year.
As part of a team of deranged ghosts, Poppins guides trolley passengers through Boston graveyards. She entertains and spooks with true stories of war, murder and ghosts — the Boston Strangler,
Omni Parker Hotel hauntings and mysterious Boston Harbor deaths.
At times, Poppins is scarier than her stories.
Before the tour starts, the caped character dances unabashedly to the “Ghostbusters” theme song, twirling and waving her umbrella at embarrassed Bostonians.
But the hour-and-a-half tour is not just for tourists. “Locals don’t think about the creepy, gruesome things that have happened right where they walk every day,” says Poppins, aka Aimee Rose Ranger, a local Boston actress.
“To find out about those darker things, it’s a bit thrilling,” she says. “How many people eat at the Paramount Deli and have no idea what happened there?”
Ghosts and Gravestones Tour
Daily through Oct. 31,
7, 8 and 9 p.m.
200 Atlantic Ave., Boston
MBTA: Blue Line to Aquarium
$24-$37, 617-269-3626 www.ghostsandgravestones.com/boston
