Off the rails at the MBTA
By Emily Sweeney
and Heather Hopp-Bruce
Globe Staff
Among the all-time stranger finds by the MBTA is this pair of horrifying costumes that were discovered by crews doing work at Government Center Station in 2015. The two masks, stitched to starred cloaks, were found in a hollow section of concrete that had been poured more than 60 years earlier. Any theory about what the costumes originally looked like, how they got entombed there, and who entombed them is pure speculation.
ABOVE: Close-up of a mask found during MBTA renovations. Probably too close-up.
BELOW: These weird capes and masks were discovered during Government Center Station renovations in 2015.
Brian Howland, MBTA resident engineer, pointed out a 100-year-old “Scollay Under” mosaic on the Blue Line platform on April 7, 2014. Crews discovered the sign while renovating Government Center Station.
On Wednesday, April 27, 1938, the day before the four towns were disestablished, Enfield held a community ball given by the Enfield Fire Department. Ella Fitzgerald’s “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” was the top song of the year, and it’s easy to imagine a mirthfully mournful group of locals doing the Paul Jones two-step to the jaunty tune. The band played “Auld Lang Syne” to end the night, and the town hall bell was tolled at midnight when the four towns officially no longer existed.
The name of the reservoir hints at the land’s heritage: “Quabbin” is a Nipmuc word that means “meeting of the waters.” Those shining waters now cover a long and rich past, much of which is lost to history.
From 1927 to 1938, 2,500 people uprooted their lives when the state seized their land by eminent domain to create a reservoir for drinking water. (The reservoir is part of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority system that provides water to 2.7 million people, including the population of Boston). The town residents moved their homes, churches, schools, and ancestors: 7,513 graves from the towns were relocated. As the town buildings were moved out of the valley, foliage was cleared and controlled burns were set. According to Maria Beiter-Tucker, the interpretive services supervisor for the Quabbin, there’s an old story of a boy who went to school in the valley until the end in 1938. Day by day he had fewer and fewer classmates because their houses had disappeared and they’d had to move away.
Looking for the lost city of Atlantis in Massachusetts won’t get you very far … unless, actually, you take a look in the Quabbin Reservoir, where 412 billion gallons of water now glimmer over the remains of four Massachusetts towns: Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott. Where children once played and Bay Staters of yore complained about the cold now swirls a watery time capsule. The remnants of whiskey flasks, stone steps, mausoleums, covered wells, and giant stone walls that once lined meandering hilly streets are the only whispers that human life once existed here.
This video, taken in 1999, is rare footage of the remains of towns submerged in the Quabbin Reservoir. Edward Klekowski, an accomplished scuba diver and now-retired University of Massachusetts Amherst biology professor, and his team were the first human visitors to the underwater towns in over 60 years. They found artifacts of the long-gone residents, including plenty of sediment-covered gravestones.
Looking northeasterly at Quabbin Reservoir on Oct. 18, 1939.
Enfield Bridge, around 1935, before the town was flooded.
COURTESY MASSACHUSETTS METROPOLITAN DISTRICT WATER SUPPLY COMMISSION
Ghosts in the
Quabbin Reservoir
By Gwen Egan
Globe Correspondent
VIDEO COURTESY EDWARD KLEKOWSKI
MASSACHUSETTS METROPOLITAN DISTRICT WATER SUPPLY COMMISSION
Cambridge
ALL PICTURES BY HEATHER HOPP-BRUCE/GLOBE STAFF UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED
Waltham
Allston
KARISSA KORMAN/GLOBE STAFF
Watertown
Watertown
Nonantum
It’s a sad ghost. Or a pig. Or an alien ghost pig. Or a combination of those. The artist goes by HOAX, or Ethereal Space Boy, or neither. It’s done by one person. That person is, or was, based in Waltham. Or Watertown. Maybe Philadelphia. It’s done by many people, because the original artist tragically died and now others use the tag as a tribute. That’s why it’s sad, right? Maybe it’s not even sad. The artist is not dead but they were in prison. Some of this is true. None of this is true.
The only verifiable fact about the graffiti tag commonly known as Sad Ghost is that it exists. And if you start looking, it’s everywhere. The greatest concentrations appear to be in Watertown and Waltham, but it can be readily found all over the Boston area and, occasionally, up and down the entire Eastern seaboard. Online commenters claim to have seen the tags at least since 2015, but it’s unknown when the first ones popped up. Some of those pictured here are at least as old as 2017 (they can be seen in Google Street view). Another appeared mid-2025.
