Over the years, we’ve covered countless tales of hauntings and spooky lore – a college dorm in Providence that was once a funeral parlor, evidence of witches marks in Little Compton, and sightings of a ghost girl in a Charlestown inn bedroom – to name a few. Leaving no stone unturned, our editors invite you to a spooky campfire chat – with flashlights held beneath our chins – in the pages of this magazine. From interviews with a TV personality whose livelihood is tracking spectral visitors to authors specializing in New England ghosts, and places to eat, drink, and stay where you might feel the brush of something otherworldly, it’s all right here.
“I feel like this whole island is haunted,” says Amy Bruni, of Kindred Spirits and Ghost Hunters fame. She lists off a handful of Aquidneck Island sites, both well-known for their frights like White Horse Tavern and those less traversed by tourists – Miantonomi Tower, where public hangings once took place, and the supposed “blood alley” behind the Newport Opera House. Paranormal investigators like Bruni spend their careers not only communicating with the dead, but also ruminating over genealogical texts, court records, and house deeds. Visit any historical society in the area and it will become immediately clear – the East Bay is home to both hallowed grounds and the stuff of haunts and legends.
“Ghosts did bring me here,” says Bruni, who was drawn to spirits from a young age, a passion her father helped foster by supplementing it with American history lessons. Often traveling from California to the East Coast to film Ghost Hunters, she met her significant other in Providence and settled down in Portsmouth. She jokes that this comes with the benefit of sleeping in her own bed after investigating nearby haunts, but it also means she’s never far from the region’s abundance of lore.
“There are little cemeteries everywhere, especially on Aquidneck Island,” Bruni says. “You can just pick one and learn fascinating things about a family there, like the Cornells. They’re buried behind a condo complex in Portsmouth.” She’s referring to the family who went down in infamy for Thomas Cornell’s alleged murder of his mother, Rebecca Cornell, in 1672. The kicker? The evidence leading to Thomas’ conviction and execution was purely spectral – the ghost of Rebecca appeared to her brother, John Briggs, with a message about the illicit nature of her death: “See how I was burnt with fire.”
It’s likely Thomas Cornell now rests beneath the Valley Inn Restaurant parking lot – apart from the family plot, of course.
Bruni investigated the Valley Inn for paranormal activity on both Kindred Spirits and her podcast, Haunted Road (and returns often for the stellar pizza), though the job takes her all over. She brings a uniquely thoughtful approach to coaxing out stories from the past.
“It’s just about humanizing the ghosts. I won’t claim to know exactly what a ghost is or speak in absolutes; I’m still not sure what we’re dealing with. But I just imagine, if someone were there in front of me, how would I treat them?” she says.
Bruni compares what they do to walking into a party where you don’t know anyone. In Kindred Spirits, you’ll see her and paranormal partner Adam Berry calmly, cautiously conferring with the spirit box – a means of getting on the ghosts’ wavelengths to hear what they have to say – and asking polite but probing questions, reading the room and feeling out the energy. “And it can be scary – sometimes, just like in day-to-day life, people don’t like a super cheerful lady walking in. Sometimes we’ll actually have homeowners or business owners introduce us to them. It’s just manners,” Bruni explains.
Bruni and Berry go where they’re invited, and the scope of their investigations varies. Sometimes it’s homes that are plagued with unexplained phenomena. In those cases, “I think a lot of it is understanding,” says Bruni. “To a family, they’re living with door slamming every day and footsteps and voices and that’s terrifying until maybe Adam and I come in and provide some perspective. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”
For locations steeped in history like Fort Adams or Rose Island, “There’s just so much information to draw on,” says Bruni. They conferred with Joan Quinn, a historian and haunted tour guide who has worked for the Newport Preservation Society, on their visit to Rose Island Lighthouse. A former lighthouse docent, Quinn is not only an expert on the island’s history but has also spent lots of time there.
