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.

Providence is still here.

I thought I died, but I just left for a while.

this is providence

Someone died here. You could, too.

Lefkowitz, Garfinkel, Champi & DeRienzo

Photo taken inside the offices of Lefkowitz, Garfinkel, Champi & DeRienzo - accountants at 10 Weybosset Street.



The pipes have begun to leak blood. Blood has tested human, type AB positive. Cause unknown, investigation continues. (Champi has not been seen since October.)

"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.