They are often relatively small and hidden. They are always full of personality, hurrying alone to an unknown destination with big tears streaming behind or in pairs gazing downward with looks of great concern. Drama is constant in the mysterious world of Sad Ghost. Sad Ghost has big things to worry about and is not one to hide feelings.
It’s easy to feel a connection to this elusive creature. Because of this, it’s always a treat to find a new one, that moment of recognition and delight. It feels like a glimpse into a whole secret two-dimensional world made of paint and flat surfaces and sensational storylines. The world of Sad Ghost is like a foreign-language soap opera where you can’t discern the plot but the characters are clearly worked up about something, always flitting around in very high emotional states.
Sad Ghost tags are easy to enjoy when you are not doing — or paying for — the inevitable cleanup of uncommissioned graffiti. But let me make a plea: Consider leaving the Sad Ghosts alone. They are clearly working through something and need a little time. And the rest of us need the small joy that comes with finding one.
Sad ghost
By Heather Hopp-Bruce
Globe Staff
COURTESY BOSTON CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL
Dr. Charles Ferguson in 1974, above, and a foreign body removed from a patient's lung on June 18, 1949, below.
STUDIOLOCO/ADOBE
Button batteries range in diameter from 20 mm (like the CR2032 shown) to 6.8 mm.
IMAGES COURTESY BOSTON CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL
By Heather Hopp-Bruce
But no laws can change the fact that all manner of whatnot will always get stuck in kids’ ears, noses, and throats. In 2017, the BCH ENT team removed a prayer necklace bead from a 10-year-old’s esophagus. The bead had settled in such a way that, though it obstructed the airway, the child was able to breathe through the bead’s eyelet until it was removed.
Due to increased security requirements, the main ENT display is no longer open to the public. However, many items are now part of the Boston Children’s Hospital A-Z exhibit on the first floor of the Hale Family Building at 300 Longwood Avenue.
The words “needle” and “in throat” do not go nicely together, especially in reference to a child. Neither do “chicken claw” and “laryngoscopy.” Or “metal star” and “esophagus.”
Yet there they are — the actual offending items — in a display at the ear, nose, and throat clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital that is equal parts horror show, cautionary tale, and full-throated (excuse the pun) bragging.
The bragging is certainly warranted. That a two-inch sewing needle was safely removed from inside a kid’s throat is impressive, but it’s mind-boggling when factoring in that this procedure occurred in 1954. In fact, all the items in the display were extracted between 1918 and 1962. The best options for pediatric painkillers then were (1) ether and (2) adept surgical hands. For a needle. In a child’s throat.
Luckily for many of these kids, BCH had a generational talent in the fast surgical hands category. The legendary ENT doctor Charles Ferguson, who was the first full-time pediatric otolaryngologist in the United States, did many of these extractions himself in his 38-year career. Starting in 1940, items are annotated with his name: a doll’s eye, roof of mouth, Jan. 14, 1944; thumbtack, lung, June 18, 1949; silver buckle, esophagus, Sept. 2, 1955.
The objects on display are the types of things that can be preserved, unlike chemicals and organic material. But stories about those kinds of materials are just as harrowing: The current BCH otolaryngologist-in- chief, Michael Cunningham, has a more modern story about a child who unwittingly inhaled a bit of pistachio testa (that’s the flaky bit that covers the nut) and ended up in the emergency room with pneumonia.
The biggest modern ENT problem, however, is not pistachios: It’s button batteries, which can have a deadly corrosive effect on a child’s airway or esophagus. Some manufacturers, like Duracell, have added a bitter coating to their button batteries to discourage children from putting or keeping a battery in their mouth. And Reese’s Law, passed in 2022, introduced strict standards for button battery packaging and battery compartments. This federal law and a host of others — toy safety standards, choking hazard labeling, caustic poison labeling, and safety standards for magnets — work to keep kids out of the ER.
Globe Staff
An X-ray, left, shows a prayer bead stuck in a child's throat. An endoscopic view of the bead, above, shows the hole through which the child was able to breathe.
