Discovering the weird and whimsical sites of New England
Author: Theophanes Avery
Theophanes Avery is a whimsical travel blogger that is hopelessly in love with New England and all it's weird places, people, and things. Besides running way too many blogs they are the author of three books, at least one of them good, and they also enjoy raising aquarium fish in Walsted tanks, sculpting, Sharpie doodling, knitting, tattooing leather, homesteading, and whatever other hobby tickles their raging ADD. Less fortunately they are a hopelessly impoverished spoonie yelling to the world, "WE NEED MORE COMMUNITY!" but alas no one's listening. Make sure to find them on the FaceBook. They love new oddball friends. Fly the freak flag high my darlings!
By now the sun had basically come directly into Providence and there was the smell of bacon as people cooked under it. Not really, but it was close. Luckily the gun totem was only supposed to be a short walk down the street from the Edna Nature Lab. And it was! In a park!
Now the gun totem is a concrete pillar filled with over 1,000 reclaimed guns. And I mean I guess that’s one way to use guns that people no longer want or need…
It’s a weird attraction. Not one to specifically go for but if you’re in the area doing other things by all means give it a little looksee.
From here we took a respite in the park under a tree until I could no longer ignore the sizzling noises coming off my arm and we headed directly back into the sun to find the car. This would require not just beyond oppressive heat and humidity but also a rousing jaunt up a steep hill. And as it turns out we walked right by what was supposed to be the last destination of the day – the John Brown House which has been on my bucket list for over a year now. Sadly, we were both probably 15 minutes away from dying of heat exhaustion and my companion did not understand I wanted to go in and kept walking. So this will remain on my list for now… until I return.
And why did I want to go to the John Brown House? Because it’s a super fucked slice of New England history. I remember distinctly being of elementary school age and being taught how to sing “John Brown’s body lied a-moulderin’ in the grave.” And now here I am, an adult, going, “What the fuck was that about?!”
John Brown was a slave trader who realized later in life that what he was doing was deeply ethically wrong and so he became an abolitionist but not in any sane or rational way. Instead he decided he’d arm a bunch of slaves and start a revolt. The only reason this did not happen was because the slaves he approached basically responded to his offer of free guns by saying, “I don’t know you, I never talked to you, this never happened. GOOD BYE.” AS ANY SANE PERSON WOULD.
In addition to this absolutely mental story there is also a root nailed to a coffin board in the John Brown House that was supposed to be the vaguely human shaped root that they pulled out of Roger William’s grave 200 years after his death. But that’s…. another totally bonkers story for another day!
If libraries full of books weren’t enough for us we decided that a library of dead things might round out the day. That’s basically what the Edna Nature Lab is. It’s a large collection of bones and specimens that are there for easy study by the students at the Rhode Island School of Design. And if you follow this blog you might remember not too long ago I was at the RISD poking at their puppet museum. Clearly this is a school for… strange people. And that’s what so amazing about it!
Now when we arrived the door was locked. This was clearly some sort of college building used for different things so we were kind of out of luck until a gaggle of students walked in and we… just followed them. Sorry security! We promise not to do anything bad!
The lab was great. It was a giant room full of bones, taxidermy, insect specimens, you name it. There was even a few cages and tanks with live baby sea horses and a veeeery old and depressed looking degu. Maybe it survived the rest of the colony, I don’t know. My companion had never seen one before and thought he was cute. I… once had one of them escape my breeding colony that I had a teenager and unbeknownst to me it ended up living feral in my lawn until my pit bull was found throwing its carcass violently into the air like a toy. It was a bit of a startling sight to see a Chilean rodent being dug up by your dog in your very American lawn… Such is my life.
But back to the lab! It reminded me of something a Victorian “naturist” would have set up. I was very keen on the bones and bug specimens but there was also a lot of really spectacular taxidermy… and one baby dik dik that looked fucked up. I guess you need one piece of bad taxidermy to make the rest look all the better, I don’t know. Anyway, it was a short visit but none the less super interesting and we left before being removed by security. So that’s always good.
As we left I also noticed they seemed to have a bunch of marine tanks in the basement I could see through a window. Some with little cuttlefish in them and that just made my heart soar a bit. So cute. Remember when we all though marine biologist was like the go to job in the adult world? Those were the days…
So after the John Hayes Library we decided to keep on walking to “The Ath” as the locals call it. It’s another library but with its own unique charm. Apparently, it was in this library where Edgar Allen Poe had his marriage proposal turned down and H P Lovecraft also wrote about it in his many letters to friends. He seemed to have a great affection for it and I could see why.
