October is the spooky month. Vampires, ghouls, demons, and ghosts are icons of Halloween, horror, and stories to tell in the dark. For those who get a thrill out of the supernatural, October is the pinnacle time to look for the creepy, the spooky, and the inexplicable in real life; this month is ghost hunting season.
Although it is a small city, Newport has its share of eerie locales, and as such, the city offers plenty of opportunities to join ghost hunting tours. Recently, US Ghost Adventures launched new Providence and Newport ghost tours. Newport Ghosts is not the typical ghost hunting experience. In fact, a tour guide, Joe, stressed that Newport Ghosts was not a “ghost hunting” experience at all. He rebranded the idea of wannabe Ghostbusters taking over Newport into the idea of taking a “respectful ghost tour.” The Newport Ghost tours, he explained, rely more on historical anecdotes than flashy gear and the need to witness a supernatural occurrence. “I want people to feel a connection to this city and the stories here,” he explained, acknowledging that there was no need to desecrate a graveyard to unearth the more gruesome aspects of Newport’s local history.
Since the tour focuses more on the concrete – the historical past – Joe makes sure that all tour-goers are thoroughly prepared to sense (or not) spirits. “Newport is a top-thirteen bachelorette location, so you may not hear the ‘boos,’ but you might hear the ‘whoos,’” he jokes.
The tour is about one mile long and lasts for an hour. The route starts at Eisenhower Park, and makes a loop from Long Wharf up to Trinity Church, the Vanderbilt Hotel, and to The Artillery Company of Newport.
While the walking loop might feel small, the eras the tour covers spans centuries. Joe started the tour by winding back the clock to the time of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Puritans – back before Roger Williams established Rhode Island and Anne Hutchinson founded Portsmouth – as proof of the city’s old roots and ties to even older religions (the backbone, of course, of most things in the horror genre).
Newport’s dark history comes out in full force with the tales about the “ninety years of lawlessness” from the 1670s-1760s when over forty executions took place in Eisenhower Park and Long Wharf. Joe spun tales of a pirate crew who failed to beat the British Navy ship, HMS Greyhound, and who subsequentially received the “low drop” when they hung. Their bodies were kept tarred along the coast of Goat Island, and years later, hundreds more were buried on Rose Island from a deadly cholera outbreak.
The tour relays the true crime story of road rage, murder, and potential suicide that took place on the Pell Bridge in the 1990s, the cruelty of the Transatlantic slave trade that Newport was so prevalent in, an old-money Newport native who sank with the Lusitania – the ship that brought the United States into World War I – and more. The tour stops at Trinity Church, were Joe showed off an EMF (electromagnetic field) reader that is supposedly a tool to track supernatural and ghostly forces; the reader flickered to orange – signs of activity – and Joe assured the tour that our electronics – including phones in our pockets – could not affect its small sensory range.
It is not guaranteed that the tour will find anything ghostly beyond the phantoms conjured up from historical retellings, and yet, Joe reports, there have been sightings in Newport of “orbs of energy” over Eisenhower Park, and sightings of apparitions in other landmarks along the route like the Vernon House and the Vanderbilt Hotel. Newport Ghosts does not seek to prove or disprove the claims. Rather, the tour embraces the spooky feelings as a welcome atmospheric addition to the retelling of Newport’s more gruesome aspects of history.
Tours are run nightly at 8 p.m. and can be booked on the Newport Ghost website.
