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A shallow grave. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leeb. And this is Ghost Town. In the historic Trinity Churchyard in Lower Manhattan, just off Wall Street, is a limestone grave.

Most don't make this grave their first priority when they go to the cemetery, as American icons like Alexander Hamilton also call the cemetery their eternal homes. But to a curious few,

the small, simple stone marked Charlotte Temple is the real draw. Why? Because she never existed.

Today on Ghost Town, the mysterious Charlotte Temple. Two centuries ago, most American readers

would have known the name Charlotte Temple.

Temple was the title character in a novel by Susanna Rosen called Charlotte, A Tale of Truth.

It was published under the name Charlotte Temple in some places around 1791.

The plot of this novel goes something like this. Charlotte Temple is this naive, 16-year-old British girl who gets seduced by a man named Lord Montraville.

Montreville takes Charlotte to America and then abandons her when he goes off to marry another woman because he hadn't married Charlotte.

After this marriage, Montreville fights in the Revolutionary War. And so, after being abandoned, poor Charlotte dies penniless in a

wintry New York City after giving birth to an illegitimate child. And the book ends with her

father arriving too late to save her from this death. It sounds like, I've never read it, a bit of a

bummer. Well, it was, but the book was also hugely popular. In fact, it was the

best-selling novel in America for half a century, a moody New York tragedy. Says fandom scholar

and Atlas Obscura community editor Allegra Rosenberg about the novel, quote, it's the exact same kind of

thing that's just playing on people's heartstrings.

...