"The Optometrist"

75 Canton Street downcity first opened as an optometrist's office and lens carver's in December of 1949. It was a family operation: the lenses carved by brothers Hans and Garfield Ford (trained in Germany and Paris, respectively, prewar), the reception and sales run by Hans's wife and daughters, and the good doctor, John Fordham Ford - Hans and Garfield's father - doing the doctoring.



It is unknown who among the family, if anyone, was aware of John Fordham's interests in the occult.

John Fordham was a worshiper of what the fiction writer and Rhode Island documentarist H.P. Lovecraft called "the Old Ones." John Fordham believed that other worlds existed not adjacent to but on top of and within our own, and that we needed only to squint a bit, so to speak, to see them clearly. Though he, himself, was aware of these other worlds via divine providence or devout works and prayer, he made it his holy mission to allow others this sight as well. He spent his entire professional life seeking out just the correct degree of "off" humans required in their eyeglasses so as to warp the eye, work the brain, and imbue an ability to see the unsightly.

Did it work? 

Reports vary. 

John Fordham's reputation as an optometrist was certainly not the best in town, as first-person sources clearly recall. Glasses from Ford and Sons were known to tend to cause headaches, blurred vision, dizziness. There are a very few records that could indicate something more. Among the most reliable are the well-known diaries of Emily Banks, and the far lesser-known medical records of Carl C. Young.

Emily Banks was eight years old in 1958, when her teachers suggested that her reading difficulties and recent lack of concentration in school may simply have been due to poor eyesight. Her parents took her to John Fordham (he was cheap) where she was examined and fitted for her first (of course: also last) pair of glasses. Her schoolwork continued to suffer nonetheless. Additionally, she began to get headaches and stomachaches, eventually to a degree that caused her parents to remove her from school. Some months later she was checked into the hospital where, two days later, she died. The cause listed was heart failure. 

That's all we know without reading her diaries. Her father had read them. He placed them in a safe deposit box which was opened by his brother after his death. The brother, recognizing names from Lovecraft novels but not realizing what the book was (but assuming they must be rare or valuable, given where he'd found them), sold them to a Lovecraft dealer, thinking that they were perhaps notes for a new story written by the author when he was young. The dealer, Richard Silverstein of Boston, eventually published the edited diaries as Visions of Lovecraft: The Diaries of Emily Banks. The book is, of course, still very much in print and readily available via your local bookseller or teen goth supply emporium. Its content has been and continues to be debated, but Silverstein has produced the originals for examination (by handwriting analysts, historians, daters of book-bindings, etc) on more than one occasion, and both he and Emily's uncle have submitted to lie detector tests (whatever that's worth): the texts themselves, at least, are not fakes. It is easy enough to be one's own judge of these readily-available writings; we will not dwell on them here.

Carl C. Young is perhaps the more interesting case, if only for his novelty: not every grumpy teenager with dyed-black hair and literary aspirations has has yet poured over and over his history in an edition bought at their local mall.

Carl C. Young could not be accused of being an innocent, impressionable, or particularly creative young thing, making up fantasies or creating fictions for fun. Young was a Providence physician - an OB/GYN - respected and still practicing at the time of his first visit to John Fordham. Young had worn glasses previously, and visited John Fordham for an update of his prescription in the fall of 1960. Young and John Fordham must have known each other through medical and professional organizations about town. It is not known who Young's previous optometrist was, but according to Ford and Sons records, Young received his new glasses on January 2, 1960. He returned to John Fordham on January 15 and 29, and again on February 14. On February 16, he saw his own physician, Dr. Howard Ackland.

According to Ackland, Young complained of blurred vision, headaches, and periods of blackouts that Ackland diagnosed as narcoleptic. During these blackouts, he had, according to Ackland's notes (no published copies - firsthand reading done while sitting in the filthy kitchen of the current owner - hereafter noted "Ackland"), "vivid dreams, violent delusions, and thoughts of an anti-Christian nature." Ackland perscribed Veronal. As far as we know, he was still wearing the glasses at this time.