Upon stepping in there’s a little room to the side you’re guided into and there was a woman at a desk handing out visitor stickers and politely saying that there was a suggested $5 per person donation but that it wasn’t required. I was already endeared to this place so whatever. Spending $5 here was a lot better than the $5 that the parking meter ate (no, I still haven’t forgotten about that.) In return for our most gracious donation, we were handed a little guide and told we could do a self-tour.
This place was kind of adorable. I was digging the whole vibe with the historic figure busts around the ceiling, the Roman statue at the entrance, and in the center of it all the bane of my childhood existence – A card catalogue. Today’s youth will never know the pain of having to search for “key words” manually by hand, flipping through index card after index card only to end up absolutely nowhere because guess what? The key words in your brain will NEVER match the keywords of the insufferable clerk that put this hellfire together. Made me a little nostalgic.
The guide was fun, we walked about looking at different things it was talking about and just generally digging the place. The downstairs had a distinct speak easy feel about it and this place did say it held a lot of cultural events so who knows! We then wandered accidentally into the rare volumes room and were quickly shuffled out by a very intense academic whose energy was let’s just say tightly wound. VERY tightly wound. The door we walked through was supposed to be locked. We held up our hands, swore we didn’t touch anything, and tried to back out in the friendliest way possible. I sighed, spending a day out in this college town was a bit of a mindfuck for me. It was the kind of place I always daydreamed about as a kid when I still had aspirations. I wonder if I had not had a total likely autistic burnout in nineth grade if I would have ended up somewhere like here… being someone like that guy, hidden by academia because the world is really too much, swatting at people getting too close to my drawers full of bones (as I would have studied paleontology not literature.) Life has not been easy or straight forward for me but I like who I am now and I’m actually grateful that I have come this far. I certainly enjoy life more.
And with that epiphany we decided to continue our journey to the Edna Biology Lab.
I really needed more trees but when the weather is 89 degrees you tend to want to do things indoors… so this week I tepidly pointed towards Providence and said, “Why don’t we poke around there until we find something weird.” And we did.
The John Hayes Library is a big beautiful library set up mostly for the nearby Brown University students which is rumored to have not one but three separate books bound in human skin. Morbidly I was hoping they might have one on display so off we went!
But first I have to warn you that if you use the Brown University visitor’s parking don’t pay in cash unless you have exact change. There were NO signs up saying the machine didn’t do change so when I gave it a $20 for a $15 day pass IT ATE MY FIVE DOLLARS. That’s just super not cool you guys.
The library wasn’t too far away. We walked through the college campus to get there (trying to take the shortest route possible since it was so miserably hot that day.) When we arrived it was another ornately decorated building with an entrance befitting a castle. We walked in and noticed there were displays everywhere so we wandered around, quietly looking at them and trying not to look too much like tourists. We’re both WAY old to be students although being baby faced no one would know that.
Somehow we ended up on a different floor in a big room that seemed 100% dedicated to tin soldiers in historic battles. And I don’t just mean American ones either. There were a lot of British Empire type things going down as well as armies consisting of elephants and people from far off lands. It was… fucking surreal if I’m honest. Like how exactly did we topple down a rabbit hole and land in the middle of a bunch of toys reenacting military history? I have no idea. This was not in the pamphlets.
Other art was scattered about – paintings of very posh looking historical figures adorned the walls in the hallway and there were also a lot of illustrations and photos of the library back in the day. No human skin books though. However, before we left we did ask about the H P Lovecraft letters that were supposed to be here.
“We have a lot of his letters here. He wrote a ton to his… pen pals?” I had to laugh at this poor young librarian in search of a better word. “Anyway, the main collection is huge but we can show you the samples if you’d like.”
And so we were handed a box full of what I can only describe as mad scribblings. A few full letters, a bunch of little doodles, lots of notes…. just absolute and utter mental chaos. There was even maps and schematics to imaginary locations. As a fiction writer myself I found this refreshing. And slightly horrifying. Please don’t scrutinize my To-Do lists after I die.
