Road Trip: Haunted Waltham, MA

Imagine a sterile hallway, painted a soothing shade of off-white to calm the frayed nerves of the patients locked behind metal doors. The eerie sounds of whimpering, crying, laughing, and talking, dampened by the steel, glass, and concrete, permeate the hallways. Down at the other end of the hall, a pair of double doors swings open and a pair of hulking orderlies escort a young patient, eyes glued to the floor, towards his windowless room. The reflection off the polished floor of the hallway shows the young man's dead eyes, limpid inky pools, like staring into a singularity.

These are the images that came to mind as I read about the Metropolitan State Hospital, one of the many supposedly haunted places within the town of Waltham in Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. As someone who has always been intrigued by the occult, digging through a variety of sites to locate some background on the exact locations of the various haunted places in this small suburban community tickled my sense of adventure. I was stunned to find so many potentially haunted places crowded into a single stretch of one single road, each location with its own rather sordid history. Out of sheer curiosity, and perhaps a bit of thrill seeking, I decided to take a morning ride to visit a few of these sites.