Below, the extracted bead with the urology basket stone extractor used to remove it.
Hover on display at left to inspect real objects found in children’s air and food passages over a 50-year period at Boston Children's Hospital.
A nose
for trouble
David L Ryan/Globe Staff
ABOVE: Sean Martell, who has a YouTube channel called Brockton Magnet Fisher, found a metal scissor part attached to his magnet near River Street in Boston on Sept. 17, 2020.
COURTESY BOSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT
This gun was pulled out of the water by two people magnet fishing off a bridge in Jamaica Plain in 2020.
COURTESY MASSACHUSETTS STATE POLICE
This bazooka round was found in the Charles River in Needham in 2024.
COURTESY MASSACHUSETTS STATE POLICE
The MK-2 hand grenade and 60mm mortar below were found in Devens by a person magnet fishing in 2020.
COURTESY STOW POLICE DEPARTMENT
A resident of Stow came upon these rifle cartridges while magnet fishing in the Assabet River in 2022.
When I received a
magnet fishing kit as a
Christmas gift two years ago,
I immediately imagined
tossing the line into the depths of
Boston Harbor and hauling up a rusty
safe or Prohibition Era revolver or some
other treasure lurking beneath the surface.
But alas. I went to one of the wharves downtown and threw my magnet into the harbor multiple times … and I pulled up nothing. My partner and I tried casting the line off a bridge into Balch Pond in Ayer and had no luck there either. The best catches we got were from Turtle Pond in West Roxbury, and those were limited to nails, screws, and unrecognizable little scraps of metal.
I should be happy that our local waterways are so clean and that every time I’ve ventured out and cast my magnet, the results have been disappointing. But that hasn’t been the case for other magnet fishing enthusiasts in Massachusetts, who’ve made some interesting — and potentially dangerous — discoveries.
In 2020, two people who were magnet fishing on a bridge behind the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain pulled up a gun that Boston police described as “a black snub nose revolver” that “was loaded and covered in muddy gunk.”
In March 2022, a resident of Stow came into the town’s police station to bring in approximately 31 large rifle cartridges that he fished out of the water while magnet fishing at the Assabet River.
In 2024, people magnet fishing on the Charles River in Needham caught what State Police determined to be a “heavily deteriorated bazooka round,” possibly dating back to World War II. It had to be detonated by the State Police bomb squad.
But my favorite magnet fishing story happened on a Saturday morning in the summer of 2019. A man flung a powerful magnet into Pillings Pond in Lynnfield and fished out an Uzi submachine gun.
The man called the police and told them about the Uzi, and naturally they were interested. An officer came down to the pond, took a closer look at the machine gun, and confirmed that not only was it real but it appeared to be loaded. Curious to see what else might be hidden in the pond, the man threw his magnet into the water again.
Before long, he hauled out another gun. And then another one … and another one. In total, five firearms were recovered, including a .40 caliber Glock handgun, a Colt Cobra revolver, a corroded revolver, and a corroded semiautomatic handgun.
Why would someone throw away firearms? And such a large number of them, in one particular spot? Did this cache of weapons belong to a professional hitman who found a favorite place to dispose of his tools after each job? The State Police ballistics unit took the weapons for further analysis.
“In my more than 35 years on the force, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Lynnfield police captain Karl Johnson told The Daily Item. “It’s a little strange.”
Adventures in
magnet fishing
Globe Staff
By Emily Sweeney
FBI
Just a fraction of the money stolen in the 1950 bank heist was recovered in a wall in the South End. It was badly deteriorated.
FBI
One of the robbers wore this Captain Marvel mask during the robbery.
PAUL MAGUIRE/BOSTON GLOBE
Officers carry a picnic cooler containing money identified as Brink’s loot out of B&P Contracting Co.
JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF
The business, and the recovered money, are now just memories at 617 Tremont.
COURTESY CITY OF BOSTON ARCHAEOLOGY PROGRAM
A Boston resident found this bottle tucked away in a space between a condo’s fireplace flue and an interior wall, with a handwritten note (below) inside.
A sketch by Phil Reidy of how the robbery went down was in The Boston Globe on Jan. 18, 1950.
One of the most famous robberies of all time happened on Jan. 17, 1950, when a group of thieves stole more than $1.2 million in cash and $1.5 million in checks and other securities from the Brink’s building in Boston’s North End.
