Ella is one of Providence's more heartstring-tugging legends.
Ella, the Irish Terrier, was lost in 1953 when she ran off of her leash as 68 year-old spinster Olive Rowen was walking her on Waterman Street. Olive passed away in 1960. Posters searching for the lost Ella continue to appear on lightposts and mailboxes on the East Side. Ella herself is spotted wandering the neighborhood a few times a year, and people who don't know the legend continue to call the number on the poster to report her. The number, of course, has long since been disconnected.
When local Rhode Islanders refer these days to the Wyatt School House, it is as the "Wyatt-School House," rather than the "Wyatt School-House:" 132 Arlington has been a private residence since the turn of the century, and was converted to apartments in the early 1980s, along with so many other lovely old Victorian buildings during the so-called "renaissance" of the East Side.
The Wyatt School remained in active operation through almost 1900, hobbled though it was by the appearances of the doppleganger of Emilie Sagee.
Emilie Sagee was a teacher at the Wyatt School from 1840-79. Between 1845-46, her doppleganger appeared four separate times:
The first time Emilie's doppleganger appeared was in May of 1945. Emilie was outside of the schoolhouse chatting with a gardener while a piano teacher was inside her classroom for her students' music hour. Emilie was helping pull weeds. She remained, throughout the appearance, in full sight of all 12 of her students plus the piano instructor. About twenty minutes into the music hour, the doppleganger appeared in Emilie's chair, behind her desk. It sat, staring, motionless and serene, for roughly five minutes. Multiple children attempted to attract its attention through shouting and waving of hands; it did not notice them. A few braver children tried to touch it, but the air around it was somehow thick and impermeable. One girl stepped behind the desk and tried to walk in front of it, somehow bypassing the thicker air that the other children had been unable to penetrate, and walked directly through the apparition. Emilie, outside, had been contacted during this time and was on her way back into the building; the apparition was gone by the time she arrived. (The girl died two years later, but of a presumably unrelated strangulation by unknown parties.)
The second and third appearances of the doppleganger appeared also in Emilie's classroom at the Wyatt school: once during the lunch period, in November of 1945, when the children were all eating at their desks and Emilie at hers. The doppleganger appeared roughly five feet to her right, sitting in an invisible chair and eating an invisible sandwich alongside her, following her movements exactly. The second time was three months later. The doppleganger appeared while Emilie was writing on a chalkboard. Again, the apparition appeared about five feet to her right and mimicked her movements (though without holding any chalk and without writing anything), and disappeared very soon after. The children began to shout immediately upon seeing the apparition; both Emilie and the doppelganger looked to their right, Emilie saw nothing, the doppleganger disappeared seconds later.
The last appearance of the doppleganger occured inside Emilie's boarding room upstairs. Emilie was ill with what was probably a typhoid fever. While sweating in her bed in a hallucinatory near-coma, her doppleganer appeared one last time near her bedroom window. A doctor, a close female friend, and the Wyatt women's rooms landlord all witnessed it standing, back to the room, gazing out of the window for over one minute. None approached or attempted to touch it. Finally, it turned toward the room, smiled gently, and disappeared.
Emilie Sagee, of course, recovered, and enjoyed a full career teaching children, though beset throughout the remainder of her life with accusations of witchcraft. She claimed to have never seen the doppleganger, never anticipated its appearance, but to have sometimes felt tired or nauseated during its occurrence.
The Peter Green House was built in 1869, and its historians claim it was a doomed enterprise from the start. Peter Green himself was ill by the time construction was begun, and would not live to see its completion. He was 68 years old and building the house for his new young bride, Dorris Marie Mae Green, nee Kerne, 26 at the time of her marriage, 27 by the time she moved into her home as a widow.
Dorris claimed from the very beginning that Peter haunted his house, though never malevolently. She saw him often standing in the parlor, looking silently out of the front windows, or sitting in one of the chairs near the parlor's fireplace. John, the son born just after Peter's death, also saw his father in the parlor, and further claimed that his father had intervened to help him on more than one occasion: once at the age of four to command him away from a hole in the backyard where he was playing, and in which a rabid raccoon was later discovered; again at the age of twelve he appeared to convince John not to climb a tree from which another boy fell two weeks later due to a rotten limb, breaking both legs; and at the age of thirty-two Peter appeared to John in California where John, now a newspaper journalist, was away on business, to let him know that his mother was dying (this was the only time he ever appeared away from the house).
After Dorris's death, John sold the house to Brown University, where they used it for the housing of faculty and visitors for the next 80 years or so. Residents reported footsteps, cold drafts, the opening and closing of doors and drawers, whispered voices, and other assorted phenomena. These were ascribed to both John and Dorris, as well as the occasional additional resident who happened to pass away within its walls.
These extra deaths were not excessive nor were they violent. The house itself has never been accused of evil - only of an odd absorption rate: evidence suggests that every single human to have died in or near the house has remained there - including one professor of neuroscience who died of a massive stroke in 1981 in a classroom in a building next door, and a German Shepard named Sadie who belonged to a resident post doctoral student and was hit by a car in front of the house in 1966.
Near the end of the 20th century, the house had become so crowded - and so famous for it - that rooms became difficult to rent. There was nary a spot in the house where some unexplained phenomena had not been reported (though, obviously, much of that must have been due to a bandwagon sort of effect - if one stayed in the house and didn't see a ghost, then one would feel left out and need to make up a story). By 2007 the house had become so unprofitable that Brown was unable to even sell it. Finally, in an act of desperation, they decided to move the house to a new location, hoping that this might dislodge the old ghosts or confuse them, or at least leave them behind.
The gabit failed. Each and every ghost - Dorris, Peter, Sadie, and all the rest - still reside noisily and cheerfully within the Peter Green house. The house has been converted into classrooms and conference rooms, where manifestations and disturbances are still regularly reported to not much fanfare or interest at all.
