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.