CHAPTER 1
PART I
HAUNTED PROVIDENCE
AMERICAN INDIAN GHOST STORIES
I am always in search of new stories to add to my rather weird collection. Over the years, I have heard countless stories of shadowy figures at the foot of the bed, mysterious cold spots, footsteps heard in otherwise empty rooms and probably too many anecdotes ending in: "And when I looked back, she was gone."
One area of spooky folklore that intrigues me is that of American Indian ghost stories — legends that must have been told here long before Columbus ever set sail. What little I have been able to unearth so far indicates that, for the most part, Native American tribes didn't have a particularly strong ghost story tradition in the way that the white man did. Native Americans have a very different understanding of spirits and the spirit world. Most tribes have a tradition of feeling very connected to the spirits of their ancestors — meaning both specific family members in particular and ancestors in general. This tradition is often a source of great comfort and even strength. Their spirits are there to help, not to haunt.
And I am well aware that anyone who presumes to speak of "American Indian beliefs" or "Native American culture" can easily land in trouble. There are hundreds of tribes and thousands of stories spread out across the Americas, and a Wampanoag may not have very much in common with a Cherokee or an Aztec.
In the nineteenth century, the golden age of the American magazine, noble savages were in vogue and many authors simply took familiar tales, recast them with "Indian" characters and made another sale. When I came across one story recounting the tale of Chief Stick-In-The-Mud, I began to suspect that this was probably not an authentic Algonquian folktale as the author claimed.
Still, I have discovered one story concerning spruce trees. According to legend, Narragansett Indians hold that each spruce tree marks the spot where a warrior fell fighting the white man — every spruce tree grows from Narragansett blood and is, in its way, a monument.
One day, a white settler looked out across his land and saw too many spruce trees for his liking. He took up his axe and set about chopping down every spruce tree he saw — clearing his land of any vestige of Native American presence. He didn't get too far in his project, as one of those spruce trees fell on him and killed him.
It might also be noted that American Indians began to tell more ghost stories after they made first contact with Europeans. Most of those stories, unsurprisingly, involve the spirits of the dead returning to warn fellow tribesmen to beware of white men.
BENEFIT STREET AT DUSK
Benefit Street, on Providence's East Side, is one of the oldest streets in the city. It was originally laid out in the 1750s and was called Back Street, as it ran along a pathway at the back of the house lots running up the hill from North and South Main Street, then called the Towne Street. In the early 1770s, Back Street was straightened and widened and renamed Benefit Street, as it was said at the time that it would be "a Benefit for All." With its beautifully preserved and restored Colonial and Federal houses, it remains one of the most popular and most photographed neighborhoods in the city. It is a destination for tourists, historians and architects alike. But beneath its picture-postcard perfection, Benefit has a strange history known only to a few.
Until about the time of the Revolution, Providence had no common burying ground. This was the result of having been founded by freethinkers and dissenters, the religious and philosophical refugees mentioned earlier.
While a plot of land had been set aside for a graveyard, most of Providence's early citizens chose instead to bury their dead on their own land — usually out back along that pathway that became Benefit Street. It sounds pretty ghoulish to us, but those were different times and different people.
Eventually, the remains in all those little family graveyards were removed to North Burial Ground, but there is a persistent rumor that some of those bodies were missed, left behind and remain buried along Benefit Street to this day. Perhaps the more tight-fisted residents simply moved the headstones. Something you may want to bear in mind on your next moonlit stroll.
Edgar Allan Poe visited Providence five times to court the widowed poet Sarah Helen Whitman. And although Poe died in Baltimore on January 19, 1849, many say that his visits to Providence continue. On several occasions, a man in black has been seen stalking down the street in the middle of the night, wearing a tall hat and carrying a walking stick, and many feel it is the restless author of "The Raven."
When Poe was in Providence, he sometimes stayed at the Mansion House hotel, a place that had fallen on hard times. When it opened in the eighteenth century, it was known as the Golden Ball Inn and was one of the best inns in the colonies. George Washington stayed there, the Marquis de Lafayette stayed there — both enjoyed a warm bed and the cordial hospitality of the taproom. But over the years it changed hands (and names; for a while it was known as Dagget's Tavern) a few times, and eventually it became a ramshackle place where one stayed when he could afford nothing else.
