He was standing in line to buy a ticket to a performance by the Martha Graham Company when he noticed a “tall, willowy man” with his nose in a little book. He was wearing rings on his fingers.” Larry Osgood, a year behind Ted, shared Montgomery’s double-take reaction the first time he saw Gorey. “He seemed very, very tall, with his hair plastered down across the front like bangs, like a Roman emperor. “I remember the first day Ted Gorey came into the dining hall I thought he was the oddest person I’d ever seen,” said George Montgomery.
Swanning around campus in his signature getup of sneakers and a long canvas coat with a sheepskin collar, fingers heavy with rings, Gorey was the odds-on favorite for campus bohemian, with the emphasis on odd. Insatiable in his cultural cravings, all-embracing in his tastes, unreserved in his opinions, O’Hara was in many ways Gorey’s intellectual double, down to the fanatical balletomania. At the same time, he shared Ted’s passion for pop culture, which for O’Hara meant the comic strip Blondie, hit songs by Sinatra and the big-band trumpeter Harry James, and, most of all, film: he was an ardent moviegoer, papering his bedroom walls with pictures of popcorn Venuses like Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth.
Like Gorey, O’Hara was fluent in modern art, bristling with opinions on Picasso, Klee, Calder, and Kandinsky. By 1944, when he enlisted in the navy, he’d become “something of an expert on the latest developments in 20th-century avant-garde music, art, and literature,” mostly by way of his own autodidactic curriculum, Gooch writes. But the most obvious evidence that he and Gorey were cast in the same mold was O’Hara’s “drive for knowing about all the arts,” an impulse that “was as tireless as it was unfocused,” according to his biographer Brad Gooch, who adds that “he showed a genius, early on, for being in the know”-another Goreyan quality. He, too, was Irish Catholic, but whereas Ted had slipped the traces of a Catholic upbringing early on, O’Hara had all the post-traumatic baggage of the lapsed Catholic: “It’s well known that God and I don’t get along together,” he wisecracked in one of his poems. Like Gorey, he’d come to Harvard on the GI Bill. Brilliant, intellectually combative, lightning quick with a witty comeback, O’Hara was a virtuoso conversationalist who turned cocktail-party repartee into an improvisatory art. Frank O’Hara, his upstairs neighbor in Mower B-21, would go on to fame as a leading light in the New York School of poets (which included John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, both Harvardians as well). In his first month at Harvard, Gorey met a fellow veteran and fledgling poet with whom he soon formed a two-man counterculture. His roommates were Alan Lindsay and Bruce Martin McIntyre, about whom we know zilch, as he would say. Gorey’s new home was suite B-12, on the ground floor, a no-frills affair with two bedrooms giving onto a common study room with three desks and a fireplace.
Mower, a small red-brick building completed in 1925, has its own courtyard, a patch of tree-shaded green that gives it a secluded feel. According to a friend of Muise, when staffers were alone closing the bar, the mobster’s ghost was sometimes seen lurking around.Edward Gorey, like all incoming freshmen, had been assigned to one of the residence halls around Harvard Yard. As a result, he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. After a night of erotic fun in the garage with two prostitutes, the mobster forgot to turn off the car. One night, he decided to mix business and pleasure. A straight mobster owned the club back then.
Now how does a hotspot like this become a haunted gay bar? Mobsters use to rule Boston early in those times. The 1270 Club was known for its music, so much so that it even brought in a straight crowd. The club had three levels which featured a mix of everyone. It hosted Boston’s best DJs and popular dance parties. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the 1270 Club was one of Boston’s featured gay bars. Peter Muise, writer for New England Folklore, shares his story about a haunted gay bar in Boston on 1270 Boylston Street to be exact. What exactly is a ghost? According to American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, a ghost is the spirit of a dead person, especially one that is believed to appear to the living in bodily form or to haunt specific locations. Massacres, witch hangings, pirate executions and weird murders are a few reasons to check off why ghosts would vacation here. Boston is one of the oldest cities in America, which means that it’s a prime location for paranormal activity.