On February 20, 1960, Young murdered his wife. He was initially sent to the Rhode Island State Penitentiary in Cranston. There he pounded his own head against his prison bars until transferred to the infirmary, where he was given, according, again, to Ackland's notes "all the dope to kill a pig" (probably Paraldehyde - his visiting brother later complained that his breath smelled like "the sea") (Ackland). Despite the pig-sized dose, Young managed somehow to bite the neck of a prison orderly hard enough to nearly sever the jugular; Jacob Kelly died on February 27, 1960. From there, Young was transferred to a high-security wing of the Arbour Mental Health Hospital in Boston. Ackland met with him only four more times. His notes on that first meeting were as technical and detailed as they would have been for any patient for whom he might expect to be called to trial. By the second meeting, he knew that Young was never leaving the hospital, and they became much more casual: notes, impressions, doodles, a letter. The letter was, if it was to anyone, to Young himself. It was full of "I'm sorry" and "I don't know what to do to help." The drawings were of wet round pustules like bloated wounds or cysts. Some had mouths. It would be an irresponsible assumption to claim that these had been described to him by Young.

Young did narrate visions to Ackland; these are written in a clear hand and cannot be misconstrued. It would, however, still be reckless to quote from them. They are blatantly Lovecraftian. Only a few have come true, anyway (the swallowing of his son, the 1982 earthquake, the rising of Shub-Niggurath from the Narragansett Bay, Jeffrey Mailhot).

Young died old and fat and cheerfully gibbering in his locked room in Cranston, a frequent correspondent and close friend of John Fordham Ford, who himself had been convinced by his sons as of the mid-60s to give up his position in the family business. Ford's sons and granddaughter continue the business today. Their customer satisfaction ratings have risen considerably. 

Every year for Halloween, a few local teenagers dress up as a boogeyman known locally as "the Optometrist," in white coats with tentacles in the sleeves, though very few relate that local legend to the dusty old optometrist storefront downcity.

Construction at the Libbey Valley Nursing Community

151 Libbey Valley Avenue houses a small nursing home consisting of between ten and sixteen full-time live-in patients, mostly dementia and Alzheimer's patients, and a team of round-the clock nurses, orderlies, and psychiatrists (as well as occasional manicurists, hairdressers, art teachers, and assorted volunteers). The building dates from 1974; the Libbey Valley Nursing Community was begun in 1982. Papers prove this. It is a clean and quiet facility, and had no reported incidents prior to current renovations.



In the summer of 2009, renovations were begun to a decrepit heating system. While they were at it, Community Director Jocelyn Delessips planned on knocking down a few basement walls and adding in half a dozen more dorm-style rooms. Demolitions revealed an underground wing - warrens of hallways and small rooms, living quarters and storage rooms, shelves stacked with boxes upon boxes of paper documents.



The documents have not all been read as of yet, but the oldest so far date to 1912. Soda cans, chip bags, and tabloid papers left scattered on the floor, near the reading chairs, stuffed into the shelves, date from the turn of the century through to the current year. These rooms were completely sealed. Dust lays half an inch thick. It's all a bit of a mystery.

The Ladd Observatory

The Ladd Observatory was opened in 1891 with donations from Rhode Island Governor Herbert W. Ladd. Its first director was Brown University Professor of Astronomy Winslow Upton.



The Astronomy program hardly existed at Brown University prior to Upton's influence. He built it with money and support gained via lofty speeches, war-rally cries, of intellectual freedom and academic exploration. It was at Upton's urging that the observatory was built, it was under his watch that the intellectual architecture of the program was constructed, and it was via his remarkably heavy courseload (in not only Astronomy, but Physics and Mathematics) that the next generations of building and program conservators were created.

Winslow Upton was born on the night of a Witch's Mass, October 12, 1853, in Salem, Massachusetts. His mother, Sarah Upton (nee Ropes) was granddaughter of Abigail Faulkner, who, because of pregnancy at the time of her conviction of witchcraft, was allowed a reprieve to hanging until after she had given birth.

Upton is said to have died in January of 1915, but no body was ever found.

Small mammals frequently found on the grounds with their throats cut, often also with organs missing. Mysterious lights. Rank smells. No hard proof of supernatural phenomena.

Below, the Ladd Observatory in daylight.

