In the days before cars lined the narrow streets of the East Side, one afternoon little George Kelly was traveling along in a horse-drawn carriage. Tragically, the carriage careened out of control and the eight-year-old was thrown from it. He was killed instantly. Could his tragic death be the reason why George Street pedestrians sometimes hear the phantom clip-clop of hooves or catch a glimpse of a ghostly carriage? Courtney Edge-Mattos, founder of Providence Ghost Tour, the longest running tour in Providence, thinks so.
“After I encountered rumors of the ghostly carriage, I started looking at death records and found George’s story,” says Edge-Mattos, explaining her research-based approach to the paranormal. “I’m a hopeful skeptic. I believe in ghosts, but I like to start with logic.”
Before launching Providence Ghost Tour with her former business partner in 2007, Edge-Mattos became a sponge for local ghostly lore. “We dove in everywhere that we found leads. We looked for stories in books and magazines, newspapers, and documentaries. We put fliers on doorways and telephone poles asking people to contact us with their stories,” she says. After collecting tales from Providence’s rich base of paranormal activity, she cross-referenced them with the city’s death records, seeking tales of unexpected or sudden deaths that could result in a haunting. The result of her research is what she calls a death database, which fuels many of the stories she tells on her walking and boating tours.
Providence Ghost Tour’s 10 guides offer several options to the ghost-curious. There’s a year-round tour that meets at Prospect Terrace Park before wending its way through the streets that surround Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. Although the route is the same, tours change as stories told shift with the whims of the spirits. Edge-Mattos also partners with Providence River Boat Company and Gondola Providence to offer haunted boat rides. “The trips are so ethereal,” says Edge-Mattos. “You have the atmosphere of the bridges and the streetlamps. You’re almost waiting for Dracula to swoop down!”
Edge-Mattos has a lovely way of respecting the humanity of the spirits she visits on her walking tours. She describes one spirit she stopped visiting because it was interacting in unpleasant ways with those on tour. “I didn’t think that continuing to visit was respectful either to the spirit or to my guests,” she says. “I try to lead with a lot of heart.” But for the most part, Edge-Mattos and her guests have pleasant experiences with the spirits on her tour. “My ghosts are kept here by love. A building, a person they left behind, love for theater, love for art. That’s what keeps spirits here.”
These spirits interact in a way that makes Edge-Mattos feel as if she’s building relationships with them. “I’ve had gentle touches on the shoulder where it seems like they’re saying ‘thank you,’” she says, and describes one very active spirit who seems delighted with her visits. “She gives off the warmest, most joyful energy, like she’s excited to finally be acknowledged.”
Building relationships across planes of existence may seem far-fetched, but the investigative tour Edge-Mattos conducts in partnership with paranormal investigator Deb Vickers might prove otherwise. Vickers occasionally joins the tour with equipment in hand that allows her to confirm the presence of spirits or even interact with them. “I bring a voice recorder and sometimes a spirit will come through, or I’ll have yes-or-no conversations with spirits using dowsing rods,” says Vickers. Dowsing rods are L-shaped metal bars investigators hold in two hands. Believers say that spirits will cross the two rods together to indicate a “yes” answer and move them apart to indicate “no.”
Edge-Mattos and Vickers had a particularly hair-raising experience when they were outside of the Providence Athenaeum one evening with a spirit box, an AM/FM sweep radio that cycles through radio frequencies; sometimes spirit voices come through between frequencies. “We were sitting together on a stone bench, and Deb was encouraging any spirits in the area to talk to us,” says Edge-Mattos. “I was super skeptical. But then she said to them, ‘You know Courtney,’ and very clearly, the word ‘Edge’ came through.”
Vickers remembers the night well. “We spend so much time with these spirits that they become familiar with us. They’re like friends,” she says. Later that night, the duo visited University Hall, the oldest building on the Brown University campus that once served as a hospital for French soldiers during the Revolutionary War. “The spirits kept asking through the spirit box, ‘Where’s Mike?’” possibly referring to Edge-Mattos’ former business partner who loved visiting that particular building.
Edge-Mattos has been drawn to the vivid and intense spirit encounters at University Hall lately, but her favorite spirit was that of Ann Mary Brown, who has grown quiet over the years, leading Edge-Mattos to believe she’s moved on. “She was dear and lovely,” she says. Brown was not a healthy woman, and when she passed away, her spirit tethered itself to the memorial her husband built for her. “She guarded that place so diligently and exuded strength I’m sure she couldn’t have shown in her human body but could in her afterlife.”
Edge-Mattos frequently refers to the spirits she visits as “my ghosts” and seems to feel a responsibility to them. Once a year, she and her guides visit Swan Point Cemetery and North Burial Ground to deliver flowers to those whose stories she tells as a measure of gratitude. But they were never able to find little George Kelly’s headstone. “We knew he was in Swan Point,” says Edge-Mattos, “but we couldn’t find him.” One day, she and her guides were in Swan Point delivering flowers when one guide, Kelly, tripped and face-planted on the ground. The other guides gathered around to help her and see what caught her foot. It was the little boy’s grave marker. Edge-Mattos describes the poignant moment. “We like to say George Kelly grabbed our Kelly so he could get his flowers.” And every year since then, he has.
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