Lindo Tenement - 615 S French Hill St
By no means the only tenement on the block, this 1840s brownstone has a third floor walk-up available for $20 a month. The building is cramped, dirty, noisy, and the water and heat are unreliable. Windows are drafty and one can hear crying babies, fistfights in the streets, and children running up and down the halls. The next-door-neighbor is an occasional prostitute, Mona, who also performs petty theft when she can.
Decades ago in the apartment just above the currently vacant apartment lived the artist Hagan Wilson. Wilson was a deranged master of watercolors and pen and ink who seemed destined for fame and had several shows in Boston and New York, but about that same time Wilson discovered, in issues of a pulp magazine called Weird Tales, the works of a reclusive New England horror author. He became obsessed by the author’s visions. Wilson’s paintings took on a darker and more foreboding tone. He hinted to friends that he had done some other paintings that he dared show to no one.
From late February until early April of 1925 a series of shocking dreams left him, for a time, an inmate at the New Jerusalem Sanitarium. Upon release he supposedly burned his collection of strange stories along with many of his paintings, but he remained obsessed by the themes and continued to produce strange canvasses —nightmare scenes released from his unconscious mind by the bizarre dreams.
His professional career was ruined, but he continued to occupy this one-room drafty garret churning out piece after piece, foregoing food and sleep to satisfy his madness. Eventually the desperate lifestyle took too great a cost, and after a night during which horrible screams were heard from his room, he was found dead the next day, all his strange works missing. Unknown to anyone, even the owners, those strange paintings and writings are still here, somehow sealed up in-between the ceiling of this room and the roof of the building itself. Recent rat gnawing has opened a few small holes that one might be able to see the cursed cache through.
Type
Apartment building / Tenament
Parent Location
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