For this week’s edition of “Ghost Hunting at URI,” I want to take you off campus for a minute. The Paranormal Society has been blessed with a partnership with RISEUP, the Rhode Island Society for the Examination of Unusual Phenomena. They are a volunteer organization that specializes in investigating paranormal claims, and are all very experienced and educated people who look at paranormal things scientifically. We were lucky enough to get in contact with them one year and got the chance to go off campus with them to historically haunted places.
Last semester they offered us the chance to go to Smith’s Castle, one of the oldest homes in the state of Rhode Island, built in 1678. It is also right next door to us in North Kingstown. We took the chance to go and had a very interesting experience.
They had told us some stories about their experiences in that location that were unexplainable. So going in, I knew I wanted to try and recreate those happenings to see if we could get good pieces of evidence. While we did not get any video evidence (after disproving something that would have been an amazing piece), a majority of the members in our group, if not all of us, heard the exact same thing at different times throughout the night.
The house has a giant circle floor plan, one that if you simply walk, you will eventually end up at the stairs that leads to different floors. When you went upstairs, there was a master bedroom on the right. If you went through the master bedroom, there was a child’s bedroom, and so on. A group of us who were originally on the upper floor decided to sit in the master bedroom and shut both doors to essentially lock ourselves in without actually locking the doors. We sat on the floor and began an EVP session.
Not too long into recording, we heard footsteps coming up the stairs. This was something that RISEUP mentioned they had heard before, so we were a little on edge about it. We called out to see if it was someone we knew coming up, and it wasn’t. The footsteps eventually stopped. We continued.
A few moments after that, it sounded like a man walked into the child’s room next to us. There were footsteps that went into the room and stopped, and I swear I heard a man’s voice and thought the voice was one of a RISEUP’s member. I didn’t think much of it until we met back up with everyone in our safe room, which was a room where the lights were on throughout the investigation. The also held all of the camera monitors and such. I told RISEUP about the footsteps and asked them about who had gone up to the room. They said that none of them had gone up there during that time. Still to this day, I swear it was one of them in that room, even though I know it wasn’t.