Hemisphere Building

The Hemisphere Building was not built in 1989, despite the date on what most people had assumed was a datestone. It was built in 1932, by the Van Nuys family. Originally a part of the Van Nuys Printing Corporation, it was bought by Brown University upon the Corporation's failing and dissolution in 1969, and used as, first, a Human Resources and general campus administration office center, and, since 1992, the Computer Information and Technology administrative offices.



On March 22, 1989, just after 10:00am, machinery began to whir to life in the bowls of hidden spaces underneath the basement floor. The apparently solid cement basement revealed itself to in fact be two pieces which split and slid sandily apart, revealing a building-wide but shallow (4 feet, perhaps 4 and a half) sub-basement (this still above whatever room or rooms housed the machinery which revealed it). The machinery failed, and the floor, instead of retracting the entire width of the building and causing the whole structure to crumble, only revealed a two- or three-inch-wide strip running the center length of the building. Employees were evacuated, but no one had been hurt, and damage was estimated at under ten thousand dollars, mostly to the wiring and to a few bits of broken furniture and electronics which had fallen during what most of those inside and nearby had thought was an earthquake.  (Damage estimate does not include inspection or repair to the basement floor itself.)

Investigation revealed a four foot tall crawlspace, a single room running the width and length of the building.  Inside this space were between sixty and eighty dusty objects, apparently the dead, dried husks of some sort of biological incubators - wombs or eggs. Inside these incubators were only desiccated strands of an unknown substance, many, many years past doing any harm to anyone.

The remaining Van Nuys family claimed no knowledge of what these dead objects were or should have been, nor why they were to be released on that particular date.

The room was cleaned, the objects burned. The basement floor was repaired, and the crawlspace is now used for storage.

Home of Judith and David Duarte Suárez

Visible repairs to chimney. Specter under tree on west lawn looking into the master bedroom window is apparently that of Michael Duarte Suárez (1966-1981).

El Dorado Women's Hostel

The El Dorado Women's Hostel, at 211 Wakefield Ave, is the only operating women-only apartment building in Providence. There are no longer any chaperones or "house mothers" - only Judith Woolfe, the live-in super, who is, both of her own accord and all reports, not the "house mother" type. There is, therefore, no one to really enforce the "suggested guidelines" on male visitors - no overnight stays, still even in 2025, first among those.



Still, interviewed residents insist that the tall, thin man in the white shirt, black suit, and black tie is not a guest of any woman who lives there. He has been seen by at least three of the current residents.  One of those told me matter-of-factly that every person living at 211 had seen him, though when I inquired, specifically, if that also applied to Woolfe, she laughed a bit and admitted, no, not Judith.  None of the three current residents that I interviewed would allow me to name them.  Each of them referred me to a number of other women, prior residents, who had also seen him.  Of those twelve, nine agreed to speak with me, though anonymously, and all twelve referred me to additional potential interview subjects.  It seemed unnecessary.

The sightings are remarkably consistent among observers, even year over year (The youngest woman I interviewed on record was 23; the oldest was 67.), though interpretations of his motives vary quite a bit.  The man walks (or "paces" or "stalks") the halls in the late evenings, with sightings usually between about 9pm and 12am (men's suggested visiting hours end at 9pm).  He holds to hold his hands either in front of or behind his own body, in a gesture that might be interpreted as nervous or worried, or suspicious and creepy.  Occasionally he stops at one door or another, leans in, and attempts to look inside through the peephole.  This is, of course, particularly upsetting to those who have caught him attempting to look in from behind those doors.  He does not knock or make other attempts to communicate, either with the women inside the rooms or the women who see him from the hallway.  He will disappear when spotted from the hallway, perhaps after a reassuring nod at the woman down the hall from him, or a threatening smile, or a startled gasp.

His motives remain unclear, though the women I interviewed tended to not appreciate my voicing of that factual statement.  

The El Dorado remains, still, a relatively safe haven for Providence's women: suicide, murder, and disappearance rates among them, though still far higher than for women in other American cities of comparable size, are slightly lower than the city average.

Edward Stahl, City Hall

Providence's City Hall was designed by Samuel Thayer (the "Thayer Street" Thayer - plenty more stories through that particular worm hole). He laid the cornerstone in 1875; before the first office was inhabited, 12 men would have lost their lives to its construction. Two of the bodies were never found, assumed to have found their final rest somewhere within the walls or foundations of the building itself.

The ghost tours will tell you about the ghost of Mayor Thomas Doyle, under whose reign the building was constructed. Cigarette smoke, footsteps, whispers, that sort of thing. Maybe true; who cares.

There's also the little rash of three female high school work-study interns who committed suicide (one jumping from the roof, two by hanging) over the course of 8 months back in 1977, but they don't seem to have stuck around and we've all agreed not to dwell on it. 

More interesting is the ghost of Edward Stahl, hired as a janitor in 1881 (three years after it opened for government business) and working his way up to head caretaker of the building, a position he held until his retirement in 1919. 

In his time, the lights were gas and the elevators were powered by steam. Caretakers lived in the building year-round (on the fifth floor, near the modern-day archive room), so they could be available at all hours to knock back the boilers and sweep up any emergency cigar ashes. Stahl was a reliable, trustworthy young man when he was hired, and it very quickly became his job to wind the central clock mechanism. All clocks in the building were connected and run through a single device which needed to be wound once per day at dawn. (The device can be seen on permanent display in the aforementioned archive room.) 

Stahl lived in the City Hall. And by all accounts, he loved it there. It was his home, and it was the home of his wife and two daughters. And the feeling was mutual: He was respected by the elected officials he worked with, looked up to by other staff members. Mayor Joseph Henry Gainor cut the cake at his retirement party. Gainor took the fifth piece (after Stahl's wife, then two daughters, then Stahl himself), and then handed the serving knife to a slightly startled lady reporter for the Providence Journal who happened to be standing nearby. Her own fault for looking like a woman. 

Stahl retired at the tail end of the influenza pandemic. He and his family had been untouched by that tragedy for two long years. He was one of the dwindling number to contract it near the end of 1919, though, and he died not six months after he left City Hall. 

Written reports of his return don't appear until 1922, but there's no reason to think he didn't come back much earlier than that. It seems like he would have. Pocket and wrist watches began to run too fast or too slow. Watch crystals would suddenly develop cracks, even though you were sure you hadn't bumped it. Flip clocks (still relatively novel tech in the 1920s) would drop their plastic tags like leaves into the bottom of the clock body. As the years passed and technology marched on, it didn't seem to help the situation. Digital clocks flashed 88:88 as soon as they were plugged in. Cell phones display times that are inconsistent and unreliable, and that's when the battery doesn't just up and quietly die while it's in your pocket. Twice, now, an Apple Watch has burst into flame and caused enough bodily harm that 4-foot-tall standing signs have been installed by the doors, expressly forbidding them. 

It isn't every clock, every time. Just often enough to remember him. There's not much harm to it (aside from the Apple Watches; I've seen the scars). I think it's mostly a joke. I'm waiting to hear from the work-study students.