"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.