The Granary Burying Ground
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Bostons 1660 colonial burying ground, holding revolutionary martyrs and founding families, where leaving tokens on the graves is a living tradition and ghost-lore layers onto real devotion.
The Granary Burying Ground has held Boston's dead since 1660: Crispus Attucks, the first man killed in the Revolution; Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, John Hancock; the parents of Benjamin Franklin; thousands of ordinary colonial dead under slate tablets worn soft. It is a working archive of New England gravestone symbolism, the winged skulls and souls' effigies that colonial carvers used to think death's way through.
The living practice is the token tradition: visitors leave pennies and small objects on the historic graves, a custom the site's caretakers have come to expect and manage, and the ghost-visit lore that Boston tour culture trades in sits on top of what is genuinely a devotional act, the honoring of the dead at their stones.
Visiting
Tremont St, Boston; open daily; see the Freedom Trail.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boston's_Granary_burial_ground.jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories