Duxbury after dark.

The documented part: digging up the Captain

Start with the strangest true story in town. When the Duxbury Rural Society reclaimed the overgrown Old Burying Ground in 1887, visitors immediately wanted to know where Myles Standish lay. Family tradition pointed to two rough pyramid-shaped fieldstones, and in April 1889, over real objections, the Society dug beneath them. They found the skeleton of an elderly man beside a young woman, and no proof of anything. The Society's own president wrote that nothing was found to show the man was Standish. The graves were closed.

It did not stay settled. A newly arrived Episcopal minister, Rev. Eugene Huiginn, became convinced the dig had been too timid, and in 1891 he got permission to open the ground again, this time uncovering four sets of remains and declaring the question answered. The affair split the town. The Rural Society voted to wash its hands of the whole matter, two dozen members quit in protest and founded a rival historical society, and the splinter group raised $364 to build the cannon-cornered monument that marks the grave today, completed in 1893. The rivals eventually reunited, which is why the organization is now called the Rural and Historical Society.

And then it happened once more. In 1931, forty years after the diggings he had opposed from the start, an elderly Frederick Bradford Knapp watched the grave opened a third time, so the remains could be moved from a plain pine box into a sealed copper box inside a concrete vault. Whoever lies beneath the cannons, he has been disturbed three times and is now very thoroughly locked in.

The legend part: the man who never left the tavern

Now the folklore, offered as folklore. The 1741 farmhouse on Congress Street that houses the Sun Tavern comes with a story most of its staff and many of its regulars can recite: that it is haunted by Lysander Walker, a recluse who lived out his final years there and died in the house in 1928, and, in some tellings, by two young girls lost to scarlet fever in the 1700s. Over the decades, employees have reported cold spots, odd sounds, and the general sense of company in empty rooms. None of it is verifiable, all of it is tradition, and the restaurant wears the story comfortably. It is a good dinner regardless, and better in October.

The atmosphere is real

Verifiable hauntings or not, Duxbury after dark comes by its mood naturally. The Old Burying Ground at dusk, holding Mayflower passengers under bare trees, is as evocative a place as New England offers. The bay goes black and silent off the bridge on a November night. And fog coming over the barrier beach can erase the modern world entirely. Every town has ghost stories; not every town has scenery that makes them plausible.

Got a Duxbury story of your own, family lore, a strange night, a legend we should chase down? Send it in. The good ones get investigated.

Sources & verification

The grave exhumations are documented history, drawn from the Duxbury Rural & Historical Society, the research blog Historical Digression's detailed account of the 1889, 1891, and 1931 openings, and the record of the Society schism. The Sun Tavern material is presented as the legend it is, as collected in published haunted-places compilations, and is not offered as fact. Last verified: July 20, 2026.