Witch House

Witch House.

29 Shank Hill Road

This is a bedtime story my mother used to tell me about 29 Shank Hill Road:

People start bedtime stories with "a long, long time ago," but this one doesn't start like that. Maybe it seems like a long time to you, but to your mommy, it wasn't so long ago at all. Your mommy was I think eleven years old when all this happened, not so much older than you are now. And this happened down the block from Granma's house, over on Shank Hill, you know? So it's not so "far, far away," either, is it? No.

Now, back when this story took place, children – in general, "children" – tended to ostracize by fear some one certain older person. Just somehow by unspoken animal agreement. Children liked to make up stories; children liked to be afraid, just a little bit. I think this happened before this time, too, and I guess I would assume it still does. You know Mrs. Goldsmith, down the dead end? It's like that, I think. Kids daring each other to go touch her front door, bothering some poor old lady whose only crime is a bad taste in lawn ornamentation. Poor thing has far more to fear from the neighborhood committee than you do from her, I can tell you that. Well. We had someone like that, too. You know, now that I'm thinking back on it, she wasn't even that old. But we thought she was a witch, you know. Thought she killed and ate kids, anyone who disappeared or ran away or even just moved to another state with their parents – we blamed them all on her. It may have been true.

Even when people stop being children, they still tend often to fall into this trap, this habit of fearing the completely wrong object. Worrying and worrying and worrying but over, just…the thing that turns out harmless.

Well. Anyway.

As far back as I can remember, there was always a kid or two disappearing every once in a while. It sounds obvious, or brutal, just saying it like that, but I don't think it was, really. These things happen in towns like this. Kids fall into the river and never get found. Kids run away from abusive fathers. Or those fathers finally take it just a little too far, and the kids wind up buried under the cellar floorboards – I wouldn't know. But kids disappear. It's something kids do. So I suppose that's why it took us so long to connect these occasional disappearances. It's not like we were finding bodies, or anything. It was just that a mommy tucked her little boy or little girl into bed one night, and then in the morning, that little boy or little girl was clean gone. At least according to that mommy.

And there never were bodies, ever. I didn't mean to make it sound as though a cache of them was found in somebody's refrigerator or crawlspace or something later on. This was part of the reason we thought that Miss Riley was eating them. No evidence.

This story starts so vague because it's not told from the point of view of the mistreated step-children, or even the wicked witch. We'll never know what really happened to them. This story is told from the point of view of the townspeople who come in at the end and clean up and punish and reward and then go on their ways, if they can.

This story starts when Jasper Hitchens - you know Jasper - he cleans up over at the Wheeler School now - he was real, real young at the time, maybe three years old? - when he was found by a couple of deer hunters one Monday morning. I know one of them was your daddy's friend Mike's father. I don't know who the other one was. They said all they heard was this thin high little wail, like some kind of alarm, getting louder and louder and louder. They never said this part, but I wonder what kind of awful thing they might have thought it was, human or earthly or not. It was just little Jasper Hitchens, still so young he waddled more than ran, fell down every ten feet, stark naked and bloody and half-blue around his eyes from the cold. Ran right out into their clearing screaming, and when they ran down to pick him up and wrap him up in one of their soft old flannel hunting jackets he just kept running. At first he wasn't screaming anything, just screaming noise, but after a while, after they caught him and wrapped him up and started whispering to him like you do to terrified animals, he started screaming words. "Witch, witch."

I guess maybe a doctor would say he was in some kind of shock, or had that post-traumatic disorder that soldiers get. Maybe a boy that young can't get that sort of thing. But the kids in town, they knew. He was just under a spell, is all. She made it so that he couldn't talk anymore so that he wouldn't be able to tell anyone what had happened to him, or who had done it. But he was a strong little boy, a little fighter, and he fought his way through that spell and he could say one thing. "Witch. Witch."

This isn't some kind of backward small town I'm telling you about, you know that. But the more you hear something, the more natural it sounds. So the kids were all talking about it, of course. And it grew upward, like soft mold. The primary school teachers started telling each other in the faculty lounge, "You know, she always has stuck me as a little odd," and Miss Dankon from Sunday School told the pastor, "She gives me a funny look whenever I try to wave hello," and the parents ask each other, "Have you ever smelled anything a little funny when you're walking past her house?" And the people started asking the sheriff, "Do you have any leads? Any suspects? When will someone be arrested?" But there were no suspects, there were no arrests. No leads other than that poor little broken boy still shrieking in a big white bed over at Women and Infants, "Witch! Witch! Witch!"

