pirates in newport

Newport was also a major center of pirate activity during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. So many pirates used Newport as their base of operations that the London Board of Trade made an official complaint to the English government. The most famous pirate who made Newport his base was Thomas Tew. Tew was very popular with the locals; after one of his pirating voyages, it was reported that almost the whole town came out to greet him.

In the 1720s, colonial leaders, acting under pressure from the British government, arrested many pirates. Many were hanged in Newport and were buried on Goat Island.

Lost City, RI - slaves, diseased, or loyalists?

Hanton City (known locally as Lost City) is a colonial era ghost town in Smithfield, Rhode Island, United States.

The remains of Hanton City consist of several stone foundations, a burial site, a defunct dam apparently used for irrigation, and a dilapidated scattering of stone walls, typifying it as a standard small New England farming community. The entire site is completely overgrown, making it nearly impossible to locate when any vegetation is present.

At the time of its habitation, the small settlement was extremely isolated from the main town of Smithfield. For this reason, several theories have been posited in regards to its raison d'être.

The first theory is that the residents of Hanton City were a small band of runaway slaves united to live in secrecy in the wilds of then extremely rural Smithfield. This theory seems unlikely given the logistics of a renegade group of people's ability to procure the building materials and basic supplies needed to create even the most rudimentary settlement (let alone the outside goods required to maintain day-to-day life).

The second theory is that the residents of Hanton City were all pariahs afflicted with a communicable disease that mandated their isolation from the general populace.

The third and most likely theory is that those who founded Hanton City were Loyalists: colonists who remained loyal to the king of England during the American Revolution. It is uncertain whether these Loyalists were forced to live in exile by the historically fiercely independent Rhode Islanders or whether they chose of their own volition to form an enclave of the politically like-minded. Several Tories from Newport were exiled to Smithfield and Glocester in 1776, including Thomas Vernon whose diary was published.

The wooded area in which Hanton City is located is currently owned by The Dow Chemical Company. The presence of orange surveyor's tape suggests the area's imminent development. The small Alfred Smith Cemetery is located in the area. The only readable names are Alfred, Eliza and Emor Smith. "Hanton City Trail" in Smithfield and "Hanton Road" in North Smithfield serve as reminders of the now defunct village.

vampires in exeter, ri

[TRUE STORY]

The Mercy Brown Vampire Incident, which occurred in 1892, is one of the best documented cases of the exhumation of a corpse in order to perform rituals to banish an undead manifestation.

In Exeter, Rhode Island, the family of George and Mary Brown suffered a sequence of tuberculosis infections in the final two decades of the 19th century. Tuberculosis was called "consumption" at the time and was a devastating and much-feared disease.

The mother, Mary, was the first to die of the disease, followed in 1888 by their eldest daughter, Mary Olive. Two years later, in 1890, their son Edwin also became sick.

In 1891, another daughter, Mercy, contracted the disease and died in January 1892. She was buried in the cemetery of the Baptist Church in Exeter

Friends and neighbors of the family believed that one of the dead family members was a vampire (although they did not use that name) and causing Edwin's illness. This was in accordance with threads of contemporary folklore linking multiple deaths in one family to undead activity. Consumption was a poorly understood condition at the time and the subject of much urban mythology.

George Brown was persuaded to exhume the bodies, which he did with the help of several villagers on March 17, 1892. While the bodies of both Mary and Mary Olive had undergone significant decomposition over the intervening years, the more recently buried body of Mercy was still relatively unchanged and had blood in the heart. This was taken as a sign that the teenager was undead and the agent of young Edwin's condition. The cold New England weather made the soil virtually impenetrable, essentially guaranteeing that Mercy's body was kept in freezer-like conditions in an above-ground crypt during the 2 months following her death. Therefore, the lack of decomposition is not surprising.

Mercy's heart was removed from her body, burnt, and the remnants mixed with water and given to the sick Edwin to drink. Unfortunately, despite all his efforts, George was unsuccessful in protecting his son, who died two months later.

[Mercy Brown Gravestone]