ANYWAY… I did not muster the courage to ask about the damned tomes but I suspect they’re hidden somewhere safe only to be seen by appointment and I…. do not have a legitimate reason to be asking strangers about their human skin books. Sad Sigh. I can tell you that at least one of them is an anatomy book probably bound in the skin of a cadaver – to which I say – that’s a really fucking bomb way to go out. Can someone make me into a book after I die? Almost makes me want to get a tattoo that could also work as a book title… *whistles*
We headed over to the Mayflower Hill Cemetery after reading online that there was a haunted cemetery marker there in the shape of a rocking chair. It was the stone of a young girl who died in the 1800’s and was reported to have come back for a little sit-in every now and then.
When we drove in we found the chair almost immediately with no searching. This once again disappointed my companion who loves the thrill of the chase. Even worse we are both super jaded by going to other amazing cemeteries and this one seemed to lack character.
“No wonder they think this stone is haunted, it’s the only one that looks any different than the others.”
And it was true. This cemetery had a profound lack of creativity. The rocking chair was piled with toys but there wasn’t much else going on. Just a few cast iron stones smattered here and there. We did however find a pretty big monument to fallen veterans which included cannons that were suspiciously pointed directly at local houses and a few mourning women type stones. Curiously Jane Toppan was supposed to be buried somewhere out here. She was an Angel of Death, a female serial killer nurse who admitted to killing 31 of her patients between 1880-1901 with morphine. She died in an insane asylum and doesn’t appear to have much of a marker, just a tiny headstone reading, “981.”
If King Philip’s Cave was a bit of a disappointment surely we could find something else cool to see in these parts. Why not check something off my list that has been on there for a few years? Dighton Rock. Dighton Rock is a boulder that was discovered covered in all sorts of strange petroglyphs. We have no idea what it says, who made it, or why. It’s just a total mystery which of course beckons me like nothing else.
There’s a long-standing story that the indigenous people didn’t build anything out of rocks or have a written language when the colonists came over buuuuut the more I poke about New England finding curiosities like these the more I think that’s a load of hogwash. We don’t know shit about the people who lived here before us because we kinda sorta killed them off and drove any survivors away. Suffice to say whole civilizations were lost and clearly this rock was part of that.
The rock is advertised through signs on the main highways nearby and I have passed by it a number of times. It’s actually located within a park, Dighton Park, in a building that calls itself a museum that was built around it.
When we got there we parked in a parking lot that claimed it was $3 but had nowhere or no one to pay. It seemed to be a very pretty little park with lots of grass for children to run and some picnic tables near the water, all surrounded by trees. Honestly it was one of the sweetest parks I remember. There was even a young woman here at one of the picnic tables playing her guitar. She waited until we were out of sight to start singing The House of the Rising Sun but she shouldn’t have. She had a nice voice! And her guitar playing was also lovely. It echoed eerily in the air on this fine summer day.
We managed to find the museum nearby but it was all locked up. There wasn’t any opening hours posted anywhere. It was just a whole lot of nothing. When we got back to the parking lot we found a sign saying to call for opening hours so we did and got an answering machine asking to wait for a call back for an appointment. We didn’t leave our info, it seemed unlikely anyone would call back within any reasonable amount of time to come down here and unlock the museum for two out of towners. Their website claims that opening hours are dependent on local health regulations… so I am guessing Covid has struck again.
So we wandered back to the car and started driving off when my travel companion yelled, “PARK PARK!” I stopped, and parked again. He’d seen a sign reading, “Dighton Cemetery” and wanted to check it out. However, upon further inspection it read, “Former site of historic Dighton Cemetery.” In other words no stones remained. We hiked down the trail a ways anyway. It had a lot of bowed trees going over the path from both directions and I found it to be quite whimsical, but my travel companion was disappointed there wasn’t an actual cemetery. He had wanted to stumble blindly onto another sweet forgotten collection of headstones in the woods like we’d seen at Historic Cemetery 26. No such luck. As for myself I was trying to keep positive but I was suffering from heat stroke and a migraine was kicking up so we went back to the car and continued our journey to find a real cemetery to round out the day.
On this particular day we decided to muck about the Bridgewater Triangle which is supposed to be a hot spot for ghosts, UFO’s and even Pukwudgie sightings. Pukwudgies are part of Native American folklore and are said to be small troll like creatures that lead people into the woods never to return. Sadly we didn’t go at night to poke at these phenomena but we did decide to check out a bit of indigenous history in exploring King Philip’s Cave.
