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.