Boston Neighborhood Network News

0:00Hello Boston, welcome back to B&N News where we tell community stories you can only find here. I'm your host, Adel Chang, thanks for joining me. First, post your music and storytelling are bringing generations together. We'll take you to Free Verse and show you how local artists are using their voice to connect with the community. Free Verse Presents is a revolutionary open mic series that exists to uplift voices and cultivate inclusive spaces where poetry, music, and visual art become tools for healing, resistance, and transformation. Rueded in Boston and resonating throughout the country, Free Verse Return to Boston's civic pavilion last week to kick off the fall 2026 season. I especially. Independence Day baby boy, Ratten Boardy, Quapalu. I saw, I never got where he came from. You know, the day he got elected, all the sudden, no one could look me out anymore.

1:00I wonder, do they do the same thing when they're out? Ice, cold, chains, something way the same day. The blue only protect the white as long as the red is flooding streets. Because we're all in the same way, right? One nation. Under God, we want you to the jobs done. My father's son, check my visa. May feel me free my people to the my womb and come home down north. Hear my block ring with liberty and ring with injustice. I do not need more time in schools more concerned with my compliance than my curiosity. Nor do I need to watch a maternal ward become a confessional where unmedicated cries of agony are weighed on a scale of moral failure, far less real than the medical failure of doctors

2:02delivering fruit from a womb horizontally when all fruit in nature is deemed right and pulled to the earth by gravity, not by a man's hand. I do not need to be saved. I like Levi O'Lathone from my brethren's death to firemen with bloodshed. I know my blood is not unclean. It is the only blood not shed in vain, bearing life that cries in all the rotiaries of joy and not of pain before this city drains me of my genetic innocence before pens wielded by right men, erased me and servants slip poison into my veins before ink and then penetrate my mind and sculpt the way I speak because this world has no time for my childhood. It's about damn time I set myself free. When I started exploring my sexuality, most of my family turned their back on me because the golden child got fell in love with the rainbow. You already know how that same ghost every family has a black sheep and I became that at 13 so you see me on my head high slowly shoulders, oh wait, if you look deep behind this big

3:07smile you'll see that I'm still fighting to this day. And who wins the war when you and your enemy shit in the same face? When you tried to pray the gay away, but it never worked. When you tried to mask the pain with rage, it will forever hurt. Poet will never be princess enough for a fairy tale ending. The glass slipper has always been a pair of sneakers. I was always wearing a suit. So please don't put me in the dress at my funeral. Don't mention the boyfriend I had in third grade. Tell them. Tell them how I loved women, loved women, and I loved them so much that it cost me everything. Through these open mic performances, free verse and powers artists to share boldly, build community and continuously expand their creative reach.

4:10For V&N News, I'm Lulu Harding. And finally, the old state art has been standing in Boston for centuries, but some say not everyone who's walked its halls has left. From a cursed figurehead to stories of a ghostly little girl, we're taking you inside of the building spookiest legends. We have more than 300 years of history that live in this building and a lot of visitors and sometimes our staff have reported encounters that they feel are a little bit out of the ordinary. And one of the nice things about imagining that we might encounter something spooky or a ghost is that it puts a person from the past into the story. So instead of looking at a floor that is 300 years old, you're imagining that you're having an encounter with somebody who might have been in this space at an important moment in the past. I think when you go into a historic space, you can feel the history, but to make it relatable, people sometimes want to imagine that they're seeing a person who

5:17is connected with the story of this place that brings it to life. So we try to do that work through the exhibits and the objects that we put on display and the way that they can tell stories about the people who have been here, the people who inhabited Boston at different moments in time. But sometimes it might feel more immediate for a visitor to imagine that they've had an encounter with someone who actually was there and that's a first person encounter. I think the strangest reports that we have received from visitors here have to do with a little girl, maybe eight or nine years old, who has repeatedly on different days and different months and different years been reported by visitors to our staff as having become separated from her parents and standing at the bottom of the circular staircase down in the basement of the building. And our staff go down to try to find her and she's never there. And it's the repetition of that story and the conviction on the part of the visitors that they have seen this girl in need that is so strange and spooky.

6:25So not only buildings but also objects become infused with a kind of energy that people want to believe connects them to human beings or to something in the past. And we have in our collection a ship's figurehead that dates all the way back to the 18th century. It was carved to be on a French ship in the 1790s in revolutionary France. I was captured by a vessel out of Boston. In the Quasi War against France in the late 18th century, towed back to Boston and then disassembled. So privateers would capture an enemy vessel and then they would make money by selling the guns and other items off the ship. This particular figurehead, a top ship met with an ill fate, but then it finds its way onto another ship. So in the early 19th century the figurehead

7:25sailed on a ship out of Maine called the Caroline which wrecked but was salvaged. And the figurehead was again auctioned and it found its way onto the USS Martana. And in 1861 it wrecked in Boston in what is still regarded as the worship wreck ever in the harbor. And the figurehead now had been associated with three different ships, each of which had met with a horrible demise. And that was the last time any shipmaster wanted that figurehead to be on top of ship. So they sold it to the owner of Lincoln Wharf in the north end and within a week of it being mounted beside the arch that was the entry to Lincoln Wharf, the Wharf burned down. So another horrible thing associated with the figurehead seems to have happened. At that point nobody wanted anything to do with it and it was

8:27gifted to the Maritime Museum of Boston which at that time operated out of the ground floor of the old state house, the building where we are standing today. Within a few short years of it coming to the old state house there was a fire in this building in the attic. At some point somebody decided that all these horrible things associated with the figurehead happened because it was cursed. And the story is that a young Greek carver, basically a boy who worked in that French shipyard back in the 1790s had not been paid for the work he did to craft this amazing figurehead. And so he put a curse on it. That story finds its way into print in the early 20th century and it's been repeated over and over again. And so that story of the Lady Maritana has been told and believed by many generations and we still, even when the object is not on display, we have visitors who come in and

9:29want to know if they can see the cursed figurehead. What I hope is that when people reflect on these stories what they're doing is reflecting on the many, many, many layers of history that live in our building and in the objects in our collection and that they, it sparks a curiosity for them about the wider history that unfolded in this special place in Boston and in our country.

10:35Welcome back before we go if you're looking for something to do this weekend we've got you covered. Saturday's Spice October Fest takes every city hall plaza from 11 to 6 with food, live entertainment and plenty of heat. Also Saturday the Rosentale Dumbling Festival is back at Adam's Park. He can try downplays from different cultures from 330 to 7. Then Sunday Fiesta on La Plaza brings music, art and Latin culture to city hall plaza and also Sunday Cambridge Asian Fest takes over North Point Park with food performances and cultural activities. So plenty to check out around Boston this weekend. Well that's all we have for you tonight for more BNN News visit bnmedia.org to watch our previous broadcasts including full length event coverage. Thank you for watching for BNN News. I'm Adele Chi.