Bell Gallery Suicides

David Winston Bell Gallery terrance. Three apparent falling deaths within three full moons: August 6, September 4, and October 4. All three deaths listed as suicides, though the second body had a slit throat and the third had been dead for weeks before hitting the ground. August body was unavailable for examination. August body is missing. Further information will no doubt be forthcoming; the next full moon is November 2.

deaths

The squirrels are dying; it started back in July, but I wasn't sure until now. Born deformed like frogs and unable to survive the atmosphere. Look for it in the press. Try. It's not there. I know why.

Swan Point Castle

Near the eastern edge of famous Swan Point Cemetery, one particular hill curves and rolls toward the Seekonk River. It is cool and green in the summer, softly rotting and lousy with mushrooms in the fall, treacherous in the winter. Especially in winter.

Near the bottom of the hill, overlooking the shore is a crypt. It has a porch, a veranda, a backyard. It's beautiful. Children call it the Swan Point Castle. In past years, children called it the Elves' Castle or the Elves' Crypt. It is the Sprague Family Crypt, though that name does not appear on the structure itself, and it is not listed on the Swan Point map - though a different Sprague family plot is. This one was constructed apart, nearer the water, for a few special family members who needed it. It is still in use, when needed.

Spragues tended and tend to die violent - you can take that in whichever meaning you please. They are an old Providence family, founders. (Legend has it that it was a Sprague who planted the apple tree at the head of Roger Williams' first gravesite.) The Spragues are as famous in the area for their drinking and their violence as they are for their money and their local power. They were one of those families.

Those on the receiving end of the violence don't tend to stay dead, and for a while the Spragues were having problems with hauntings. Eventually they contracted Pawtucket-area stone workers Lucero Masonry, known locally for their peculiarly adept containment techniques. They completed construction on the crypt in 1882. Their blueprints, materials lists, and methods have today been lost, but were apparently effective enough. Other than a few limpid wraiths in white gowns wandering the shores of the Seekonk during the colder months, unable to cross the water, the Sprague dead have ceased to haunt the Sprague living - aside from reputation and tradition.

The most recent of the Sprague deaths were Jake and Amanda Sprague-Teague, 7 and 4 respectively, drowned by their mother, Joanne Sprague-Teague, in January of 2007. They were both interred in the crypt, though their mother, a resident of the Rhode Island State Department of Corrections for a life term, may not be, if she dies while in custody. Her family is currently involved in a suit to allow it, when the time comes.

220 S Everson St

According to original blueprints and building permits, 220 S Everson should have been no more than 5,862 sq ft inside. Though its outside has remained unaltered, new rooms continue to appear, and old ones continue to grow, inside. Its current size is estimated at over 12,000 sq ft.

Witch House

Witch House: auto-regeneration visible in lower Southern quadrant. Dead animal in yard.



Appears to be sacrificial, though I've never seen anything like this sacrificed. Perhaps a manifestation? Or something sucked through from - some other place? Something that found it could not survive here?



I hope it's dead.

The Samuel Staples House

The Samuel Staples House eats people.





Sometimes it isn't there.

Shadow House

"Shadow people" are, in the paranormal community's dictionary, entities that were never human. They are humanoid shapes with no mouth, nose, eyes (though, amusingly, there is a common shape called the "Hat Man" which sports a fedora) which, like traditional ghosts, tend to drop through floors and slide through walls. They are quiet, made of "black smoke" or "black mist," and incite feelings of dread in witnesses.

They often stare at the floor.



I have been unable to find reference to shadow people dated earlier than 1932.

251 Cedarpoint Avenue is, as far as I can tell, the location of the first ever "shadow people" sighting. John Fraser, his wife Marie, and three daughters 11 to 16 moved out of the house in June of 1934. Though no public mention was made of it at the time, Marie's diary was bought at a garage sale in 1988, wherein was made extensive documentation of her and the family's sightings of the shadow people. This diary indicated that it was in fact the shadow people which caused them to leave the house into which they had moved a mere 19 months previously.

"I do not know what they are," Marie Fraser wrote on October 10, 1935, "only that they are not of this earth, they do not think as such, and they wish us harm." She went on in that entry and later ones to hypothesize that these things could not actually cause them this harm. They could not act at all, in addition to being unable to "think as such." But they did, indeed, vehemently wish the Frasers ill. Apparently this was enough for Marie. Her last entry from inside 251 Cedarpoint Avenue ended with: "Perhaps it was only my own black projections, but either way - I know that as of tomorrow, I will be free of them. I do not care whether they stay or go in this house. I do not care to whom they will belong next. I care only that we are free" (Hartfried, 1992).

