Fort Warren is located on George’s Island in Boston harbor.  Its construction using Quincy Granite began in 1833 and the first troops occupied the fort in 1861.  Interestingly because the fort took so long to build it was already obsolete when completed due to technological advances like ironclad warships.

The first confederate prisoners to be detained at the fort were confederate soldiers who were captured at Roanoke, VA by General Burnside.  One of these prisoners was a recently married Lieutenant and the story of the fort’s Lady in Black begins with this man.

This officer managed, via the Underground Railroad, to get a message to his new wife.  He told her that he was alive and on an island in Boston harbor.  When she read the letter this young woman immediately decided that she was not only going to see her husband again, she was going to make it happen herself.

She made her way to Boston, arriving in Hull, MA on a small sloop and made her way to the home of a southern family who had relocated there before the war.  They helped her by giving her men’s clothes to wear, and an old
pistol.

The woman rowed across Hull Gut and what was then known Nantasket Road and landed her boat on the beach at George’s Island.  After sneaking past several sentries, she hid in the ditch alongside the cell wall and gave a prearranged signal.  Being small, she was hoisted up the wall and squeezed through the carronade into what is now called the Corridor of Dungeons.

Along with several other prisoners plans were made to dig a tunnel that would bring them onto the parade ground.  Unfortunately their knowledge of the fort’s layout wasn’t as good as they thought, and they miscalculated. 

They were seen as soon as they broke ground and surrounded by troops.  The woman decided to try and shoot their way out, but the old pistol she was given backfired and her husband was killed.

The prisoners were returned to their cells, but the woman, since she was a civilian, was sentenced to hang as a spy. 
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With her husband dead she was resigned to her death, only asking that she be hung in women’s clothes and she was given a black dress that had been worn by a soldier during a play at the fort and executed that very evening.

Since that time the Woman in Black has become a fixture at the fort, having been seen by men stationed there until it’s decommissioning in the 1950’s and many visitors since Fort Warren was opened as a park in 1961.

Incredibly, there are military records of court martials taking place at the fort when sentries fired their weapons at a figure who wasn’t there, or deserted their posts looking for someone they saw rounding a corner or entering a doorway…