Two months later, the getaway vehicle was found chopped into pieces in Stoughton. But the robbers — and the money — had vanished.
The perpetrators were eventually captured: Over the next few years a total of 11 men were arrested and charged with the crime. But the money was nowhere to be found.
On June 4, 1956, authorities executed a search warrant at B&P Contracting Co., in a garden-level office space at 617 Tremont St. The office appeared to have been recently renovated, with built-in bookcases and walls covered with pine paneling. Federal agents tapped on the walls with hammers and found one particular spot that sounded hollow. They used an axe to chop away that part of the wall and discovered a secret closet that contained a green picnic cooler. It took two agents to lift the cooler out of the hiding spot, and when they opened it, they saw it was filled with cash.
Over time, a number of interesting things have been stashed in local secret compartments.
In fact, one could argue that secret compartments hold a special place in the hearts of New Englanders. Other things found squirreled away in New England buildings include a pair of brown leather shoes dating back to the 1830s that were uncovered underneath the floorboards of the Colony House in Newport, R.I., during a 2013 renovation project, and a cryptic message in a bottle that was found tucked away in a secret nook between the fireplace flue and an interior wall of a Back Bay condominium in 2020.
Inside the old rye whiskey bottle was a folded piece of paper with the name “Tom Ford” scrawled on it, along with the phrase “6 on Shea” and the date Sept. 23, 1894.
Was Tom Ford placing a bet on a boxing match or horse race? Or was this note about something else entirely?
The mystery continues …
The money was wrapped in plastic and newspaper, but it was in rough shape. Some of the bills were moldy and matted together and so brittle that they fell apart; others were already in pieces. After examining the loot in the FBI’s laboratory, investigators determined that the money had been buried underground at one point and had gotten wet.
The money inside the cooler totaled more than $57,700; the feds were able to trace $51,906 of it back to Brink’s. It was the last of the heist money that has ever been found. To this day, more than $1,150,000 in the cash stolen in the robbery is unaccounted for.
Globe Staff
WHAT'S IN
THE WALLS?
By Emily Sweeney
COURTESY
NEW ENGLAND WILDLIFE CENTER
Charles, the obviously
named alligator found in
the Charles River in November, came in for a checkup at the New England Wildlife Center on Nov. 25.
COURTESY JOE KENNEY
It was dramatically captured by Joe Kenney on Nov. 13.
An ocean sunfish, also called a Mola mola, in all its weird glory at the Lisbon Oceanarium in Portugal.
Danielle Parhizkaran/Globe Staff
SERG ZASTAVKIN/ADOBE
COURTESY ROB KARNER, GLEN LAKE ASSOCIATION
Crystal Lake in Newton is a popular swimming spot.
WHITNEY LIEBERMAN VIA AP
The small alligator was sighted doing alligator things on the Charles River Esplanade on Nov. 11, 2025.
The good news is that the alligator found in the Charles River in November was cute. At least as far as alligators go. It is a baby, after all, someone’s dumped pet. But full stop: An alligator. In the Charles. That creature can log all the social media adoration in the world but it’s no less nightmare-inducing.
Paddleboarders and boaters worried about their feet descending into opaque river murk can now add this to their list of imagined dangers (such as rottweiler-sized snapping turtles with a taste for human toes), a list that pairs nicely with real dangers (cyanobacteria blooms, stabby invasive water chestnut seeds, and regular-sized snapping turtles).
If you’re still craving a reptile jump scare on the Charles, there’s a secret life-size adult alligator replica on the bank of the river near The Cove in Auburndale. Look for it among the similarly life-size replicas of elk, bears, deer, a giant tortoise, and, why not, an iguana. They’re all on private property and visible only from the water; rent a kayak at the Newton Historic Boathouse and journey downriver.
Or head to relatively nearby Crystal Lake, where someone has dumped more pets into the water — creatures that have proved far more elusive (and damaging to the ecosystem) than the baby alligator, namely koi. The lake is home to two large domestic koi that have been there casually wreaking havoc for years; uprooting plants, eating food that native fish need, mucking up the water quality, and generally being jerks.