King Philip was the name we gave the local chief of the Wampanoag tribe in the days of our early colonization. He was initially in favor of working with the white colonists and establishing trade but things sort of went south when we kept coming over in droves insisting the locals bow down to our rules and religion. And so “King Philip” (Metacomet) started to lead the other indigenous tribes in a war against colonist expansion.
King Philip’s Cave is where he hid during key moments during the war. We thought this might be an interesting thing to see so we prepared for a day of hiking and drove to a quaint little neighborhood on a private road that had a sign up saying, “Residents and guests only.” We decided we were guests and drove in anyway and at the end of a cul-de-sac there was a couple parking spots on the grass a big sign reading King Philip’s Cave completely obscured by another truck parked there.
We headed in and realized this wouldn’t be a day’s hike. The “cave” wasn’t far from the road at all and was just barely obscured by trees. It wasn’t a cave either, rather just a pile of glacial rocks sitting atop each other in such a way that a small tunnel was created through them. You see this sort of thing a lot around these parts and I suspect being at the end of a cul-de-sac this may have been some child’s favorite place to play. It was interesting but entirely underwhelming. There wasn’t even a plaque at the cave itself explaining it (though there was one at the entrance of the trail.) It was all very… half-assed. We’d seen this before looking at other places important in King Philip’s War and other bloody skirmishes with the people who already lived here. It’s almost like we’d like to forget it ever happened…
Luckily we had other plans that day to go see Dighton Rock and the Mayflower Hill Cemetery also in the area so the day wasn’t a complete wash.
I’m not going to lie. Mentally I haven’t been doing so great lately and honestly, I am suspicious of anyone who is on top of the world right now. It’s been a rough few weeks and there has been so many people just burned out and screaming into the void as the world burns. I’m right there with them. And I know life is sucking HARD right now for a lot of us which is why I have decided I needed more trees in my life. A LOT MORE TREES. Because trees are good people. They’re quiet, they gives homes to birds, they never say anything mean, and when we’re not watching they make oxygen!
So I struck out on my own. I know for the past couple of years almost all my adventures have been with travel companions and that’s cool, I still enjoy it, but that doesn’t change the fact I still need to submit myself to the solitude of the forest on my own every now and again. So I shall be doing more hiking – as much as my angry body allows.
Today I started driving to an actual hiking destination (which is more planning than I usually put into these things) but then I got completely and utterly distracted when I found the entrance to this trail on my way. Clearly it was calling me so I had to go in. In the rain. Because it was also raining (yes, I’m that desperate to go play in the woods.)
And I must say skulking through some swampy woods in the rain was exactly what I needed. I spent two hours wandering from the route 123 entrance to the other side of the park at the Condy Road entrance. Along the way I took sooo many photos of raindrops on leaves, found a whole swarm of orange newts and said hi to every one of them, and somehow didn’t get lost even though the trail was not marked and diverged at several points. That being said it was for the most part a very flat trail with only a couple mild inclines at the beginning. I could hear cars for most of the trek but also tons of birdsong and a couple bullfrogs to boot. Someone had even brought their horse down here at some point as I found their leavings and some hoof prints. And of course, I had to pick up two dog ticks along the way. BLECK. All and all it was a nice little find and fed my soul. So if you happen to be in the area and needing a little tete a tete with nature I would suggest this happy little trail.
Last week was just so completely random. I have no idea how I ended up at the bougiest corner of Rhode Island staring down the world’s most terrifying carousel while surrounded by ice cream lapping tourists but I’m not complaining…
Truth be told I desperately needed to be somewhere, anywhere, that was so completely and utterly different from my usual surroundings that I could just mentally check out for a while. You know what I mean. You feel it too. Well, I don’t live anywhere near the ocean so that fit the bill but really we went for the carousel and the lighthouse. The rest was just a cheerful bonus.
When I drove up it was definitely hoppin’. People were everywhere packing nearby beaches and perusing the shops and boutiques. It was like… going back in time… you know to the mid 1990’s, before the economy collapsed and people had vacations like this all the time! Parking was just an ever lovin’ joy to figure out as it was all parallel and pretty much full down the whole block. No worries after a 20-minute show with at least one horrified onlooker I was able to technically get the car within the lines. Technically. Then we walked!
