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.