I saw one a couple of years ago while I was paddleboarding near the MBTA track. It was gorgeous orange and pearly white, and then it flicked its tail and was gone. It was roughly the size of a dachshund, so I suspect it was not the bigger of the two: According to Janice Bourque of the Crystal Lake Conservancy, at least one of the fish is “extremely large.” Hopefully not as large as the monster koi removed from Glen Lake in Michigan.
Fishing is allowed at Crystal Lake, which is stocked mostly with rainbow trout. Try sweet corn for koi bait, and good luck.
Speaking of fishing, the gold standard for creatures found in Boston area waterways is, and always will be, the ocean sunfish found in Boston Harbor in 2015 by fishermen Mikey Bergen and Jay Foster of Malden. In this case, it’s not the creature that’s the true find — ocean sunfish wander into the harbor from time to time in pursuit of delicious jellyfish — but rather the pure wonder and joy in Bergen and Foster’s reaction. The video they took of the incident went viral, maybe bigger even than the cop slide years later, landing the pair on the Jimmy Kimmel show.
Ten years later it’s required viewing for new Bostonians, and one of the hilarious quotes from the video will ring true for anyone who encounters something unexpected in that dirty water: “We’re seeing some shit we ain’t never seen before, kid!”
Monsters
in the
waterways
By Heather Hopp-Bruce
Globe Staff
Still, no one knows where the monkey came from.
“When we found him, you could see his hands and his fingernails,’’ Richard Bagen told Eaton in 2015. “He wasn’t quite a skeleton yet, more just mummified. We just figured it was from the circus at some point and it lived on peanuts and popcorn. Up near the roof, there’s a space between the roof panel and the trestles, so he might have lived in there for who knows how long.’’
Maybe the monkey was the reason fans thought for years that the Garden was inhabited by a leprechaun. Or maybe it was one of the dozen circus monkeys that escaped into the rafters in 1937. Fleet Center officials said the remains weren’t old enough to have been there 61 years, but perhaps the real fountain of youth was in the preservatives that were found in hot dog scraps.
Only the monkey knew the truth, and it took its secret to its grave.
Eaton’s truly bananas three-part series is still a must-read more than 10 years after it was published.
When Eaton’s phone rang that day, the caller was John Bagen: He and his brother, Richard Bagen, had been on the original demolition crew and had kept the monkey after the work was complete. After all those years, John still had the remains.
Eaton agreed to meet. And shortly, under the lights of Sons of Italy in Weymouth, John Bagen brought out all that was left of the union’s longtime mascot: the monkey’s skull.
“He told me at one point he moved the monkey, that was in a box, to another part of his basement, and the next time he got back there, only the skull was left,” said Eaton, who is now a high school teacher. “Which is gross.”
Before he laid eyes on what remained of the monkey, Eaton had met with Richard and his wife, Kathy Bagen. During the meeting, they showed Eaton a treasure trove of pictures, which demonstrated the wreckers’ fondness for the deceased beast.
“They pulled out a binder of various photos of the monkey and various people working on the job putting cigarettes in the monkey's mouth. And coffee cups and stuff — it was super weird,” said Eaton.
In 1998, Boston Garden demolition workers found a monkey carcass wedged between a trestle and the roof panel.
The workers didn’t want the officials who were overseeing the Fleet Center, the arena that would replace the Garden, or Morse Diesel, the company overseeing the demolition, to catch wind of their wacky find lest they be forced to dispose of it. So they hid the monkey in an electrical panel near where the wreckers parked their cars. It even became something of a mascot and superstitious symbol of luck for the workers as they continued the deconstruction.
A 1998 article by Judy Rakowsky in The Boston Globe first covered the story.
“Add another bit of myth and mystery to the old Boston Garden now being slowly consigned to history by demolition crews,’’ Rakowsky wrote. “Workers said they found the remains of a monkey in the rafters Thursday, and were even moved to pause for a moment of silence, hard hats in hand.’’
Almost 20 years later, Eaton wanted to fill in the holes left by Rakowsky's original story: Was the monkey even real? If it was, how did this monkey get here? Was it a runaway circus performer? A zoo escapee? Rakowsky’s story didn’t contain any photos; a Fleet Center employee had stopped the Globe photographer from entering the premises.
The reporter had been investigating the story for weeks, following leads on an old Boston tale too weird to be believed, one seemingly lost to time. He'd heard rumors about it since childhood.
Then, in October 2015, he got the call.