“I feel like the lighthouse has always had a very friendly kind of feel,” says Quinn. “I would say it’s very spiritual, but there is some spooky stuff, too.” Two mass graves, barracks that once housed a cholera ward, and a deadly ship collision that happened close to its shores all make the small island a prime source for otherworldly activity; but inside the lighthouse itself, both Bruni’s team and Quinn detected the more peaceful presence of its long-time keeper. Charles S. Curtis is rumored to still make the trek up the stairs every night to turn the light on, and appearances of a child could be grandson Wanton Chase.
“Maybe some people get stuck, maybe it’s some kind of trauma, or maybe it’s, ‘oh I love this house, I never want to leave.’ I think Rose Island was very much that,” says Quinn. “I think he still wanted to do his job. It was that important.”
Quinn, who speaks of local history and paranormal encounters with both relish and reverence, absorbs tales relayed by guests in her Bristol and Warren haunted history tour groups and – with their permission – adds them to her repertoire of lore, which has expanded to become a sort of oral history collection of East Bay experiences over the years. She has witnessed glowing orbs in graveyards, heard doors slamming in the Rose Island barracks, and found mysterious streaks of light on photos. Others have entrusted her with stories of hearing Revolutionary War flutes in the Bristol Town Commons, apparitions on Tower Street, and other echoes of the past.
“Being a religion minor, it always made sense to me that there is another step after this, another reality, maybe,” says Quinn. “I always ask people on my tours, ‘are you believers?’ I don’t even know what I think, but there’s definitely something going on. What we see is very minimal of what is really out there.”
For investigators like Bruni and Quinn, the search for spirits begins in courthouses, historical societies, and libraries before ever setting foot inside a haunted house. And often, the discoveries made in old paper trails can be more rewarding than the lure of the supernatural. This is true for Marjory O’Toole, executive director of Little Compton Historical Society.
“I find a lot of what I do is start with the old histories and compare them to primary source documents and find that many of them need adjustment in order to be more factual, more accurate,” says O’Toole. “The legends are fascinating and often start with a grain of historical truth, but it’s really rewarding to try and discern what is truthful and what is legend.”
Even when ghosts can’t be conjured between the lines of historical records, there’s evidence of colonists’ superstitious belief found in small details like silver jewelry stuffed in children’s shoes and hidden behind fireplaces for protection, or circles and lines etched into wood to ward off witches.
Apotropaic marks, or witches’ marks, can be seen in Little Compton’s Wilbor House, on furniture originally from the Waite-Potter House in Westport, MA. “They were purposely tangled marks and designs because that would help tangle up and catch the witch as she was trying to get into your house,” explains O’Toole. “New England colonists would try to protect themselves from evil spirits with these marks…we have this impression of Puritans as not being superstitious people but in reality, not everyone was a Puritan, and English colonists brought European superstitions with them to the New World.”
Their concern over evil spirits was deeply rooted. “I think it was a fear of things they couldn’t control or understand and attaching that fear to imaginary things like witches and spirits that would come and hurt them,” speculates O’Toole. “The real fear, the greatest fear of all, was illness. There’s no antibiotics; something as simple as strep throat could kill your children.
“And they feared the wrath of God. Quite sadly, there was also a belief that God was punishing them. The witches marks and hidden shoes weren’t connected to God – they were connected to the opposite of God: evil creatures, evil spirits.”
The story of Jonathan Dunham – known as Shingleterry – and Mary Rosse taps into New England’s obsession with witches. O’Toole recounts the story as it’s told in The Naked Quaker by Diane Rapaport. In the 1700s, across the street from the Quaker Meeting House in Little Compton, the crime-committing duo broke into the home of John and Elizabeth Irish, barricading their children inside and setting the house on fire. John Irish was able to rescue his children, and Shingleterry and Rosse were “turned over to the officials – local judges – who decided that they needed to be tied to the back of a wagon and whipped on their way out of town. So they were sent out of town but not imprisoned,” explains O’Toole.