Well. I don't know what happened in that little boy's house at night, when the doors were closed but the lights stayed on. I don't know the kind of conversations his parents had or the kind of awfulness his mother felt in her throat. But it was two weekends after Jasper was found when there was a knock on our front door. This was late, too. And my father went out and he talked to the man on the porch. And he turned back in and he said to my mother, "You stay here, now, and you watch your children." And he left the house. This was happening all over town, I suppose. And all over town the children managed to leave those houses where they were being watched so damn carefully, and they met in the woods behind that woman's house, and they hissed to each other, whispered in the cups of hot little pink ears, "Witch, witch." And they watched their fathers burn that woman's house down. Their fathers had circled her house first, nailing plywood sheets across the windows, two-by-fours across the doors. Banging their hammers unabashedly, trying to wake her up, trying to taunt her. Let her know what was coming. And the children, they expected to hear her screaming, of course, as she burned. But she didn't scream.

That's the real heart of this story, here. That she didn't scream. It leaves ever so many more possibilities. Maybe they didn't actually kill her. Maybe she got away and she's still out there, living crazy and ragged in the woods – those woods, see? Back behind the house? Or maybe they did kill her, but she was such a powerful witch that she somehow survived it anyway, dead though she was. And in that case, well, she wouldn't need to hide in the woods at all. She could go anywhere she wanted. Into houses, into the walls, into beds and under the covers with anyone she wanted to, huddling maybe in a dirty lump like old laundry at the end of the bed, staring at the soles of their bare feet. Maybe they killed her but they shouldn't have. Maybe she never did anything wrong at all. Imagine! If that's the case, oh I don't even want to think. That means that madman would still be out there just carrying right on along, but also too there's this woman's wrongly accused vengeful spirit! That's just too many for the price of one, isn't it?

So I suppose this story doesn't necessarily have an unhappy ending. I needn't have prefaced it with all that rigamarole about worrying at the wrong bone. Maybe they were worrying at the right bone, after all. Maybe they killed the killer. Maybe she stayed dead. Sure, children keep disappearing. But like I said: that's just something children do sometimes.

So that's that: we'll never know. That's the way all stories that are really real, and not fairy tales, ultimately end.

Now. You close your eyes. Give me a kiss. Go to sleep. I'm sure I'll see you in the morning.

They rebuilt the house for apartments, now, and happy college students live there. None of them have disappeared yet.

Wayland Square Bakery

Likely apocryphal:

Mary-Louise Bauman opened Wayland Square Bakery in 1962. She and her bakery are generally credited with beginning the trendy "lemon bar revival" of the 1980s. Her daughter, Heidi Larson, and son-in-law, Trevor Larson, have since become head chefs, and Mary-Louise herself performs a mostly administrative role in its operation. When Mary-Louise was the head baker, nearly half of the shop's inventory was given over to non-dessert breads. Today, the shop sells 100% dessert items. This, they say, is why:

One morning in December of 1994, Heidi and Trevor had, as was their custom, arrived at the shop at 3:30am to begin the daily bread. Heidi was in the pantry, collecting ingredients, when she heard a low voice moan: "There's blood in the bread."

The voice gave her an instant chill, but, realizing that the voice was not that of her husband, and further realizing that there was no other explanation since there was no one else in the shop (not to mention that the bread had not even been baked yet), the headstrong Heidi decided to ignore the voice and continue her work.

She heard it again, low, but insistent: "There's blood in the bread."

Unwilling to be mocked or frightened, the increasingly rattled Heidi clenched her jaw and exited the pantry with as much poise as she could muster. She placed her recently-gathered ingredients down on the steel countertop. Trevor was not in the room. She called his name, to no answer.

Once again, she heard the voice, this time, louder: "There's blood in the bread."

Heidi screamed Trevor's name this time, no longer able to uphold any pretense at bravery. There was no answer except:

"There's blood in the bread!"