Toward the end of its days, one of the roomers — a student — was rummaging around the back of his closet and found an old, worn slipper in the back corner. The young man asked up and down the hall if anyone knew whose it was, but nobody did, and nobody even remembered who lived in the room before him. But from the day he discovered the slipper to the day he moved out (a short time later), he was kept awake night after night by the swishing sound of a woman's skirts, as though a ghostly girl was looking for something she had long ago misplaced.
The Mansion House is long gone now. Benefit Street declined over the years and was occasionally described as "a slum," and the once- fashionable Mansion House was apparently another victim of the neighborhood's changing fortunes.
A friend from college used to live in an old house just off of Benefit Street where, he told me, he and his housemate would frequently see a figure on the staircase. He said the figure wore a long white shirt and a tricorn hat, and as they thought he looked like a pirate, they called him "the Captain." They saw the Captain several times over the year they rented the house, and would often greet him as they passed on the stairs, but he never responded.
A woman who lived in an old house on Benefit reported hearing piano music at odd times of the day — the same few pieces being played over and over, and not always well. Asking among the neighbors, perhaps hoping to find where the music was coming from, she was told that her house was once a music school some seventy years ago.
An old miser, rumored to possess a great fortune, lived just off of Benefit Street, and each night he patrolled his house with a fireplace poker in one hand and a loaded pistol in the other. He continued to make his rounds after his death, though his house stood empty and no one ever found the rumored fortune. A junk dealer bought the house for five dollars — the neighborhood had begun its slow decline and houses were going cheap. He stripped out the lead sash weights and sold them as scrap for fifteen dollars. The ghost was never heard or seen again. One misty evening, a young woman was sitting in a little sculpture park on Benefit when she looked up from her sketchbook and saw a horse-drawn carriage roll silently by her. She told me it was in her view for a few seconds before it disappeared completely.
Another resident reports walking down the street late one night when a woman in an eighteenth-century ball gown ran across the sidewalk in front of him. She dashed out into the middle of Benefit Street — where she disappeared. When the man looked back to see from where she had come, he discovered that she had not come out of a door, but straight out of a blank wall.
THE LAMPLIGHTER OF MILL STREET
As you stroll down Benefit Street and admire the houses some evening, pause for a moment to look at the streetlamps. Although electric, the lamps are designed to resemble the old-style gas lamps that once illuminated the street. The gas lamps were installed in 1874, replacing the earlier oil lamps, and seventy-five lamplighters made nightly rounds. One worthy of note was John Quinn, who worked his way through Brown University lighting lamps and later became a lawyer. Described by one source as "a cripple," Quinn gave an account of the lamplighter's lot:
We used to carry a ladder, weighting 21 pounds, and a container holding sufficient fluid to light our respective districts ... We were paid ... 3½ cents for lighting oil lamps, and 11/2 cents for gas ... and had eighty minutes to light the lamps in our section, the time depending on the season of year and the hour the moon came up ... Winter or no winter; blizzard or no blizzard, you had to get the lights lit ... there were no streets cut in many places, and it was hard to find your way in the dark.
Another lamplighter once lived on Mill Street, a little lane near Benefit Street. He lived in a modest house with his only child — a daughter — his wife having died some years previously. They were devoted to one another, and each night when the lamplighter returned from making his rounds the daughter would have supper waiting for him — "cold mutton and even colder apple pie," as the story goes.
One especially bitter winter, the girl became gravely ill and her worried father rushed through his nightly route and raced home to be with his ailing child. Every night when he came through the door she seemed thinner and paler.
Finally, she lost her struggle and died one cold afternoon, and her poor father was inconsolable.
He laid the girl's body out in a black coffin, which he placed in the front room of the house, under the window that looked out onto Mill Street. He surrounded the coffin with tall black candles, which he kept lit night and day. He never again left the house to make his rounds lighting lamps, he just stayed home tending to his daughter's body, combing her hair, stroking her face and talking to her.
After a few weeks of this, the other neighbors up and down Mill Street grew understandably worried. Calling in the authorities, the poor lamplighter was taken into custody and his daughter was given a decent Christian burial.
The house stood empty for a number of years after the events just described — no one wanted to live there after that.
Still, passersby in the street often claimed to see the young girl's face at the window — sometimes thin and sickly, sometimes healthy and rosy — smiling and waving, occasionally sticking her tongue out and laughing. But the girl was buried long ago, and the house was long since abandoned.