“Meet me at the Sons of Italy in Weymouth, Monday at three," said the caller. "I can show you the monkey.”
Perry Eaton, then a reporter for Boston.com, had found, he hoped, the missing piece in an urban legend turned mysterious true tale: the Boston Garden monkey.
PART 1
The Boston Garden closed 20 years ago today, but the mystery of the monkey lives on
PART 2
Could this finally be proof that the Boston Garden monkey was real?
PART 3
Closing the case on the Boston Garden monkey mystery
The legend
of the Boston Garden monkey
By Gwen Egan
Globe Correspondent
HANDOUT
HANDOUT
HANDOUT
HANDOUT
BOGDAN/ADOBE
The Boston Garden monkey, leaned against a Fleet Center welcome sign in May 1998.
The Boston Garden, mid-demolition.
John Bagen holding up the monkey on top of the Boston Garden in May 1998.
HANDOUT
The crew of building wreckers that found the monkey in 1998.
The head was all that remained of the monkey by 2015.
The Boston Globe article, by Judy Rakowsky, published the day after the 1937 circus monkey escape.
The most popular type of monkey for circuses (and occasionally, pets) in the 1990s was the capuchin, pictured here. Macaques, marmosets, and tamarins were also kept.
In late 2024, a mysterious Reddit post caught the eye of a specific genre of Boston mystery enthusiast.
The post, “They dug up a car at my jobsite,” by u/rawrawrawrz, includes photos taken through a chain-link fence of a mangled, badly deteriorated car on Western Avenue in Allston. The car is crushed, rusted, wheels and hood askew. It looks like dirt in the shape of a car. It looks like an overdone prop design for a sci-fi movie set in the year 2653. It looks like something someone wanted to remain hidden.
This was enough to pique the interest of Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist enthusiasts: The getaway car used on that fateful night of March 18, 1990, has never been definitively identified or found. The hatchback, possibly red, a Ford or Dodge, disappeared into myth with the Rembrandts stolen that night. Could this be the first real clue in decades?
Sadly, no. It was quickly pointed out on the Reddit thread that the Allston wreck’s engine and headline bucket details prove it’s a Datsun 240Z, or something in the Z series, none of which have a hatchback style. Another Redditor noted that Stadium Body Shop used to be at that location, which does make the car’s location slightly less weird. It also appears to have hints of yellow paint, not red, though paint color isn’t exactly a permanent vehicle feature.
Maybe the real mystery is how someone found a parking spot in Allston. As u/asmithey wrote, “Hey buddy, Are ya slow? Can't read a sign? You can't pahk heah.”
The car buried whole
By Heather Hopp-Bruce
Globe Staff
HEIST IMAGES: FBI; FRAME: scenery1/Adobe; ford: RILEY VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
A 1989 Ford Escort hatchback. The Gardner heist getaway vehicle was a hatchback, possibly red, possibly a Ford or Dodge. But definitely not this one, as this picture was taken in New Zealand.
Surveillance footage released by the FBI in 2015 shows a car moving in reverse on Palace Road by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 17, 1990, at 12:48:10 AM.
A man approaches the museum from the direction of the car at 12:48:58.
The man returns to his car and turns on the parking lights at 12:49:32.
The man returns to his car at 12:53:10 …
… and leaves at 12:53:30
The Museum of Fine Arts moved Juno carefully: A steel frame was built around the statue to keep it protected during the relocation process. A crane then lifted it onto a flatbed truck and took it to a storage facility where it stayed for the winter and underwent restoration. On March 20, 2012, the statue arrived at the museum and was lifted by a crane and carefully lowered through an open skylight in the museum’s roof.
Today, the statue can be seen in the George D. and Margo Behrakis Gallery at the MFA. The museum calls her Juno, but to me, and many other kids from Boston, she’ll always be known as Gloria.
If you grew up in this area anytime from the 1970s through the 2000s, you may have heard about the Statue of Gloria.
The Statue of Gloria was one of the most feared landmarks in Boston. For decades, teenagers would drive up Allandale Street in Jamaica Plain to sneak a peek at the 13-foot-tall statue of a woman, which, according to urban legend, would cry tears of blood if you stared at her long enough. The back story, which varied as it was retold through the years, was that Gloria had been a nurse who worked at a local hospital and was murdered, and her spirit lived on in that statue.
