Ghosts in Rhode Island

Idiots

Rhode Island has a grand tradition of religious tolerance, and is the birth place of the concept of separation of church and state, thanks to founder and visionary Roger Williams. Despite such a proud heritage, there are two cases pending regarding church-state separation, one in Cranston concerning a school prayer painted on the wall, and one in Pawtucket where Catholic parochial schools are given first dibs on publicly maintained recreational fields. We also had a big hullabaloo about whether decorated evergreens on state property should rightly be call "Holiday Trees." We have a powerful Catholic Church and a strong Tea Party presence in the state, and our Democrats for the most part behave like Republicans elsewhere.

And to top it all off we're the home of The Atlantic Paranormal Society, the group made famous on the SyFy series Ghost Hunters.

It's embarrassing to live here sometimes.

Today's Providence Journal decided to give front page coverage to the ghost hunters, because Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson are coming to Providence (a twenty minute drive from their base in Warwick) to investigate possible ghosts at City Hall. Their suspects for ghosts include former mayor Thomas Doyle (d.1886) city sergeant Edward S Rhodes (d. 1903) and/or Geoffrey Secor (d. 1998). The attention of the ghost hunters was gotten when a city worker heard voices in the night:

“I was walking out of the fifth-floor restroom when I heard something that I thought was a ghost,” Elise Swearingen, a city employee, told The Journal on Wednesday. “It whispered to me, ‘Not today.’ I called the officers downstairs, and we checked and found no one. It literally sounded like it was right next to me.”

Swearingen said she went home that summer night in 2011 and emailed The Atlantic Paranormal Society (T.A.P.S.), the Warwick group that stars in “Ghost Hunters.” They didn’t call her back until three weeks ago.

This comes, of course, one day after my niece Jessica found out that 14 out of 20 kids in her debate class believed in ghosts, based on the weight of souls measured leaving the bodies after death. The fact that the "scientific" study that gave these results is totally bogus did not dissuade her fellow students from believing, just as the fact that the ghost hunters have never actually found anything like evidence for ghosts (and in fact have been accused of manufacturing the scant evidence they have obtained) keeps people from believing those idiots are doing anything but running around in the dark.

Argh.