Even before he found out he was related to one of Mobile’s most famous ghosts, Preston Boyington was fascinated with stories of the spirit world. As a child growing up in Florala, he discovered author Kathryn Tucker Windham’s “Thirteen Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey” and was hooked.
He used to ride his bike several blocks from home to the library, where he would “read everything,” he says. “I was ravenous.” One day as he was devouring a spooky tale, he was shocked and even impressed to see his own name related to a ghost story from Mobile.
Charles Boyington was hanged in the 1830s for a crime he claimed he didn’t commit. His last words proclaimed his innocence, as he told the crowd gathered to watch him die that if he were telling the truth – that he’d been wrongfully accused of murder – an oak tree would grow from his very heart. Sure enough, a mighty oak still stands at his burial site near South Bayou Street, a block north of Government Street.
For the next few decades, Preston Boyington, whose father’s family lived near Mobile, would have a neat story to tell about his connection to one of Mobile’s most famous ghost stories. “It’s kind of a novelty thing for me,” he says. “It’s something I’ve always touched back to. Finding someone you may have a connection with around the event that still is talked about is pretty interesting.”
Recently, Preston Boyington, an IT director in Dothan, visited the century-and-a-half-old oak tree that stands just outside the walls of the Church Street Graveyard in downtown Mobile. The Boyington Oak, which grew to prove Charles Boyington’s innocence, is known to be one of the city’s most haunted spots.
‘I’m innocent!”
Todd Duren, an artist, teacher and tour guide who owns Secret History Tours, leads a “local color” walking tour of downtown Mobile on Saturday afternoons, making regular stops at the Boyington Oak. While there, he tells tour groups “the true-crime story of Charles Boyington and Nathaniel Frost,” he says. When it’s quiet and dark, he tells them, the tree is said to whisper, “I’m innocent! I’m innocent!”
It’s enough to send shivers down your spine.
But the story is much more than a ghost story. It’s a tale worthy of William Shakespeare that incorporates history, drama, romance, murder, mystery and the supernatural. For years, Mobile writer and teacher Maureen Maclay has thought about writing a play based on the story. She used her knowledge of the subject to contribute the foreword to a new book, “Boyington Oak: A Grave Injustice” by Mary S. Palmer.
“It’s a riveting story and a glimpse into life in Mobile before the Civil War,” says Maclay. “It’s also an intriguing story about crime and punishment based on circumstantial evidence in an era before specialized criminal investigations and techniques like DNA gathering.”
Here’s the story, in a nutshell: Charles Boyington is believed to have moved to Mobile from Connecticut in 1833 at age 19, to work as a printer. He lived in a boarding house with a roommate, Nathaniel Frost, who suffered from tuberculosis. Charles fell in love with a young Mobile woman named Rose le Fleur, but her father, a former baron in Napoleon’s Army, didn’t approve of him and forbade her from seeing him. He wrote poems to Rose, some of which were printed in the Mobile newspaper at the time, says Maclay. Each chapter of the new book begins with a poem Charles wrote to his beloved Rose.
One night in May of 1834, someone stabbed Nathaniel to death in Church Street Cemetery, and Charles immediately became a suspect because he was the last person to have seen Nathaniel alive. Charles was already aboard a riverboat, gambling away, when two officers met him at the next stopping point on horseback.
Charles was brought back to Mobile, where he was held in jail before being tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to hang on Feb. 20, 1835.
In those days, a large crowd would gather to witness a hanging, which took place near Oakleigh. “He was well-liked,” says Preston Boyington. “Charles Boyington was allowed to walk to the gallows, shaking hands with people in the crowd, cracking jokes. When he first saw the gallows, he broke down for a second but quickly recomposed himself and gave a speech.”
He made an attempt to escape but was quickly recaptured. “They dragged him kicking and screaming to the gallows,” says Duren, the tour guide. “It was a grisly hanging.”
Maclay says she has always wondered if Rose planted an acorn at his gravesite, or maybe he swallowed an acorn. Whatever the explanation, an oak tree sprouted at the site, and the tale became a good ghost story.
‘A long line of n’er-do-wells’
Palmer and her friend Shannon Brown, who’s credited as the editor of “Boyington Oak: A Grave Injustice,” spent about a year working on the book, which will be released in November. They insist that Charles Boyington haunted them throughout the research and writing process by rapping on doors and making things disappear.