The voice was unearthly: literally inhuman, deep, rattly, like huge rocks being slowly ground together, and it came again, louder:

"There's blood in the bread!"

She ran from the room, abandoning her post, fled into the main shop and display area: but the shop was, of course, empty. She screamed for her husband once more - but he was not there. Perhaps she had left the voice in the back of the store? And just as she thought it, it came again, louder than ever, seeming to emanate from the very walls themselves:

"There's blood in the bread!"

Wild-eyed, frantic, sweating, she turned and lurched back through the entryway to the kitchen. She bypassed her spilled flour and ran through to the equipment room: there was Trevor, standing in front of the industrial mixer. He turned innocently toward her as she entered the room, and there it was again, so loud this time that it made the stacks of bowls on the shelves rattle:

"THERE'S BLOOD IN THE BREAD!"

Trevor's thumb was planted firmly in his own mouth. As Heidi skidded to a halt in front of him, he held it out toward her, a child showing a hard-won prize to his mother.

"Didn't you hear that??" she asked him.

"Hear what?" he asked. "I-"

"Put a fucking band-aid on it," she told him.



The bread did not get made that December day, and bread was never made at the Wayland Square bakery again.

This door did not exist four days ago, I swear to god.

December 4, 2008:



December 1, 2008:

Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church and School

A rare piece of hard evidence of the continued (though indisputably non-temporal) existence of the Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church and School.



In 1982, the Holy Name was burned to ash by Jeffrey Sloane, 16. Sloane made claims to abuse by the Reverend Andrew Nortz, settled out of court three weeks before the fire. Sloane was sentenced to serve in juvenile detention until he reached the age of eighteen; he stabbed another inmate (John Emanuel Rafael, 15 in 1984) exactly two months to the day before his eighteenth birthday. He is currently serving his life sentence in Rhode Island Maximum Security State Prison in Cranston, Rhode Island.

The Holy Name was rebuilt in 1986. It burned again, to the ground, in 1987, immediate cause undetermined. The Reverend Rafael's body was found among the ashes.

Signs pointing the way to the church, in various states of rust or decay, some smoking (particularly in rain or fog), some bloodied, some still shiny and new, have appeared (according to various reliable reports) at literally scores of different locations throughout Providence and Cranston from 1987 to present day. The church itself seems not to have reappeared. Photographic evidence is rarely available.

Jackal's Berries

Nex cakal bacca, known as Death's Berries or Jackal's Berries or Widow's Helpers or, after they have fallen from the tree, Toddler Killers, grow in obscene profusion throughout Rhode Island, with their thickest epicenter the Eastern Providence area. They bloom and come to full ripeness within a span of a few days just before full spring hits, in February or early March. They stay at full ripeness for nearly the whole year, slowly falling from the trees sometime in mid-winter, but remaining at full sweetness and full ripeness and full deadliness through all of winter, blackening, shrinking, and turning to dust with repulsive suddenness just weeks before the new batch blooms.





Some have ascribed a basic predatory intelligence to the berries, like that of the Cobra Lily or Venus Fly Trap.

Caretaker's House, Church of St. Arilda

First murder-suicide: 1842, three years after the completion of the building of the Church of St. Arilda. (It should be noted that the original caretaker's shack is not the one pictured here, completion of which was not until 1912. The original shack was a wooden, squared-off, two-room building, thrown together in servants' style of the time. The pictured "shack" was built in 1912 to be a miniature of the church itself. The church was added onto in the mid 1950s and now has many growths and appendages that the shack does not.)

The first deaths, in the original shack, were those of widower John Hayes and his twelve-year-old daughter, Constance. Constance was bludgeoned to death with a length of red oak firewood. John Hayes hung himself in the same room in which her astoundingly bloodied body was found. Records are nearly nonexistent, and church records of the time politely suggest that John likely hung himself in horror after he arrived home and saw her pulped body. Research of local parishioner diaries suggest that John was routinely beating, if not fucking, his daughter, and that the community widely assumed his guilt in her murder.

The original wooden shack was torn down; the next caretaker lived within a back room of the church itself. Marley O'Donnell became a widower himself under suspicious circumstances six months after he took the caretaker's job; he murdered his twin eight-year-old daughters and himself almost two years later.