Tracing out-of-town court records, you can chart the pair’s destructive path, and eventually their crimes caught up to them – or at least to Rosse, who was declared a witch. “The court decided that Shingleterry was under Mary’s spell and he was innocent. From what I understand, he became a minister and had congregations down in the New Jersey/Maryland area, and I’m not sure what happened to Mary but I’m sure she wasn’t treated as well by the courts.”
Little Compton Historical Society, and its Wilbor House museum, is a bottomless well of these kinds of stories, as well as lesser-known tales of ordinary people living in the town at different periods of time. O’Toole notes the wealth of new information digitized records give us access to. “In the past, people would think, you can’t do the history of people of color in New England because there just aren’t any records. That’s simply not true. There are lots of records, but they’re hard to find, so it really comes down to how hard we are looking.”
It’s this process of uncovering the facts behind the myth that drew O’Toole to the field of history, though she doesn’t dismiss the tantalizing lore that circulates our region.
“The main thing is that the stories are really fun, and there’s nothing wrong with a story – even an exaggerated story – if it piques someone’s interest in the history,” she says, “but I think as interesting as the stories are on their own, it’s even more rewarding to try and do a little bit of digging to find the truth behind it.”
–Abbie Lahmers, The Bay, October 2022
“Rhode Island doesn’t really have a monster story,” Rondina laments. His macabre mood lifts, however, when talk turns to the state’s abundant haunted sites, many inhabiting the historic villages and deep forests of Southern Rhode Island. “In some ways, I think Rhode Island is one of the spookiest states in New England, with woods full of old graveyards,” he says. And, he points out, we do have at least one paranormal pooch pawing around the ruins of an old fort in Jamestown. Buckle up for some South County sites worth visiting for a few genuine chills.
The Advent Christian Church began holding religious camp revival meetings in the village of Greene in the 1880s, and ruins of the former Camp Greene can be found in the woods off Hopkins Hollow Road. “Abandoned cabins, enormous crosses, and bat houses nailed to every tree – this decaying former religious retreat in one of Rhode Island’s most rural corners feels like the backdrop for a Stephen King novel,” says Rondina. “Urban legends persist regarding murderous camp counselors and other dark deeds, but these grim accounts seem more like campfire tales than genuine history. Even so, it’s not a place most people would linger after sundown.”
Rhode Island has more than 2,800 historic cemeteries; #22 on Route 102 in Exeter is the final resting place of Mercy Brown, who died of tuberculosis in 1892. Suspected by her family of being a vampire, Mercy was exhumed and found to be weirdly well-preserved; in desperation, a piece of her heart was fed to her brother (also ill with the disease) in an attempt to ward off death. “Mercy was one of a dozen such revenants thought to prowl the graveyards of Rhode Island between 1796 and 1892, a cursed history which may have inspired Bram Stoker, author of Dracula,” says Rondina.
Devil’s Foot Road in North Kingstown runs along a granite ledge known as Devil’s Foot Rock, so named for a series of indentations attributed to Satan himself. “‘Old Scratch’ is said to have left footprints in the woods near Quonset while in pursuit of a virtuous native maiden in the 1600s, and his diabolical prints are still visible today,” says Rondina. The satanic stone is located just south of Quonset Point, off Route 1.
Rhode Island may not have its own monster, but a demon dog is believed to wander the grounds of Fort Wetherill — a legend that Haunted Rhode Island author Thomas D’Agostino says could date back to British occupation of the fort during the Revolutionary War. Even if you don’t run into a spooky pup on your visit, it’s creepy enough to explore the ruined World War II-era fortifications, which include underground tunnels (technically) off limits to the public.
Some spooky spots in South County have fanciful stories, but the terror and violence that took place in the Great Swamp in 1675 was all too real. In the middle of King Philip’s War, a colonial militia descended upon a peaceful encampment of the Narragansett tribe in South Kingstown and massacred hundreds of women and children, with many more dying after fleeing into the frozen swamp. The Great Swamp Fight Monument is located off Route 2, near the site of the fortress.