An interesting turn of phrase - "to whom they will belong next" - and one which has popped up in conjunction with the house more than once. Its next residents, the single female roommates Anna Marshall and Carolyn Lee Miller, lived in the house together for over three decades (complaining of rats and other vermin, as well as intruders, with conspicuous frequency for their first two or three years in residence, until they all got used to one another). After Carolyn died in 1979, Anna, who had mortgaged the house to meet medical payments for her friend, could not meet the payments. She refused to leave, however, claiming that she had to stay because "they're mine" (Hartfried, 1992). She was forcibly removed in 1980 and died, perhaps of suicide, in a state-run nursing home 38 days later.

By this time, of course, reports of "shadow people" had spread throughout America and the world. They are widely cited by organizations such as the North American Center for Paranormal Study as one of the "three major" types of haunting activity (though none of these organizations even cited 251 Cedarpoint Ave as a site of activity, much less the origin - or nexis).

Since the early 1980s, 251 Cedarpoint has passed through four different owners. The third of those four, Esther Hartfried (who claimed to be a descendant of Maggie and Katy Fox, though why she believed that claiming to be related to spiritualist hoaxters would be a boon, one must wonder) attempted to set the house up as a "haunted" tourist attraction. She was later found suffocated on the living room floor. The current owner, Kyle McNoen, who is renovating the building in order to rent it, would not comment for this article.

Hope High School

Ghost photographed in window of Hope High School.



Apparently the ghost of a young male, perhaps Joseph Condollo, shot in the face by his biology teacher, Rebbecca Ensign, because she believed he "had demons."

Black Tears of Gano Street

Two new appearances of the Black Tears of Gano Street.

At Washington Avenue:



Between Southland and Governor:



There has not been a new example of the manifestation since 1967. Why are they beginning to appear again now?

Witch House

Witch House manifestation:

Bliss Place

Providence has a long and complicated history with the Children of Bliss.

The Children of Bliss formed as a Utopian community in 1848. They based their worldview on the idea that Jesus had already returned, died in 1798, and been reincarnated as Joseph Imeldos, their first leader. They settled in Providence, as the Satanist capital of the world, for, as they described it, "fun." Since Jesus had already returned and they were already living in heaven, or at least Utopia, there was really no converting to be done here anymore - they just wanted to live among the Satanists because they thought that it would make for an interesting environment.

The Children, living in a sin-free heaven as they were, had fascinating views on what their surrounding communities would have called sinful practices at the time. They had no marriage; pre-pubescent children, menopausal women, and all men above the age of 50 worked to support the remaining members of the community, who lived an orgiastic life of pleasure: free love, free food, free education, free artistic expression. There was, according to diaries, business ledgers, and other available first-person resources, very little crime. There was not a rape, murder, or significant theft within the community during the first one hundred and forty years of their existence. There was some discussion of child abuse - not physical, but mental, or perhaps sexual (misunderstandings as members were being indoctrinated to the lifestyle), but members were always free to leave the community, and supported in their decision - non-Children workers were employed by the Children to maintain homes for those recently departed of the community, to re-adapt them to society, find them homes and jobs, etc.

The original Children supported themselves through the construction of animal traps - they were the leading supplier of all fur traps to New England between the years of about 1860 and 1900 - but around 1890, they began making brass, pewter, and silver jewelry, as well. This is why the relationship is complicated, why they were tolerated. Providence was a trap-industry capital for many years, and then became a jewelry-making capital.* Its Jewelry District is perhaps second only to New York City's Diamond District in not only fame and popularity in the collective consciousness, but in its reputation for housing and protecting via the consumerist free market an unloved minority peoples.

Post-WWII industrialization was good to the Children. Their handcrafted jewelry businesses became industrialized, went global, and got sold. Utopia became more so for a few decades. Their mid- to late-20th century leaders, first Gregor Iyengar and then his son, Nicholas, through financial stupidity really rather than malice or greed, ran the Children's (rather vast, according to all records) fortunes into the ground. As the money dwindled, so did the fun, and so did the acolytes. By the 1980s, there were less than 100 remaining Children of Bliss, all living together in one dormitory-type building in the warehouse district. There had been six child abuse trials between 1972 and 1988. Enough time and money had passed that the surrounding community was no longer as willing to overlook their eccentricities.