Seven caretakers killed their families and themselves in the shack or its incarnations. Once the hiring parties grew superstitious of family men, the deaths grew to include three single men (two of whom committed suicide and one who was murdered by his brother, who had traveled from Modesto, California to do it and was hit by a recycling truck while escaping), and four women (the latest two a lesbian couple).

The shack has been unoccupied for fourteen years.

Stony-Lane Orchard Church

I warned them about restoring the Stony-Lane Orchard Church, but they did not listen.



The clock in the tower is once again frozen at 8:59, the time of her death.

The Biltmore Hotel

The Biltmore Hotel, inspiration for Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel and Robert Bloch’s Bates Motel, holds the dubious honor of having been named “America’s Most Haunted Hotel” in 2000 by the American Hotel & Lodging Association. The Biltmore finished construction in 1918, financed by proud Satanist Johan Leisse Weisskopf. Weisskopf was unsubtle about his plan for the hotel: it would be a venue through which to familiarize reticent Puritan New Englanders with the joys of his religion. The hotel was built to include a chicken coop on the roof, to supply sacrifices for weekly masses; hot springs in the basement for purification rituals (rumors that whirlpools were filled with human blood are likely only the wild imaginings of later generations); and the famous Bacchante Girls, who waitressed nude in the Bacchante Dining Room, which perhaps more accurately might have been called the Bacchante Orgy Pit, frequented by such luminaries of the time as Douglas Fairbanks, F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong.



Obviously, the Satanism gives the hotel a bad name, though it was Weisskopf’s ties to the Rhode Island mob that probably did the hotel its only real damage. Despite the scores of chickens slaughtered in the hotel, they are not the ones who haunt its halls.

Rhode Island was widely known as the state least likely to follow Prohibition’s laws, and the Biltmore was one of the most decadent places to get drunk. No one hid in speakeasy basements in the Biltmore: wine was a quarter a glass, served in crystal. Men of the law and of the government drank free. This was likely one of the reasons that between the years 1920 and 1933 six police officers were implicated in the murders of eight people within the walls of the Biltmore, along with one governor (at least six rapes, one murder) one mayor (one murder), and a cardinal (one eleven year-old prostitute drowned in a bathtub). These are the ghosts that are said to haunt the Biltmore, along with all of the other victims of men of less auspicious rank. Nightly, after the bars close, raucous drinking and dancing and talking and laughing is heard; some guests of the hotel disappear at night and are never found.

Providence’s modern-day Satanists like to point out that the disappearances only began after new management took over the Biltmore’s day-to-day operations, “cleaning the place up” for the tourists and businessmen, forbidding their maids any blood sacrifices, reupholstering the stained velvet seating in the Bacchante Room, tearing down the chicken coops, boarding up the underground alter rooms. They claim that it was in fact the Satanism that kept the ghosts at bay and protected the living. The current owners, disagreeing, will allow no experimentation, so it remains at this time an unknown.



UPDATE: Two more disappearances in 2008: Erving F. Bishop, 42, and his daughter Emily Bishop, 4, tourists from New Jersey, disappeared sometime between 11pm on Saturday, November 15 and 4am, Sunday the 16th. Apparently the girl could not get to sleep, so her father took her on a walk around the hotel. Joanne Newnon-Bishop, the girl's mother, fell asleep just after they left, and by the time she was startled awake at 3:50am, they had disappeared. This brings 2008's total to 6.

Sunshine House

On still nights inside the Sunshine House, when ambient noise is low, one can hear up to at least three separate and distinct children’s voices, crying.  Some say as many as five.  Some (see the Happy Neighbors Group, below), say “thousands.”


 
14 Young Orchard Avenue, currently known as "Sunshine House," was bought in the early 1950s by a poet, late of New York City. This man, Harry Coogan, one of the lesser-known Beat artists, ran 14 Young Orchard as a sort of hipster flop house, known wryly in those days as "The Last Outpost," due to Coogan's dissatisfaction with Rhode Island's distance from New York. Coogan left The Last Outpost to the Rhode Island School of Design with the caveat that it remain a place for "young people" to live based on ability to pay, according to rules that the residents would write themselves.

The idea of a hippie co-op, a city-based commune, was common enough by 1966, when the "young people's" charter officially renamed the residence the "Sunshine House." The house has remained since then under essentially the same government, though these days the residents have become far more political, choosing a "cause" to champion each new year (2009: the local, organic, and slow-foods movements).

