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.
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