Countless young people made the pilgrimage to the Statue of Gloria under the cover of darkness, giggling and shrieking while running away, convinced that the statue was alive.
That is until 2011, when the statue disappeared.
What those decades of teenagers didn’t know is that the Statue of Gloria was more than just a jump scare and subject of neighborhood lore: It was actually the largest classical marble sculpture in North America — a masterpiece that was created about 2,000 years ago in Rome. And it didn’t vanish into thin air: It had been purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts, where it was carefully restored and is prominently displayed today under its true name: Juno, the ancient goddess.
The statue was originally brought to Boston in 1897 by Charles F. Sprague and his wife, Mary Pratt Sprague. The couple had the statue shipped from Italy to be a focal point of their 16.6-acre estate (now known as the Brandegee Estate) that straddled the border of Boston and Brookline.
But more than a century of exposure to the elements took a deep toll: Juno’s nose and upper lip deteriorated completely.
The statue
that cried blood
By Emily Sweeney
Globe Staff
DAVID L. RYAN/ GLOBE STAFF
COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
The statue was lowered through the MFA roof via crane on March 20, 2012.
Jean-Louis Lachevre, an MFA conservation engineer, removed old grout along the joint between the statue’s head and body on July 20, 2018.
Medical bandages were used during facial reconstruction.
BELOW: Juno holds court in the George D. and Margo Behrakis Gallery at the MFA.
DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF
DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF
DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF
FACEBOOK
Juno in all her restored glory at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The 13-foot-tall Roman statue was carved in the early Imperial period, late first century BC.
The statue, then known to locals as Gloria, stood for decades at the historic Brandegee Estate on the border of Boston and Brookline.
MFA crews work to remove the statue from its longtime outdoor location.
MATTHEW J. LEE/GLOBE STAFF
DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF
DAVID L. RYAN/GLOBE STAFF
In 2024, a bowfishing team removed four large invasive koi from a lake in Michigan. This one has coloring similar to the Crystal Lake koi.
WARNING: THIS VIDEO CONTAINS SEVERAL F-BOMBS
Need more? You'll love:
Concept, designer, and project manager: Heather Hopp-Bruce
Editors: Brian Bergstein and Heather Hopp-Bruce
Digital editor: Rami Abou-Sabe
Audience engagement editor: Karissa Korman
Copy editor: Barbara Wallraff
ABOVE: Close-up of a mask found during MBTA renovations. Probably too close-up.
BELOW: These weird capes and masks were discovered during Government Center Station renovations in 2015.
The Government Center Station work yielded other interesting items: In 2014, workers pulled back a Blue Line sign at the station and uncovered a mosaic of white and burgundy tiles that read “SCOLLAY UNDER.” Officials said the tiled sign dated back to the opening of the train platform in 1916.
It’s a sad ghost. Or a pig. Or an alien ghost pig. Or a combination of those. The artist goes by HOAX, or Ethereal Space Boy, or neither. It’s done by one person. That person is, or was, based in Waltham. Or Watertown. Maybe Philadelphia. It’s done by many people, because the original artist tragically died and now others use the tag as a tribute. That’s why it’s sad, right? Maybe it’s not even sad. The artist is not dead but they were in prison. Some of this is true. None of this is true.
The only verifiable fact about the graffiti tag commonly known as Sad Ghost is that it exists. And if you start looking, it’s everywhere. The greatest concentrations appear to be in Watertown and Waltham, but it can be readily found all over the Boston area and, occasionally, up and down the entire Eastern seaboard. Online commenters claim to have seen the tags at least since 2015, but it’s unknown when the first ones popped up. Some of those pictured here are at least as old as 2017 (they can be seen in Google Street view). Another appeared mid-2025.
They are often relatively small and hidden. They are always full of personality, hurrying alone to an unknown destination with big tears streaming behind or in pairs gazing downward with looks of great concern. Drama is constant in the mysterious world of Sad Ghost. Sad Ghost has big things to worry about and is not one to hide feelings.
It’s easy to feel a connection to this elusive creature. Because of this, it’s always a treat to find a new one, that moment of recognition and delight. It feels like a glimpse into a whole secret two-dimensional world made of paint and flat surfaces and sensational storylines. The world of Sad Ghost is like a foreign-language soap opera where you can’t discern the plot but the characters are clearly worked up about something, always flitting around in very high emotional states.