The extremist and far-left-wing political-Christian organization next door, the (somewhat ironically named) Happy Neighbors Group, claims that the sounds of crying from within the house are the sobbing souls of the “many thousands” of babies aborted by the young hipsters and hippies who have lived in the Sunshine house for the last half-century. 

A more likely explanation is that the voices are those of the three Hooper children, sons and daughter of Jacob and Margaret Hooper, who owned the house from 1931 to their deaths in 1945. John, Edward, and Carolyn Hooper were were victims of abuse the extent of which can only be inferred from what was found in the house after their deaths, the sensational details of which will not be repeated here yet again. (Parties interested for whatever reason may see: Carolyn, Edward, John: Tied; Under the Floorboards: The Hooper Family Tragedy; Carolyn Hooper Learns a Game; Three Little Children: A Case of Child Abuse in New England; or the abominable 1989 teen slasher flick Mommy's Games.) Those who do claim that more than three voices are heard crying (aside from the Happy Neighbors) attribute the extra voices to any of the other neighborhood children who mysteriously disappeared during the years that the Hoopers lived at 14 Young Orchard.
 
Jacob and Margaret Hooper were lynched on May 16th, 1945.

Waterplace Park

Sixth torso found: 11/11/08

The Lovers' Bench

Granite bench erected on main campus of Brown University, 1923, in memoriam to Janice O’Neil ’24, body found November 1922, by her grieved husband Howard O'Neil. Her body was found on their front lawn, strangled, a perfect necklace of handprints bruised around her throat. The Latin is attributed as: “Those who love, suffer, and never forget,” though a more literal translation includes a first-person reading: “Those who love before (or near) me, I will cause to suffer, and I will never forget.”



Janice O’Neil has visited her memorial bench on three witnessed occasions.

On November 17th, 1932, undergraduate student Sean Haydenfor saw a pretty woman with dark hair and an unfashionable dress sitting on the bench and sobbing. When he approached her to ask her what was wrong, she looked up at him suddenly, gasped, and disappeared. Her eyes were all white, he reported, and her throat was slit and streaming blood. When her face jerked up to meet his, as she gasped, Haydenfor heard a crack and just saw her head wrench backward – too far – skyward – before she vanished. He later picked Janice O’Neil out of a group photograph as the woman he had seen.

Janice appeared again on November 17th, 1952. It was late afternoon, but still full sunlight, when Janet Kearns was walking home from class past the bench. According to her report to the police, there was no one sitting on or near the bench as she passed it. “I remember looking right at it, because someone had dropped a notebook a ways back, and so I was kind of looking at the ground, and my eyes hit the bench. I remember seeing it, and it was empty.” (Kearns, November 17, 1962, PPD report taken by Det. Kyle Dushesne) A young man passed Kearns, walking in the opposite direction. She did not know this man, but later identified him from photos as Joshua Martino. After she has walked a few steps past him, she heard him questioningly call the name, “Janice?” Thinking he might have called her, Janet turned to look at the boy. A woman in what Kearns originally described as a “Victorian gown costume” (though she was later able to point to classmates of Janice’s and affirm that this was the type of dress she had seen) was standing in front of the bench, with her back to Kearns, holding Martino’s head in her hands. She let go, and Martino fell to the ground. (Two vertebrae in his neck were shattered. His head was turned nearly backward.) The woman turned her head to look at Kearns over her right shoulder. Kearns reported that the woman was young, healthy-looking, pretty, but that the front of her gown was soaked in blood. “She looked bored,” Kearns said. (Kearns, ’62) Still keeping eye contact with Kearns, the woman vanished.

