PETER RUGG – A GHOST STORY FROM 1824

PETER RUGG, THE MISSING MAN (1824) – This short story was written by author William Austin. A ghostly post-chaise horsedrawn carriage is often sighted and/or encountered up and down the East Coast. The carriage is pursued by a supernatural storm and is driven by a man named Peter Rugg with his daughter Jenny as his passenger.   

In the story, the narrator character Jonathan Dunwell and his driver meet Peter Rugg and his daughter on the road one night. Rugg asks for directions to Boston, obtains them from Dunwell’s driver and drives off, pursued by the storm.

Dunwell is puzzled, so his driver explains that Peter, his daughter, and their black horse are ghosts. Long ago they were killed in a storm while making their way to Boston. Rugg had refused to seek shelter at an inn, screaming to the heavens that he would reach Boston that night or never, and he and his child were then killed by the storm.

(No, I don’t know why the innocent daughter got stuck being a ghost, too.)

Dunwell is intrigued and begins researching Peter Rugg’s life. He learns that Rugg and his daughter have been haunting the roads of the East Coast as far south as Virginia.

Peter refuses to pay Toll Collectors, who fear his coming, the storm he brings and the way the horse and carriage either leap over toll-bars or pass right through them in ghostly fashion. Dunwell also learns that the night the Ruggs died was back in 1770.   

William Austin’s story – written in epistolary form – caught the public’s fancy and was so well done that people believed it must have been based on actual folklore and a real man. Some sources from the 1800s mistakenly presented the fictional Jonathan Dunwell’s encounter with Peter Rugg as a real-life ghost sighting. 

Public interest prompted Austin to write two follow-up short stories.  On September 1st, 1826 The New England Galaxy published Some Further Account of Peter Rugg, the Missing Man.

That was followed by the Galaxy publishing Arrival in Boston of Mr. Peter Rugg on January 19th, 1827. The second tale featured “Jonathan Dunwell” doing a figurative Interview with the Ghost conversation with the phantasmal Peter Rugg.

Readers learn his black horse intimidates and commands all other horses the Ruggs encounter in their travels. An inconsistent story element is introduced claiming that the black horse is an enforcer of the ghost’s curse, refusing to stop at Rugg’s Boston home no matter how many times the carriage passes it. 

In the third and final story, William Austin went back to the detail that the ghost has been known for terrorizing Toll Collectors and refusing to pay them. His narrator Jonathan Dunwell stepping in to pay Rugg’s toll has lifted the curse. Before Peter and Jenny can fade to the afterlife, their carriage finally arrives at their Boston home, only to see it lying in ruins after all this time and the land being auctioned off.

Rugg also learns that his wife is long dead, having spent the rest of her life waiting for her husband and daughter to return home. Peter reacts with awe to the world of 1827 and wonders if the Bostonians around him are the “real” ghosts, haunting him and Jenny with visions of modern New England.  

Accounts pretending (or believing) that the Rugg Ghosts were organic folklore continued as early as September 1827 with author Jonas Platt writing in The Nofolk Republican about his own sighting of Peter Rugg and his daughter. Subsequent folklore about the Rugg Ghosts took to calling Peter “the storm breeder/ bringer”, implying that when storms at sundown struck they were pursuing the phantom carriage and its passengers.

Writer Nathaniel Hawthorne mentioned being inspired by the saga of the ghostly Peter Rugg, as did other 1800s authors around the world. Folklore often ignored the third and concluding story by Austin and depicted the Rugg Ghosts still wandering, frightening nighttime travelers, terrorizing Toll Collectors and bringing powerful storms in their wake.