Sad Ghost tags are easy to enjoy when you are not doing — or paying for — the inevitable cleanup of uncommissioned graffiti. But let me make a plea: Consider leaving the Sad Ghosts alone. They are clearly working through something and need a little time. And the rest of us need the small joy that comes with finding one.
The only verifiable fact about the graffiti tag commonly known as Sad Ghost is that it exists. And if you start looking, it’s everywhere. The greatest concentrations appear to be in Watertown and Waltham, but it can be readily found all over the Boston area and, occasionally, up and down the entire Eastern seaboard. Online commenters claim to have seen the tags at least since 2015, but it’s unknown when the first ones popped up. Some of those pictured here are at least as old as 2017 (they can be seen in Google Street view). Another appeared mid-2025.
They are often relatively small and hidden. They are always full of personality, hurrying alone to an unknown destination with big tears streaming behind or in pairs gazing downward with looks of great concern. Drama is constant in the mysterious world of Sad Ghost. Sad Ghost has big things to worry about and is not one to hide feelings.
It’s easy to feel a connection to this elusive creature. Because of this, it’s always a treat to find a new one, that moment of recognition and delight. It feels like a glimpse into a whole secret two-dimensional world made of paint and flat surfaces and sensational storylines. The world of Sad Ghost is like a foreign-language soap opera where you can’t discern the plot but the characters are clearly worked up about something, always flitting around in very high emotional states.
Sad Ghost tags are easy to enjoy when you are not doing — or paying for — the inevitable cleanup of uncommissioned graffiti. But let me make a plea: Consider leaving the Sad Ghosts alone. They are clearly working through something and need a little time. And the rest of us need the small joy that comes with finding one.
They are often relatively small and hidden. They are always full of personality, hurrying alone to an unknown destination with big tears streaming behind or in pairs gazing downward with looks of great concern. Drama is constant in the mysterious world of Sad Ghost. Sad Ghost has big things to worry about and is not one to hide feelings.
It’s easy to feel a connection to this elusive creature. Because of this, it’s always a treat to find a new one, that moment of recognition and delight. It feels like a glimpse into a whole secret two-dimensional world made of paint and flat surfaces and sensational storylines. The world of Sad Ghost is like a foreign-language soap opera where you can’t discern the plot but the characters are clearly worked up about something, always flitting around in very high emotional states.
Sad Ghost tags are easy to enjoy when you are not doing — or paying for — the inevitable cleanup of uncommissioned graffiti. But let me make a plea: Consider leaving the Sad Ghosts alone. They are clearly working through something and need a little time. And the rest of us need the small joy that comes with finding one.
It’s easy to feel a connection to this elusive creature. Because of this, it’s always a treat to find a new one, that moment of recognition and delight. It feels like a glimpse into a whole secret two-dimensional world made of paint and flat surfaces and sensational storylines. The world of Sad Ghost is like a foreign-language soap opera where you can’t discern the plot but the characters are clearly worked up about something, always flitting around in very high emotional states.
Sad Ghost tags are easy to enjoy when you are not doing — or paying for — the inevitable cleanup of uncommissioned graffiti. But let me make a plea: Consider leaving the Sad Ghosts alone. They are clearly working through something and need a little time. And the rest of us need the small joy that comes with finding one.
An X-ray shows a prayer bead stuck in a child's throat. An endoscopic view of the bead, below, shows the hole through which the child was able to breathe.
Below, the extracted bead with the urology basket stone extractor used to remove it.
An X-ray shows a prayer bead stuck in a child's throat. An endoscopic view of the bead, below, shows the hole through which the child was able to breathe.
remove it.
Emily Sweeney can be reached at emily.sweeney@globe.com. Follow her @emilysweeney and on Instagram @emilysweeney22.
Heather Hopp-Bruce can be reached at heather.hopp-bruce@globe.com. Follow her Substack, Hoppyard.
Gwen Egan is a journalist
based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
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Emily Sweeney can be reached at emily.sweeney@globe.com. Follow her @emilysweeney and on Instagram @emilysweeney22.
Heather Hopp-Bruce can be reached at heather.hopp-bruce@globe.com. Follow her Substack, Hoppyard.
Gwen Egan is a journalist
based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
