public

Heavily Investigated

They say Boyington meant every word he shouted from the gallows — that a mighty oak would claw up from his heart and prove the court wrong. Visitors to Church Street Graveyard report it did exactly that. People claim to hear low weeping and urgent whispers drifting from the canopy on still nights, and paranormal investigators say their recorders have caught EVPs that sound, unmistakably, like a desperate plea. Shadowy figures are said to linger near the trunk at dusk, and an uneasy, watched feeling reportedly grips even skeptical guests who wander too close to those ancient, tangled roots.

Charles R.S. Boyington, a Connecticut-born printer barely 19, arrived in boom-era Mobile in 1833 and distinguished himself chiefly as a gambler. On May 11, 1834, his roommate Nathaniel Frost — ill with consumption — was found stabbed near Church Street Graveyard; Boyington, seen with him that day, was the obvious suspect. Inept defense counsel and purely circumstantial evidence sealed his fate: guilty, November 1834; hanged February 20, 1835. Buried in potter's field, he left behind one parting promise. The oak that rose from that unmarked plot still stands — and the cemetery wall was eventually redrawn around it.