On November 16th, 1992, Trevor Marshall had decided to skip his class and was therefore walking past the bench during class period and was the only person on the green when he saw Janice O’Neil. “At first I thought it was some chick playing a joke,” Marshall reported in an interview soon after. (Trevor Marshall, November 1992, Brown Daily Herald) “It wasn’t even the right day.” The woman Marshall saw was sitting on the bench, calling to him, though she was turned half away from him and “hunched all up like she was didn’t want me to see her.” Marshall shouted crudely at her (“I told her to fuck off, I wasn’t buying it.”) and laughed. He continued walking, and was just looking away, when he saw her begin to “flicker.” “I freaked out,” he said. “I was like, holy shit, this is either really Janice, or else, like, the film majors are doing something awesome.” Marshall began to run towards the woman, calling her name. Once he was within about twenty feet of her (“Like, not really grabbing distance, but, like, ghost-grabbing distance.”), she stopped “flickering” and stopped crying. She looked up at him and inhaled sharply, “like she was pissed.” Her eyes were all white. The front of her dress was soaked red with blood, from neckline to thigh. Marshall skidded to a halt, turned, and ran.

No witnessed sightings have been seen since 1992. It is hypothesized, particularly given the fairly regular disappearances of undergraduate men around the middle of November once per decade, that she appears every ten years, but usually does not leave a witness.

Below: Janice O'Neil (l), with classmates.

The Wheeler School

The infamous Wheeler "School":

The Green Room

The Green Room, a tiny alcove off of one of Brown University’s student theatres, is said to house one of those old-fashioned benign ghosts: Richard Dynegy. In 1976, Professor Dynegy, a professor of Theatre Studies at Brown University from 1954 – 1976 and Chair of the department for the last three of those years, hung himself onstage immediately following the final show of a week-long run of an undergraduate performance of King Lear that he had directed. He safety-pinned a suicide note to the lapel of his suit which read, in its entirety, “Dear Students: Do not read too much into this. (King Lear! Egads!) --D”

Immediately thereafter, the adjacent Green Room began to smell lightly of cigarettes, many began to report unexpected warm and cool drafts throughout the room, and those in the building late at night sometimes reported creaking floorboards and footsteps in the room when no one was there. Students of course blame the ghost of Professor Dynegy.

In 1988, the pictured caricature of the Professor appeared in the Green Room. No one has yet taken credit for it, but a student’s prank cannot be ruled out.

Exchange Street Overpass

Eight suicides in three years, 2006-present.

Witch House

Witch house.

"The Shack"

Worklab and torture chamber for one of Rhode Island's most famous serial killers, Theodore Romone Marsden. "Uncle Ted" killed at least nineteen boys between the ages of 9 and 17 between 1992 and 2000, when he turned himself in to police. Neighbors in the area have famously been compared to those Germans living outside of concentration camps for their baffled and genuine-seeming reports to police that they had no idea what was going on, despite what every one interviewed later admitted to be a penetrating smell of "just death" (Leonora Hoolbrooke, 64, neighbor) around the site, along with pounding and screaming that could be heard for many blocks.

Uncle Ted turned himself in to police in May of 2000. The police, at the time, had no leads and no suspects. Uncle Ted walked into the Washington Street police station carrying a curved claw hammer encrusted in dried body fluids and calmly asked to be put to death. The most oft-repeated line from his confession is actually a misquote. He did not say that "They're coming back," but instead, "They've come back."

Screams, knocking, and smell from within the shack are thought to be constant, but in reality only manifest themselves whenever a witness is present within hearing- or smelling-distance. Mechanical recording devices do not trigger the smells or sounds.

Black Tears of Gano Street

This is the Southernmost example of at least eight different tears along the length of Gano Street. Located on East side, near corner of Waterman Avenure.

According to DNA analysis, the black stains, which are consistently half-dried and sticky to the touch, and which are easily washed away with household solvents but diligently reappear within days, are not actually tears, but the blood of a mixed-breed dog (at least half German Shepherd).

the New City Markings

All residents of Providence have noticed the cryptic graffiti covering their city's sidewalks and streets: arrows, mostly; as well as lines, dashed and solid; arcs; stars; circles; moons; and more. Few have stopped to wonder what they mean. This is yet another example of the deadly lack of curiousity that infects Providence's long-term inhabitants. It cannot be coincidental. Something in this city kills one's urge to look, and to know. Is it the city's self-preservation, stopping people from investigating too much? Or is it human preservation, for if one knew what was really happening here, one might, like some kind of Lovecraftian hero, go mad?

