Boston Common is generally cited as the oldest public park in the United States (1634): pasture, muster ground, gathering place, and for long stretches a site of public punishment. The Great Elm served for generations as Boston’s principal hanging tree; its former ground is a frequent hook for later apparition stories (colonial dress, hanging forms that vanish, night voices). British troops used the Common in the Revolutionary period. Those uses are historical; the ghosts attached to them are folklore.

Central Burying Ground opened in 1756 as Boston’s fourth major cemetery, along the Common’s southern edge. It received many without family tombs elsewhere — immigrants, strangers, the poor — as well as some better-known burials (e.g. painter Gilbert Stuart; Tea Party participants appear in civic lists). City history notes burials disturbed when Boylston Street was improved (1830s): tombs removed and remains reinterred in a western double row. In 1895, Tremont/Boylston subway excavation uncovered further tombs and unmarked remains; those were consolidated in a large grave in the northwest of the yard, marked by a slate tablet. Tour lore often calls the subway dead British soldiers from the occupation or Bunker Hill; official city text says some British officers are *believed* buried at Central but that fact *cannot be confirmed*, and the 1895 tablet speaks of persons found under the mall during subway digging — not a proven redcoat trench ID.

Haunt claims include colonial figures among stones, shadows, emotional “crowding,” Green Line operators’ stories of uniformed men on tracks near Boylston, and a 1970s encounter attributed to Boston dentist Matt Rutger (also spelled Rutger in retellings): a silent girl in a dirty white dress appearing in different corners, touches/collar pull, keys taken or dropped — published in later ghost books (e.g. Nadler, Revai, Baltrusis), not as a 1970s newspaper primary in the sources checked here.