Founded as The Rhode Island School for the Feeble-Minded in 1908, the Ladd School was essentially an overcrowded prison for the mentally ill and women accused of violating the morality codes of the day. This place of misery, neglect, and murder was finally razed in 2013, but not before being used as the setting of a horror movie called Exeter. “Haunted by dark memories and an aura of hopelessness, the site remains stigmatized to this day by its past,” Rondina says.
Two rows of Runic letters, visible only at low tide, were carved into a granite boulder on Pojac Point, some say by early Norse explorers. Nobody is quite sure where the carvings originated or what they mean, although the closest translation seems to be “screaming river.” The stone was relocated for safekeeping to Library Park in Wickford in 2015.
The 1770 home of Rhode Island’s foremost Revolutionary War hero is one of a handful of haunted houses that are open to the public. Rondina says supernatural phenomena have reportedly included a baby carriage that moves by itself, the smell of baking bread from long unused ovens, and the sounds of militia members preparing for battle. Not for nothing did Greene himself refer to the place as “Spell Hall.”
Church cemeteries are consecrated ground, but what happens to the unfortunate souls buried in the churchyard if the church moves away? One of Rhode Island’s oldest cemeteries can be found off Shermantown Road, with headstones dating to the 17th and 18th centuries, but the Old Narragansett Church itself was spirited off to Wickford in 1799.
According to legend, wreckers lured the Dutch sailing ship Princess Augusta onto the rocks of Block Island in 1738; the ship burned and sank, costing the lives of dozens of passengers. Some of the dead, who hailed from the Palatine region of Germany, are buried on Block Island, and an eerily glowing ghost ship is said to visit the island’s shores each winter, “eternally seeking vengeance on the descendants of the wreckers who sealed her fate,” according to Rondina.
At least two ghosts are believed to roam the halls of Smith’s Castle — perhaps not surprising for a building that dates back to 1678. The spirit of Elizabeth Singleton, a Newport woman who fell down a staircase and died after an overindulgence in rum, is said to be buried on the property and haunts the old building to this day. The building was once owned by the family of author John Updike, who used Wickford as the fictional inspiration for his book, The Witches of Eastwick.
– Bob Curley, So Rhode Island, 2020
If you work in a library beloved by both H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, you have to expect the occasional haunting. Poe in particular left a significant impression, as the Athenaeum was where he courted – and was later dumped by – Sarah Helen Whitman. Poe died not long after they parted ways, and Whitman is said to have summoned his spirit in the library. Decades later, a man was found sleeping on the Athenaeum steps. When asked to move, he proceeded to yell, “The Conqueror Worm!” – the title of one of Poe’s poems – before vanishing into thin air.
This current RISD dorm was once a funeral home and morgue, where the wake of none other than H.P. Lovecraft was held. It’s also purported to be one of the earliest sites in the country where embalming was practiced, so naturally it’s just a little bit haunted. RISD students have reported the usual paranormal activity, but nothing sounds quite as terrifying as waking up in the middle of the night to find your sheets pulled tight and the indentation of a ghost sitting on the edge of your bed.
The building that currently houses Brown University’s administration, including the university’s president, was once the entirety of the Brown campus. During the Revolutionary War, the building was used as a hospital facility for colonial and French troops; you don’t need to know much about 18th-century medicine to know that a lot of soldiers died there. Faces have been seen peering through windows at night, surveying the Ivy League quad from beyond the grave.
Benefit Street is lousy with ghosts. Why? Because when the city was expanding in its early days, the bodies that had once been buried in people’s backyards had to be moved. Of course the city missed a few corpses – some things never change. Thomas Street has a few specific hauntings of note. One is in the eye-catching Fleur de Lys Studio, which is frequented by the ghost of a woman named Angela O’Leary. After her affair with a married mentor turned sour, Angela killed herself in the studio, where she had appeared as an apparition and, during renovations years ago, left handprints in the sawdust. Thomas Street is also home to a ghost who has been seen dancing in the street. Believed to be the resident of one of the street’s old boarding homes, she’s generally pleasant – the Casper of Providence, if you will.
