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.