This was the most touristy tourist trap I have ever seen in New England. Kids ran about with reckless abandon being ‘watched’ by their dads who were buying ice cream for the whole gaggle while their wives fucked off and enjoyed some sweet sweet alone time in the boutiques. There was even an antique store! Granted it was all nautical, just vaguely antique, and reminded me more of one of those Old Timey Country Stores with what it was selling. Just add some salt water to that country chic and you can picture it. I took some whimsical photos of random hanging trinkets.
And then we made our way to the carousel at the end. It was…. a thing of tremendous terror. Something that shall haunt my nightmares for years to come. Here they were selling tickets to ride the Merry Go Round $1 for the inner ring of horses, $4 for the outer ring and a chance to grab a gold ring to win a free ride. Now as fucking amazing as I find all that truly obsolete Americana I was a little trepidatious for the poor children on this machine who were whipping around that thing at great speeds, so much so the horses were at full tilt, their wee hooves kicking the air towards the onlookers at the sides. It made my heart skip a few beats. And the horses. Oh my God, the horses. I have no words to describe just how blood curdling creepy they were. They are supposed to be America’s longest continuously running Merry Go Round built in 1867 and “mysteriously abandoned” at Watch Hill in 1883 by a travelling carnival which… makes sense for a bunch of ponies that look like they could suck out your soul. I’m told each one of them still has it’s original eyes which is some sort of stone… but really it makes them all look like they have milky white cataracts and combined with their over all grizzled appearance I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the zombie horses of the apocalypse. They look the part. Every time I found one that just had to be the most unnerving another one would pop up behind it that made me gasp even more. Left me in a real pickle to find a favorite.
You may ask, “Did you ride the scary pony death machine?” No, no, I did not. The horses on this carousel are very small, clearly just for children unlike today’s carousels with life-size horses (or steam punk monsters if I remember the one I once saw in Brussels, Belgium right…) And I mean if I were a kid I probably would have loved hanging on for dear life as I spun wildly out of control trying to catch a gold ring as I went by. I mean that’s just good old fashioned family fun. Right? RIGHT?
Well anyway, there was a beach right next to the carousel with plenty of people sunning and swimming and having a grand old time. We decided to shun it in favor of walking up a nearby side street to see the lighthouse which I guess is only open for a short time every year – a short time that didn’t include that day. But it was still technically a park so we went to at least poke at it. This was my companion’s first lighthouse so he was impressed. I was amused by the mansions lining the drive it was on (especially the one with the witch weather vane) but the lighthouse itself was intensely meh for me. Maybe I’m just jaded having gone to so many. Either way it did seem to be a nice fishing spot and a few people were here doing exactly that and enjoying this gorgeous summer day.
All and all it was a nice way to spend an hour or two and the carousel made it 100% worth it because it was just soooo weird. Everything else was just a cherry on the terrifying carousel cake.
It was yet another day and yet another antique store. I know we’ve been hitting a lot of those lately but it’s hot outside at this time of year so I tend to run for the shade. This time it was at the Cambridge Antique Market which was 5 whole floors of weirdness.
I wasn’t in the most receptive of moods knowing that Cambridge is basically parking purgatory filled with empty parallel parking spots because there’s signs with super conflicting information wafting above each space confusing the ever-loving shit out of even the locals. You’ll see cars driving around and around the block for hours because there’s also not enough spaces to go around. It’s a nightmare. The antique mall was fortunate in that it had a parking lot but it was tiny, shoved between the building and some fences, big enough for maybe 10-15 cars. The front part was full so I had to go to the even tinier back bit which had parking so tight and bizarrely shaped it’d take me a 300 point turn to eventually get out. But parking drama aside this was another delightful adventure.
We had chosen this local for it’s size. It was in another mill building and sprawled out for five whole floors with who knows how many different vendors, each a new chance to find something crazy or wonderful. We’d been in a car a long time though and I had to pee so I tried to find the bathroom right off and it was… a whole separate adventure. They had an old one stall bathroom that felt like the light should be flickering. The lock on the door was this tiny antiquated dead bolt that barely aligned with the door and I was more than a little amused that they had tried to add a little class by using toilet paper with frills. I’ve never seen anything like it! It was like using a doyly! I washed my hands with their fittingly super fragrant soap and hopped out as quick as I could. This adventure was followed by getting into an elevator that could be the whole set for a horror movie any day.