– Tony Pacitti & Julie Tremaine, Providence Monthly, 2017
• Castle Hill Inn, Newport
• The Conjuring House, Burrillville
• General Stanton Inn, Charlestown
With rich history comes the lore of the inn being haunted. So, are there ghosts? “Oh yes, three sets of ghosts have been reported,” co-owner Jackie Moore grins, explaining that the last General Stanton died at the inn in December of 1821 and is buried in the cemetery on the back lot of the property. “Guests over the years claimed to see him peering from a second-floor window and some said they felt a touch on their shoulder or a saw doorknob turn on its own.” Moore is quick to regale with more tales like a ship captain’s widow who died of a broken heart waiting for her husband who perished in the hurricane of 1815. “She can be seen in a long flowing white night dress on the third floor.” There’s also the story of a ghost-cat whose tail disappears around corners. “Bartenders have felt it brush up against their ankles and some have even heard it meowing.”
–Faye Pantazopoulos,
So Rhode Island, August 2023
• The Graduate, Providence
• Hamilton Hoppin House
(AKA Villa 120), Newport
• Hotel Viking, Newport
• Rose Island Lighthouse
• Block Island Ghost Tours
BlockIslandGhostTours.com
• Ghosts of Newport
GhostsOfNewport.com
• Haunted Boat Rides
ProvidenceRiverboat.com
• Haunted Bristol & Warren Tours
Facebook: Haunted Bristol Tours
• North Burial Ground
ProvidenceRI.gov
• Providence Ghost Tour
ProvidenceGhostTour.com
• Seaside Shadows Downtown Westerly Ghost Tours
SeaSideShadows.com
• Cumberland Monastery
• Hearthside House
Lincoln
• Seaview Terrace
Newport
Long before Twilight, there was a TV show called Dark Shadows (1966 to 1971) and it used Seaview Terrace (or Burnham-by-the-Sea) as the exterior for fictional Collinwood Mansion, which in turn inspired Kingston Mansion for Shaggy and the gang in the “What the Hex Is Going On?” episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!
• Sprague Mansion
Cranston
• Swan Point Cemetery
Providence
• Carriage Inn
North Kingstown
• Tavern on Main
Chepachet
• The Valley Inn
Portsmouth
• White Horse Tavern
Newport
Rory Raven is an entertainer, tour guide, and author of the book Haunted Providence: Strange Tales from the Smallest State. In these tales from his book, Raven gives a peek beneath the veil to reveal a few ghostly happenings in our fair city.
If you find yourself on Benefit Street in the middle of the night and see a man in black walking down the street carrying a walking stick, it might be the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. Although Poe didn’t die in Providence, he visited it several times while courting the poet Sarah Helen Whitman. Perhaps he still seeks her.
A lamplighter who lived off Benefit Street had a daughter who was gravely ill, but despite her plight, had dinner waiting for him every night when he got home. One afternoon, she died, and her distraught father laid her body in a coffin under a window that looked onto the street. Weeks passed, and the authorities were called and the girl was buried. People walking the street say they could sometimes see the girl’s face in the window peering out at passersby.
One night, two janitors were working in the Nightingale-Brown House, now the John Nicholas Brown Center, on Benefit Street. One of the janitors moved to turn off the lights that illuminated the sides of a portrait, but he heard a voice that said, “Don’t turn that light out!” He didn’t.
Two ghostly residents of Power Street are a mother and daughter who died in a house fire. A second house was built on the footprint of theirs, and people say they can see the figures of the two women sitting on the steps and crying. When approached, they disappear and leave behind the scent of smoke.
A modern family that lived in the Bicknell-Armington Lightning Splitter House on Pawtucket Avenue reported several ghostly happenings in the home built in the late 1700s. They noted wine and liquor glasses being broken about once a month during their time in the home. Sometimes they heard them break from the other room, and once during a party, a guest had a glass knocked from her hand by something unseen. –Emily Olson
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