“He’s haunted us, but I think he’s happy,” Brown says.
Palmer and Brown have done extensive research for the work of “creative nonfiction,” as Palmer calls the book. “All the facts are true,” she says. “Sometimes I had to set a scene, which is fictional, and I embellished it with dialogue.”
When the book was almost finished, Palmer and Brown struck gold when they inadvertently found a descendant of Charles Boyington. “Finding Preston was almost like Charles directing that story,” says Brown.
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This past summer, a docent at the Conde-Charlotte House Museum in downtown Mobile, which was the site of the jail where Charles Boyington was held more than 150 years ago, happened to tell Brown that someone with the last name “Boyington” had visited there and had also visited the famous oak tree. He’d also mentioned that he’d done some research into his relationship to the unfortunate Charles.
Brown and Palmer knew they needed to talk to this modern-day Boyington, so they looked him up and spent two hours on the phone with him. Before he knew it, Preston Boyington had planned another visit to Mobile, this time to meet the women who were writing sympathetically about his ancestor and who believe in Charles’s innocence.
“I’m from a long line of n’er-do-wells,” jokes Preston Boyington, the visitor who, at the time, was in Mobile on a whim with a childhood friend who wanted to tour the Battleship USS Alabama.
In their research, members of Boyington’s family had learned that Charles had a brother named Ruben, the same name as Preston’s grandfather. His family tends to use family names over and over, so he assumes he’s related to Charles Boyington but he’s not clear on exactly how.
“Now we’re looking for something other than word of mouth,” he says. “I’m really interested in everything I can find on it. It was a fascinating series of events, especially for the time period. There are several characters I want to know more about.”
He believes Charles Boyington was clever, lying about his age to become an apprentice and get a job working for a printer. He likens him to a teenager at spring break. “He was out having fun, and he started going to balls and events that were clearly higher class than he was,” he says. “In my mind, he was trying to better himself, to become a gentleman.” He also, of course, wanted to woo Rose.
Even before he met Palmer and Brown – he spent a day with them in August, taking photos around Boyington Oak and having lunch at Mobile’s Dew Drop Inn and ice cream at Cammie’s Old Dutch – Preston Boyington was visiting the Mobile Public Library’s genealogy department to research the story. “I’ve been slowly building a small collection about it,” he says. “It’s been an ongoing hobby.”
Though he never heard Boyington Oak whisper “I’m innocent,” or anything else, Preston Boyington says being there is like “visiting a place where an important event happened,” he says. “You can feel a little of the weight of it, the gravity of the situation. Under our feet are the bones of a man. We’re literally walking on his grave, touching his gravesite. This was a real thing that I can touch that is directly linked to what happened. We don’t have a lot of that nowadays.”
He plans to return to Mobile to attend “Haunted Places, Haunted Spaces: A Forum on the Ghosts of Mobile” at the University of South Alabama’s Marx Library on Thursday, Oct. 17, from 6 to 9 p.m. Palmer will speak about her upcoming book, “Boyington Oak: A Grave Injustice.” Other panel members include Patsy Hamilton, president of the governing board of the Richards DAR House Museum, and Marye Newman, manager of Historic Oakleigh House. Admission to the event is free.
Meanwhile, Palmer and Brown have become so convinced of Charles Boyington’s innocence that they’re hoping to win him a posthumous pardon. The jury included one man who was actually a British citizen and another who was convinced of Charles’s guilt before the trial began. And years after his execution, there were two separate deathbed confessions to the crime he was accused of committing.
While it’s a century and a half too late to save Charles Boyington, they feel that they can at least help restore his good name for his descendants. They’ve enlisted John Tyson Jr., former Mobile County District Attorney, whose great-grandfather tried a case in 1894 that mentioned the Boyington trial, to help in their efforts.
“He has become as invested in this as Mary and me,” says Brown.
When she read a long letter Charles had written to his mother, Palmer was struck by the fact that “he kept saying that sooner or later, he’d be vindicated.”
“He just didn’t know it would take us,” Brown says incredulously.
Those eerie cries of “I’m innocent” might finally be heard by the right people at last.