How Haunted is Rhode Island?

Rhode Island may lack the brand recognition of go-to haunted haunts like Salem and Transylvania, but that doesn’t mean that our ghosts and goblins aren’t every bit as interesting. Vampires, spirits, Satanists – we’ve got spooks and scares aplenty. Here are three local legends to keep you up at night: this only scratches the surface of Rhode Island’s haunted history.

Mercy Brown: Ocean State Vampire
The Legend: Your family might drive you crazy, but Mercy Brown’s would out crazy them for sure. During the New England Vampire Panic of the late 19th century (aka a tuberculosis outbreak), it was believed that a non-sparkling, notably less dreamy variety of bloodsucker was preying on locals. Mercy Brown died of tuberculosis in 1890, two years after her mother and older sister. When her brother Edwin became ill in 1892, the bodies of all three women were dug up and inspected. The elder Brown women were good and decomposed, but Mercy had been kept in a freezer-like crypt for months after her death, resulting in a more preserved state. Naturally this was interpreted as a sign of vampirism, and her heart was subsequently removed, burned, mixed into an elixir and fed to her sick brother. You know, for vampirism! He died less than a year later.

Where to Find Proof: Mercy’s grave can still be seen in the Baptist Church cemetery in Exeter.

The Conjuring House
The Legend: Bathsheba Sherman, a suspected witch, cursed this Harrisville property resulting in mysterious and tragic deaths that plagued multiple generations of the family that lived there before the Perron family bought the property in the early 1970s. The Perrons came face to face with a full-blown haunted house. Their story, along with that of famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, was depicted in the 2013 film, The Conjuring. The Perrons have long since moved on (to a new home, not the afterlife) but the current owners are battling a different kind of possession entirely: horror movie nerds who won’t stay off their property. They’re in the process of suing Warner Brothers and director James Wan after The Conjuring turned their quiet, if slightly haunted home, into a magnet for trespassers and crank callers.

Where to Find Proof: You can see Bathsheba Sherman’s headstone in the historic cemetery across from the Harrisville fire station. Otherwise, please leave the people who live here alone.

The Biltmore Hotel
The Legend: A lot of people point to the Biltmore in downtown Providence as the inspiration for The Shining’s Overlook Hotel and Psycho’s Bates Motel. Dig a little deeper and you’ll start uncovering bone-chilling tidbits about Johan Leisse Weisskopf, the “affluent Satanist” who financed the hotel’s construction (with some help from the mob) in the early 20th century. Rumors speak of animal cages on the rooftop for ritual sacrifices and purifying baths in the basement filled with blood, which sounds more like the backstory to Sigourney Weaver’s apartment in Ghostbusters if you ask us, making it easy for people to assume that every creepy sound and disembodied howl they hear in their room is probably a ghost. But outside of slamming bathroom doors in YouTube videos, the spectral guests have been relatively quiet in recent years.

Where to Find Proof: You can always reserve a room and inspect a specter for yourself… if you dare.