The city's graffiti has long been thought, by those who do think of it, to be a kind of code. Not only do the shapes and placement of the graffiti hold meaning, but so do the colors in which they are written. The meaning of the code has long been debated, however. Some known satanic symbolism is easily noted: the rising path of Jupiter intersecting with the November Dog Star, for instance, in this piece at the corner of Benevolent and George Streets:





But just who was communicating with whom, and, of course, what was being communicated, has never been satisfactorily decided. Are they an elaborate datebook? "Meet here, at 7pm, on May 28th, for black mass?"



Perhaps simply satanic tourist trails? "Underneath this house lies the body of John J. Kraemer, noted dentist and pedophile, who donated his blood and semen to The Cause in 1954."



Are they warnings? Or spells? Summonings of demons to invade a particular house, or the equivalent of a witch's drawing of a pentagram in salt to cast a curse?



Louise Marie MacDougal, a professor of History at Brown University from 1967-1982 specializing in New England religion and government and their intersections, theorized that they were architectural in meaning. She believed that these symbols were something like a giant, life-sized blueprint for a whole other city laid atop this one. Her early research off-handedly assumed that this "other city" was an ancient one that had existed long before Providence was ever conceived of: something Native American in origin, or, according to one of her few surviving diaries, something "even older." Her later work, however, began to very gently speculate that perhaps these were plans for a new city - one which was about to be built on Providence's ruins.



MacDougal is dead, now, of course. The fires that destroyed her house and her university office in the same night also took her life, her notes, diaries, and papers, and her detailed and extensive maps of this "new city." Scraps and pieces of those maps that have somehow survived have found their way onto the internet, though much of what you will find will be forgeries. The fire left no surviving notes to indicate when construction might begin.

Wanskuck Pond Cemetery

The Wanskuck Pond on the east side of Providence is actually a man-made reservoir, fishable with a license, owned by the city. The surrounding Wanskuck Woods, less than four miles across at their widest point and surrounded on all sides by residential neighborhoods, are yet so dense that they are one of those few neighborhood wooded areas that have not become a make-out spot or homeless shelter. Still, enough fishermen have ventured off the trail to the pond that the Wanskuck Pond Cemetery has long since been a commonplace bit of local history - many no longer even consider there to be anything supernatural about it.





The cemetery lies just up top the face of the cliff at the northernmost tip of the pond. Within it, a small maze of gravel-paved sidewalks is meticulously kept, though not by the city, nor any private citizen who has stepped up to take claim. The majority of headstones have worn away to unreadability. Those whose names can still be read do not match any records of living or dead from the area.

No hauntings or other supernatural occurrences have been reported in or around the cemetery since at least 1974.

Dexter Asylum Stone Wall

Obviously, anything that could be written here about the Dexter Asylum itself would be woefully inadequate. (Serious students of the topic might try to get a hold of the latest in-progress version of the eight-years-in-the-making and still-unfinished dissertation being written by Brown PhD candidate Jonah West. West is an unapologetic alcoholic and three-time attempted suicide, but as off this writing, continues his academic history of the Asylum nevertheless.)

Of the wall around the Asylum, however, this much may be said: It originally was created with the intention of keeping various peoples and things in or out; these days it remains as a mostly decorative edifice. It was built via slave-labor - insane, untrained inmates - between the years of 1852 and 1886. Seven men died during it's construction. Four bodies were found. Every day at dawn during the winter months, the mortar seeps blood.

Witch House

Witch house.

Residential Garage, 826 Blackstone Blvd

826 Blackstone Boulevard was part of a development neighborhood built in the early 1950s. It was gutted and remodeled 1992 and '93, the single-family house turned into three rentable residences. The single-car built-in garage was absorbed into the first-floor residence and a separate three-car garage was built just behind the house. No known traumas have occurred in the garage or anywhere on the property.

Mary McGovern's Garden

Mary McGovern was orphaned at sixteen in 1968; her parents died of botulism poisoning from an improperly put-up jar of tomatoes. Mary lived alone in the house for the next forty years. She went to school, volunteered at Judy's Kindness Kitchen with the Congregation Beth Shalom, and worked as executive administrative assistant to the Dean of Faculty at Brown University for the last eleven years of her life. She died in 2008 without family, of natural causes. Her house was taken by the city after her death and demolished to clear space for the widening of Route 220. During demolition, twenty-three bodies in various states of decomposition were found buried in her front yard.