Hiram Marble and the Spirits of Dungeon Rock

Dungeon Rock is a boulder-strewn outcrop in what is now Lynn Woods. Local legend, first set down in Alonzo Lewis’s 1829 History of Lynn, says a pirate called Thomas Veal (or Veale) hid in a cave there around 1658 and was sealed in with his loot by an earthquake. Treasure hunters tried blasting the cave in the 1830s, with no result. Little is known about the pirate beyond the legend.

The man who made the legend famous was Hiram Marble, a Spiritualist from Charlton, Massachusetts, who in the early 1850s bought the land from Lynn. Marble believed the spirits of Veal and a fellow pirate called Captain Harris were guiding him. By one account he wrote questions on folded paper and a medium answered them in the ghosts’ names. He and his son Edwin began digging a tunnel on 5 June 1851, according to a regional history, and kept it up for years, paying for the work with visitor fees of a quarter and one-dollar bonds that promised a share of any treasure.

Progress was slow and dangerous. Edwin was injured in an early blast in 1855, the tunnel reached about 100 feet by 1859 and 140 feet by 1866, and in 1863 the diggers swung away from the cave the spirits had named. Hiram died in November 1868 without finding anything. Edwin carried on, relying at first on mediums, and told a visitor in 1878 that the pirate’s voice had gone silent about three years before. He died in January 1880 at 49 and was buried beside the rock, as he had wished; his widow remained a Spiritualist and kept faith that treasure was still there.

The city bought the land back in 1881 and made it part of the Lynn Woods reservation, which a local archive says matched the Marbles’ own wish for a free public forest. The tunnel, now about 174 feet long, is still there. Dungeon Rock is not a conventional haunting: the ghost was never seen, only reported through intermediaries, but it is among the best-recorded examples of Massachusetts Spiritualism and its costs for one family.

Spirit messages said to come through mediums naming a long-dead pirate; no apparition is reported. Later folklore adds lights and voices at the rock.

The boulder and the roughly 174-foot tunnel at Dungeon Rock in Lynn Woods, plus the cellar hole of the Marbles’ house nearby.

Dungeon Rock is a fixture of Lynn folklore and of Atlas Obscura-style guides; Nannette Snow Emerson wrote a period booklet, Dungeon Rock; or, The Pirate’s Cave, at Lynn.