On July 12, 1998, just after 5:00pm, an unmasked gunman walked into the Bliss Place building with two 9mm firearms, two 12-gauge shotguns, and 99 improvised explosive devices, a hammer, and almost 600 rounds of ammunition. forty-two people were killed; twenty-nine more were injured. It was the largest single firearm-based killing during peacetime in America. The gunman disappeared; none of the survivors recognized him. There was no note, no known motive, no clues.

Phantom gunshots are heard every July 12th, around dusk, since the shooting. Nightly at dusk, passerby claim to see faces looking out of the windows. The building has been unoccupied since the shooting.



UPDATE: Rumor says that the Bliss Place has recently been sold to an unnamed buyer. Construction permits show that it is slated for remodeling, but not demolition. Cars have recently begun to appear in the parking lot again.

*NOTE: The Providence Jewelry Museum is its own entry in Providence's supernatural past, perhaps simply harboring a ghost, perhaps hiding one.

Firehouse13

Now a hipster haven, an art gallery and music venue, Firehouse13 was, as recently as the early 1970s, an actual firehouse. Ironically, or crudely, or obviously, the attached stable caught fire in 1895 during a governor's ball to which all of the firemen had been invited as honored guests. 30 horses died in the fire.

Guests at the current Firehouse13 report hearing the stamping, neighing, whinnying, and, sometimes, pained screaming of a group of horses, along with smells of manure and hay. No reported harm to the living.

Wyndham Hayward Garden

According to police reports and all official school and city documentation, Brown University freshman Wyndham Hayward committed suicide by jumping from his dorm room window in 1920. Yet if this is true, why was his body found in a second-floor bathroom? And why was his memorial garden sponsored and planted by the Providence Historical Society, widely known as a cover organization? And why does nothing grow there?

Jennie Goncalves

Picture taken 1918, in Paris, France, by Richard Goncalves, the famous photojournalist from Providence whose photography during World War I is credited with helping to create modern war journalism.



The girl in the window is Jennie Goncalves, his daughter, who had died in Providence, Rhode Island that day. She was raped; her throat slit. Her murderer was not found, but was presumed to be a drifter.

The Gingerbread House

Caroline Willikens and her daughter Leanne strangled and cannibalized fourteen children in their home between 1988 and 2005, when 14-year-old Jason Stark, their oldest (attempted) victim, managed to escape.

When asked why they did it, Leanne once answered that it was "because children taste better."

Ella

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.

The Wyatt School House, 132 Arlington Avenue

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

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 (video available on the Brown University website here), hoping that this might dislodge the old ghosts or confuse them, or at least leave them behind.

The gambit 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.

Providence Point Environmental Center

The Providence Point Environmental Center at 91 Point Place Road was built in the early 1940s by federal government officials - literally, the building was designed by biologists and built by US Army reservists. This, according to the few believers of the story, was the reason it was first constructed lacking proper ventilation. They say that two US Army biologists suffocated overnight on the first night the building was in official use, dead due to the plants' exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide. (A story so ludicrous it is either patently false - but then how did the two men die? - or is due to the unusual nature of the plants, another hotly contested story.)



If the Center was indeed built for war research, a factory intended to churn out biological weapons, all of that was apparently quickly abandoned. The Center was sold to the city of Providence in 1942 and now serves as a tepid tourist attraction staffed by volunteers. The Center also grows daffodils to benefit cancer charity in the spring and poinsettias to benefit the local homeless around Christmastime.

No unexplained activity has been reported since ownership shifted to the city.

154 Waterman

The space has not rented since the incident.

Fishermen's Memorial Lighthouse

The "lighthouse" part of the Fishermen's Memorial is, of course, ceremonial, being located atop the First Church of Rhode Island quite a ways into the city of Providence proper and, most decidedly, landlocked. Instead, a real live burning fire, yes, even these days, is lit each evening in the tower to commemorate the deaths of the 246 fishermen, sailors, lobstermen, and other Providence men of the sea who have, since about 1750 when this sort of thing began to be counted, been lured into the icy waters of Narragansett Bay by the fabled New England sirens who are said to dwell there, and drowned.