They come in all sizes, shapes and forms -- from wispy visions hovering over a gravesite in Burrillville to men and women strolling down Benefit Street in Providence in full Victorian dress.
Some appear silently, while unseen others let forth eery sounds, such as the cries of Indian infants tossed into the waves off Charlestown and the mournful toll of a bell at the remains of a haunted factory in Foster.
They're the ghosts of Rhode Island, and they may be haunting anything from an antique woodcarving in Newport to entire villages in Glocester.
Most are said to be active when the moon is full, as well as on Halloween, when spirits are supposed to be most active.
And their legendary haunts are said to be among the creepiest places in Rhode Island, especially around the midnight hours.
With Halloween coming up this Friday, we turned to local experts to help us find the scariest places in a state packed with ghost stories.
But beware, warns Jason Hawes, founder of the Atlantic Paranormal Society, which he said is the largest such organization in the world. "When you go to haunted locations, you can't be sure of what's there at the time . . . It's a lot of fun to fool around with until something happens. But if something happens, what are you going to do?"
Most times, people don't see anything when they go ghost hunting for fun, Hawes said. But it's like playing the lottery: There's a chance they might. So be prepared. "What would you do if you turned around and something was standing there?"
"When you open up a can of worms, you've got to be ready for what's inside."
It may, he said, be more than you've bargained for.
CREEPY PLACES
Some places are spooky just by virtue of how they look.
Consider Fort Adams in Newport, the cavernous 20-acre former military encampment at the entrance to Narragansett Bay. Built in 1824, modelled after a castle from feudal times, it once held 2,400 soldiers. But it has long since closed and is a dilapidated series of brick walls and stone ruins.
It's spooky enough by day, with its 468 empty cannon ports, crumbling plaster walls and underground stone tunnels where anyone -- or anything -- could be lurking around the next turn.
But come night, it's downright eerie, an abandoned encampment filled with shadows and the tingling thought of the spirits still there.
"That's probably the spookiest place that the general public can go," said Eleyene Austen Sharp, author of Haunted Newport and founder of the month-long celebration of the same name. Especially at night, she says, it has a "creepy, creepy feeling."
It can be quite spooky, admits Mike Wujic, an admininstrative assistant there, "if your imagination runs away with you."
Fort Adams, a state park, is not open at night, though it would be impossible to secure the entire encampment from intruders, admits Deanna Casey, operations manager for the fort. And the Fort Adams Trust does allow group events, such as a Boy Scouts sleepover there, and it's sponsoring Fright Nights at the Haunted Fort through the end of the month for those who dare walk through the "cemetery ditch."
While the Fright Night people imported live actors to portray ghosts and ghouls to create the Haunted Fort this month, the fort reportedly has an entire cast of ghosts and spirits of its own, Casey said.
Most notorious is the ghost of John Magruder, the original commander of the fort, who became a traitor during the Civil War when he fought for the South, Casey said. A renowned womanizer, he was murdered by a jealous husband and reportedly came back to haunt the fort afterwards.
His spirit is said to join those of several others, including that of John Tracey, an Irish immigrant who was buried alive while helping build the fort in 1827; Private Fraz Koop, who was beaten and thrown into a cistern, with a rock atop it, and left to die in 1879; and Ephriham Lajoie, a soldier who died after sleep-walking out of a second-story window in the enlisted men's barracks in 1906.
THE UNEXPLAINED
Other places are creepy because of unexplained things that happen there.
Belcourt Castle, for example, is said to be the most haunted of any of the Newport mansions. In fact, the owners -- Donald and Harle Tinney -- proudly offer ghost tours while local preservationists downplay the notion that any of the gilded mansions are haunted.
"Do we have spirits in this castle? Absolutely," Mrs. Tinney recently declared, as she offered a private tour of the spooky happenings within the castle walls.
On this tour, late one dark and dreary afternoon, even those of us who don't believe in ghosts were left scratching our heads at some of the mysterious things we saw. An ever-changing reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall in the music room looked eerily like a camera panning the room. And some of us could easily see a face behind the mask of a suit of armor in the grand ballroom. On closer inspection, there was nothing there, but -- our spines began to tingle -- from across the room the face was clear as could be.
And when Mrs. Tinney invited an 11-year-old boy to "feel" the energy in a haunted seat, a carved oak English Gothic chair, he pulled his hand back in shock as he tried to rub away what felt like a "pins and needles" sensation. "My hand feels, like, really weird," he said.
Tinney said she didn't believe in ghosts until she moved here as a 19-year-old bride and woke up one night to see a man standing beside her bed. She then watched him walk out of the room, right through the solid wall.
She since has counted nine separate ghosts, including the wispy visage of a monk that occasionally emanates from a 17th-century German woodcarving of a robed monk and a suit of armor that was said to have emitted a series of screams after a wooden rail fell on its foot. Most are linked with specific artifacts collected from around the world.
So . . . isn't she a little freaked out by living in a haunted mansion? Tinney said she's grown accustomed to it. Besides, she said, the ghosts are not threatening in any way, though one mischieveous spirit has been known to make things disappear.
THIS ONE'S OFFICIALLY HAUNTED
Rhode Island's only "official" haunted building is the former Foster Woolen Manufactury, known as the Ramtail Factory, off Ramtail Road in Foster. It's even recorded in the state's census of 1885 as being haunted.
The story goes that the factory was owned by five partners and headed by William Potter, according to the booklet Peleg's Last Word, written by Margery I. Matthews of Foster. One of the partners, Potter's son-in-law Peleg Walker, the night watchman, had a falling out with the others. He was said to have warned that one day, they would have to "take a key from a dead man's pocket" to open the factory.
Shortly afterward, Walker, then 35, was found hanging from a rope in the belfry on May 19, 1822. The keys to the factory were found, as promised, in his pocket.
For nights to come, the factory's bell would inexplicably sound each night at midnight, Matthews wrote. The partners cut the rope, and eventually removed the bell, but they couldn't silence it. There also were reports of a man believed to be Walker walking through the factory, with his trusty lantern, when the factory was sealed up tight.
As if that's not enough, late one night, villagers were said to be awakened by the unearthly sound of the mill's massive water wheel turning backwards, against the flow of the flume. And another time, they found the factory running at full speed -- every wheel, loom and spindle turning -- when no one was there.
The millworkers were said to be so spooked that they fled the tiny village of Ramtail and the mill eventually went out of business. It was torched in 1873, but Walker's spirit was said to remain.
The stories were so pervasive that the official 1885 state census listed the site as a haunted building, Matthews wrote, noting that Walker is probably the only ghost counted in an official state census.
Today, all that's left are the foundations of the mill and nearby houses, scattered under the brush along the Ponaganset River.
But it's said that on some moonlit nights, the ghost of Peleg Walker can still be seen swinging his lantern through the ruins, and at midnight, when conditions are right, you can still hear the bell toll.
SPOOKY ROADS
Ghosts don't limit themselves to buildings and ruins, either. Some roads are said to be haunted by visions that have been sworn to by motorists over the years, such as the Faceless Ghost of Reservoir Road.
Paul Eno, a paranormal investigator -- a.k.a. ghost hunter -- from Woonsocket, said he's talked to "a number of people who've seen a faceless ghost in the vicinity of the reservoir up there." They'll be driving in this lonely area and spot a man walking on the side of the road. And as they go by, they see the man has no face. And then, when they look into their rearview mirror, the figure is gone. "It's pretty spooky," Eno said.
A similar ghost is said to haunt Biscuit City Road in South Kingstown, Eno said. "If you go out on a night of a full moon and you look hard enough, you're going to see something, whether you try to or not."
Hawes, of the Atlantic Paranormal Society, said the Great Swamp in Charlestown was the site of a massacre in which colonists slaughtered the native Indians. "Supposedly, you can still hear cries and gunshots and screaming," Hawes said. "Sometimes, you can see Indians in their war regalia walking through the swamp."
Spirits also have been seen fairly regularly throughout Providence's East Side, especially on historic Benefit Street, according to Rory Raven, a mindreader and amateur historian who leads Ghost Walks there this time of year. "It's a very pleasant, lovely street. But it's got sort of this weird history about it."
A man in black has been seen walking up and down Benefit Street, where an 18th-century horse-drawn carriage has been known to pull up to a house and then vanish.
Screams are said to be heard from a gothic mansion at Brown and Angell Streets, once the site of a lawyer's office. The story goes that an unhappy client shot the lawyer here, and the dead man's screams can still be heard.
The ghost of the poet Edgar Allan Poe has been known to drop by the Providence Athenaeum, the private library where he once courted Sarah Helen Whitman, a Providence woman who spurned his marriage proposals.
And who knows what happened to the ghost of Mill Street? A lamplighter lived there with his daughter, who'd have supper waiting for him each night. One winter, she died. Her father put her body in a black coffin in the front room, illuminated by candles, until neighbors complained and he was forced to bury her. But for years, people claimed to see her face staring from the windows there. The house and the street, near the Roger Williams National Monument, are no longer there, Raven said.
CEMETERY STORIES
Cemeteries anywhere are said to be filled with spirits. But some have spawned specific legends that draw ghost-hunters of all ages and abilities, hoping to prove the legends real.
Chief among them would be the Garden of Angels, a small section of the Newport Memorial Park cemetery in Middletown, where about two dozen infants have been buried over the past 50 years. It is said that at midnight, or when the moon is full, you can hear the babies cry.
Eno, the ghost hunter from Woonsocket, is among those who have heard the cries.
"It was early spring and after dark, but not that late," he recalled. "It sounded just like a normal baby's cry, but it faded in and out, as these extradimensional sounds often do. At one point, there seemed to be an adult voice, too. When I tried to trace the sounds, they would seem to have moved."
Eno believes that ghosts aren't spirits of the dead, but rather that they reflect a state of living in a different place and time. He said the sound he heard could have been that of a baby with its family attending a funeral years ago and he just happened to catch the sound.
Debra Garrison, who spent her childhood in Middletown and has worked at the cemetery for the past 11 years, said she's never heard the cries. But she grew up with the rumor. "There's not much to do here on Aquidneck Island, so your imagination goes wild."
PATRICIA MEHRTENS, town historian of Burrillville, said the same may be true of The Ghost of Laura.
It is said to lurk in a tiny burial plot tucked away in Burrillville, the Sherman family cemetery, where Clark Sherman is buried with his three wives, Caroline, Ellen and Laura.
No one knows much about Laura, nor why her spirit is the restless one. But legend has it that, when the moon is full, if you circle her grave three times and call her name, her wispy visage will appear.
Mehrtens said she doesn't know of anyone who's actually seen the ghost. In fact, she didn't even learn of the legend until her children were in high school in the 1970s. "It's a folk tale," she said.
And it would be tough to find the grave to prove or disprove it, she noted. Vandals have long since destroyed the headstones. All that remains are slight depressions in the ground, surrounded by stone walls. "They'd have trouble figuring out which grave is hers," Mehrten said.
As for why Laura is said to appear when summoned, Mehrten could only surmise: "Wouldn't you be a little angry if someone was stomping on your grave and circling around three times?"
SOME CEMETERIES AREN'T meant for ghost hunting.
Sadie Baran, president of the vast Swan Point Cemetery on the East Side of Providence, with its elegant statues and mausoleums marking the resting places of some of the state's wealthiest and best-known citizens, said the cemetery doubles its security force on Halloween to keep scare-seekers away. "This is a historical cemetery and arboretum," Baran said. "I like it to be known as that."
Nevertheless, part of the history is that H.P. Lovecraft, Rhode Island's most notorious writer of horror stories, is buried here in a family plot. But, Baran said, "I don't want his grave to be associated with Halloween."
Enough people visit his grave on other days, especially to celebrate the dates of his birth and death. Raven, of Ghost Walks, said people are known to "leave these kind of odd little offerings for him" -- including pens, candles and coins. "It's apparently a popular place for weirdos of all kinds and oddball cultists," Raven said. It's also pretty spooky there, late at night, he and others agree.
But Baran insists: "Swan Point is not a spooky place. It's like every other cemetery at night. It is like every other street in Providence that we go through at night."
THE HESSIAN HOLE
Some haunted gravesites aren't even cemeteries. Consider the Hessian Hole in Portsmouth, said to be a mass grave dating back to the American Revolution.
The Battle of Rhode Island -- the largest land battle of the Revolutionary War -- was fought in Portsmouth on Aug. 29, 1778, near Barker's Bloody Brook, a stream that flows through Portsmouth Abbey's property.
Some say the Patriots could have won the Revolution that day, if help from a French fleet had arrived. But the fleet had been scattered in a storm, so the colonists under Generals Sullivan, Greene and Lafayette were left to fight several British and Hessian regiments alone.
After the battle, anywhere from 30 to 60 Hessian soldiers -- depending on which account you read -- were said to be buried in a mass grave marked by a willow tree. The willow tree is gone and there are conflicting reports as to the exact location of this grave: The Providence Journal Almanac, which dates back over 100 years, reports that it's at the Lehigh State Picnic Grove, just off Route 114. A 1937 book by the Works Progress Administration Guide to Rhode Island and Massachusetts says it's closer to Route 114. Still other media reports place it on the Abbey grounds -- near a brook called Barker's Brook or Bloody Run, which reportedly ran red with blood for days after the battle -- where the Carnegie Golf Course is being built. Regardless, it's supposed to be marked by a large depression in the ground.
It is said that if you can find this depression on a foggy night, when conditions are right, you can cleary see a detachment of tall, mustachioed Hessians in full dress uniform marching against the western sky.
Some say the grave doesn't even exist.
Jim Garman, an archaeology professor at Salve Regina University who surveyed a large portion of the Battle of Rhode Island field in 1999, found no trace of the Hessian Hole. He said the legend of the mass grave first surfaced about 100 years after the Revolutionary War and may have been a way of gilding the fact that the battle was in fact lost. "Weaving a story about a mass grave of formerly rapacious Hessians was a decent way to spin the battle and its unfortunate outcome."
"[It's] a neat story and one worth remembering because it links us to our distant history," he said, even though it has "not much basis in history."
But the legend remains, giving rise to the belief that a mass grave may still be out there somewhere, filled with spirits.
Happy hunting.