Curiously, Mill Street itself has disappeared. Like so many things, it seems to have vanished in a frenzied shuffle of "urban renewal."
The house and its tenants are gone, and all that remains of them is their story.
THE NIGHTINGALE-BROWN HOUSE
Not all ghost stories are frightening. Some are amusing. This massive house was built in 1791 for Joseph Nightingale, a wealthy merchant active in the triangle trade. His brother-in-law built an identical house next door, which burned to the ground in 1849. Nicholas Brown bought the house from Nightingale's widow in 1814, and his family lived there until 1985. It is now the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization.
Some years ago, two janitors were working in the building one night. One of them was new, and the other had worked in the building for a number of years.
The newcomer was cleaning up in one of the big rooms on the first floor, where the eyes in the dour portrait over the fireplace followed him as he swept and straightened. It made him uncomfortable.
Finishing up, he reached for the light switch; illuminating the room were two electric lamps on either side of the portrait. As he did so, he heard a deep voice say, "Don't turn that light out!"
Taking a deep breath, he ran upstairs to find the other janitor.
"Something weird just happened to me downstairs ..." he began.
"Yeah, I know," the other man replied. "That portrait talks. Don't listen to it, but leave the lights on."
THE FIERY PHANTOMS OF POWER STREET
In a tall, narrow house lived a family who had lost all their men to the China trade. This was a time when literally thousands of ships sailed out of Providence harbor bound for the Orient, bringing back exotic cargoes of tea, silks and opium. Other ships — such as those owned by the wealthy John Brown, whose family richly endowed the university that now bears the family name — engaged in the slave trade.
When a ship left harbor, it usually embarked with two or three years' worth of supplies packed in the hold, as voyages could easily last that length of time. Some ships never returned to their port of origin, and some others did only many years later with hair-raising tales of their time at sea.
So it was with the family who lived in this house — the men had gone to sea and never returned. But the women never lost hope that one day the front door would be thrown open, father, sons and brothers would return and the family would be reunited.
As a symbol of that hope, the daughter kept a candle burning in an upstairs window, looking out toward the wharves. And one night, sitting up late, hoping to catch a glimpse of a familiar mast in the harbor, she fell asleep. And the wind blew and blew — and knocked the candle over. The candle set fire to the drapes, and the drapes set fire to the rest of the room.
The daughter snapped awake and dashed downstairs, crying to her mother that the house was on fire. The two women clasped hands and fled the house, looking back helplessly as their home burned.
After a few moments, the mother remembered that the family Bible was still in the house. The family Bible, with its record of births, deaths, marriages and other notable events, was passed down reverently from generation to generation — she could not allow it to be lost in the blaze.
The mother raced into the house to recover the Bible.
She didn't come out.
After a few long minutes, the panicked daughter ran into the house to try to find her mother.
She didn't come out.
The neighbors had raised the alarm and called for the fire department, and a few of the crowd wanted to enter the building and look for the two women, but it was too late — the roof collapsed and there was nothing to do but try to extinguish the fire.
When the wreckage had stopped smoldering a day later, friends and neighbors carefully went through the house looking for the remains of the two women. They never found them; mother and daughter had vanished completely, perhaps wholly consumed by the fire.
Years went by, and another house was built on the site of the first. And for years and years afterward, the night watch patrolling the neighborhood reported seeing two women, one young, one old, sitting on the steps of the new house, crying like two souls who had lost everything.
When the night watchman came closer, the women would scream and disappear, leaving nothing behind but the smell of smoke.
THE LIGHTNING SPLITTER HOUSE
The Lightning Splitter house dates from 1780, and was lived in by a sailmaker. Originally a simple rectangular structure, the tall, peaked roof was added in the 1860s, thereby earning the house its name. It was thought that a bolt of lightning would be split in two by the sharp roofline and sent ineffectually to the ground. As far as I know, this theory has never been put to the test.
Speaking with a family who once lived in the house, I discovered that they had some unusual tales to tell. The very night they moved in, the husband walked out the front door to enjoy the summer air and to take a break from a long day of moving boxes, and he saw several figures standing across the street by the Barker Playhouse. The men wore tall hats and buckle shoes. The women wore long full skirts and bonnets. He blinked at them, wondering what he was seeing, and then he remembered that the Barker was performing Arthur Miller's Crucible, and these were actors in costume about to go onstage.
