E-Mail This Article to a Friend I see dead people (continued)
	Where to find them • Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Avenue, Boston, (617) 524-0128. • John F. Kennedy National Historic Site, 83 Beals Street, Brookline, (617) 566-7937 • Longfellow House, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, (617) 876-4491 • Mount Auburn Cemetery, 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, (617) 547-7105 • National Park Service Visitors Center, Galleria at Presidents Place, 1250 Hancock Street, Quincy, (617) 770-1175 • Omni Parker House Hotel, 60 School Street, Boston, (617) 227-8600 • The Paramount, 44 Charles Street, Boston, (617) 720-1152. — GR • Innovation Odyssey (617-350-0358). On this tour of Boston and Cambridge, an actor/tour guide brings to life the eureka moments that accompanied Boston innovations, from the telephone to the Internet. • Literary Trail of Greater Boston (Omni Parker House, 60 School Street, Boston, 617-350-0358). This three-and-a-half-hour guided tour travels through Boston, Cambridge, and Concord to visit sites such as Walden Pond, Longfellow House, Concord Museum, and Orchard House. • Original Boston Spirits Tour (781-235-7149). A 90-minute walking tour that takes you through downtown Boston’s infamous haunted sites. — GR

Another unknown scientific pioneer is Ellen Swallow Richards, a woman accepted by MIT (then called Mass Tech and located on Boylston Street, in Boston) as "an experiment" in 1870. She became the first woman to graduate from MIT, in 1873, and the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry. In 1875, Richards appealed to the Women’s Education Association of Boston for assistance in opening a Women’s Laboratory to encourage women to participate in science. And in 1882, she convinced MIT to admit female students. Her analysis of more than 20,000 water samples and her work in promoting public health led to major advances in the prevention of infection and disease. A plaque marks her former home on Jamaica Plain’s Eliot Street (at Dane Street).

Percy Spencer, a self-taught engineer involved in Raytheon’s World War II radar-defense work, at 290 Main Street in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, discovered the principle of microwave cooking. While working in front of the magnetron one afternoon in 1946, Spencer noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Guessing that the heat from the magnetron had caused the bar to melt, Spencer tried a bag of popcorn, which popped. However, microwave ovens wouldn’t be small or cheap enough to produce for household use until the mid 1960s.

Following a presidential path

With all eyes on John Kerry’s acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination, a closer look at locally born leaders may be in order.

If you take the MBTA Red Line 10 miles south of Boston, you can take a guided tour of 11 historic structures associated with the Adams family, including those of two former presidents. Tours depart from the National Park Service Visitors Center for the John Adams Birthplace, where the second US president, John Adams, was born, and the John Quincy Adams Birthplace, where his son, the sixth US president, was born. The tour also visits the United First Parish Church, where both presidents are entombed in the family crypt.

More familiar to most Americans is the charismatic former president John F. Kennedy. In Brookline, the John F. Kennedy National Historic Site preserves the modest frame house that was JFK’s boyhood home, and also presents guided tours of the neighborhood, including homes, schools, and a church associated with the Kennedy family.

Relaxing in peace

Should you prefer to escape the city’s madding crowds, consider a visit to one of the area’s several graveyards.

Founded in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery was the nation’s first large-scale designed landscape open to the public. Its natural landscaping, ornamental plantings, monuments, fences, fountains, and chapels inspired numerous "garden" graveyards throughout the United States and, in turn, the establishment of America’s public parks.

According to Janet Heywood, Mount Auburn Cemetery’s vice-president of interpretive programs, many notable Bostonians are interred there, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of The Ride of Paul Revere, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the doctor and author who labeled Boston "the Hub of the Universe," and named the city’s social elites the "Brahmin" class.

Mount Auburn Cemetery also contains the graves of abolitionists Harriet Jacobs (author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) and Charles Sumner (orator and senator); architects Charles Bulfinch (who designed the Massachusetts State House and parts of the Capitol in Washington); and artist Winslow Homer. Foodies should seek out the grave of Harvey D. Parker, founder of the Parker House, where the Boston cream pie was invented.

Founded in 1848, the park-like Forest Hills Cemetery also offers visitors Victorian memorial sculptures and architecture alongside ambling paths and flowering plants and trees. Here, you’ll find the graves of poets e.e. cummings and Anne Sexton, playwright Eugene O’Neill, and abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lysander Spooner.

Remembering the infamous

Of course, not all of Boston’s past is admirable. Several sites around the city serve to remind us of infamous historic events.

While religious persecution in Massachusetts is typically associated with Salem, the Original Boston Spirits Walking Tour’s McCabe notes that the Hanging Tree in Boston Common (near Tremont and West Streets) is where a Quaker was hanged for her religious beliefs in the 1600s. Arrested as "a heretic," Mary Dyer was banished to Providence, Rhode Island. She nonetheless returned to Boston, where McCabe says she was hanged, dropped into a shallow grave in the back tide area (now the Public Garden), and washed out to the harbor. A statue in front of the State House memorializes her killing.

John Wilkes Booth stayed at the Omni Parker House Hotel shortly before he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, says McCabe. Booth was in town to see his brother, Edwin, a Shakespearean actor performing at a theater next door, and he used a nearby alley (outside 80 School Street) for pistol practice.

McCabe also notes that the Boston Strangler murdered his last female victim in an apartment above Beacon Hill’s Paramount restaurant, in 1964. However, later evidence has shown that Albert DeSalvo, the man who confessed to the Strangler’s 13 murders, probably didn’t commit all the crimes.

Genevieve Rajewski can be reached at ticktockwordshop@comcast.net