Halloween (and fall in general) always makes me miss Providence, and my favorite Halloween in Providence was the one I spent writing my first-ever attempt at journalism for my first-ever creative nonfiction class. And even though reading my writing from 7 years ago is fairly painful and makes me cringe, I think I’d still credit this assignment as one of the main reasons I decided to pursue nonfiction for the rest of college and then grad school, and also the reason I want to do ghost tours in every city I visit. I’m so glad I found it hidden away in my email.
Google tells me that Rory Raven lives in Salem, MA, now, and if any of you are ever there for a visit, I hope you’ll find him and take a tour.
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| Providence |
Ghost Walk
It’s the afternoon before Halloween, and the crowd for the Ghost Walk is large. Parents bring costumed children, teenagers come in couples, and one woman’s brought her poodle. Rory Raven sells tiny orange tickets to each person that approaches. Shortly after 3:00, the crowd’s grown to about fifty, and Rory begins.
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| Brown’s Halloween midnight organ concert |
His voice resonates. A woman behind me says, “He’s such an interesting orator,” which I think is an understatement. He has the rolling inflections of an auctioneer, but with immaculate pauses. He’s persuaded these people to care about something that they don’t even realize they never cared about before. This is his performing voice. This is how he talks to his audiences as he leads them on Benefit Street and as he stands on stages before them in theaters around New England.
This isn’t the voice he uses when he subtly tells the woman with the baby stroller not to worry that she could only find five dollars for her ticket instead of eight. It’s not the voice he uses to talk to the couple of women on the tour that he knows personally, joking when they pose on either side of him for the camera (“I rarely show up in pictures.”). It’s not the voice he uses with me in the coffee shop a few weeks later, offering me part of his cookie and telling me about the book he’s currently reading. But I wouldn’t consider one voice fake and the other real. I would say that Rory Raven knows how to compel a crowd to listen.
He begins the tour by saying that others shared these stories with him, and that’s how we should take them –- as stories. “And one of these stories is the product of my own imagination,” he adds, “but I’m not telling you which one. He doesn’t, even when I ask him later.
“People always do this. I said I wasn’t going to tell you which one. I didn’t say I’d tell you later,” he laughs.
“But I could look up all of the stories and know it was the one I couldn’t find, right?”
He shrugs, “Well. I guess you could.”
I don’t look it up, because part of the intrigue is not knowing. It’s this knowledge of how to best captivate an audience that makes Rory’s tour so effective.
The Ghost Walk takes place almost entirely on Benefit Street, starting with stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Sarah Helen Whitman in the Athenaeum and featuring roughly a dozen more stories and locations including Sarah Helen Whitman’s house, the house in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shuttered Room,” and a cemetery. Rory walks ahead of the crowd and waits patiently for everyone to catch up before he begins a story. His speech seems far from scripted, and he frequently includes bonus information (“…and that’s the story of the Mansion Hotel. By the way, Geoff’s next door there –- best burger I’ve ever eaten. I’m serious everyone. Go there.”)
He ends the tour by saying that he has one more story and that he can prove it’s true. It’s the story of a disturbed teenage girl whose family locked her in the upstairs room of their house on College Hill. One day the family opened the room to find the girl missing, though there was no way for her to get the key. He says no one ever knew how she escaped. He pauses and invites the audience to “Come closer. Closer.” He pulls a skeleton key from his pocket and places it flat on his palm. The audience gasps as the key slowly turns in his hand, seemingly by magic. The crowd applauds as Rory wishes everyone a Happy Halloween and tells them that Cable Car next door has coffee and a bathroom if anyone needs them.
Later, I ask Rory about his childhood and how be became interested in all of this. I might have expected a back-story equal in eccentricity to the man in front of me, but Rory presents his childhood as nothing out of the ordinary. He was born and raised in Rhode Island and grew up thinking he wanted to be an English teacher. “I would have written those unintelligible papers with lots of subtitles,” he says without remorse for having missed the chance.
His family was Irish-Catholic, which he feels caused his love of storytelling. He recalls getting sick as a child and having to spend the week in bed. “My sister would come into the room and read me Edgar Allen Poe stories in the dark.”
But he doesn’t consider himself religious. As he got older, he grew skeptic of his family’s Catholic beliefs and went through a period in his twenties when he was
a devout atheist. He smiles at this memory and says that, “At forty-one, I’ve mellowed.”
He attended Bard College and intended to major in literature, but ran out of money and came home after one year. For the next several years he took occasional courses at various schools before ultimately deciding that college wasn’t the path for him. He calls himself self-taught, saying, “I never worked well in classrooms. I wish I had figured that out earlier.”
The tours began after he went on a similar tour in Newport and decided that Providence should have one, too. He started asking people for stories, hung a few posters around the city, and started telling the stories to whoever showed up. The Ghost Walk started in 2000. His career as a mentalist started four or five years before that. It’s hard to say exactly when the point was that he started performing for real audiences instead of just for friends at parties. When I ask exactly what a “mentalist” is, he laughs and says that the term is slowly starting to catch on in America because of the TV show. “Except people expect me to fight crime,” he adds.
He was about 25 years old when he got interested in the idea of being a mentalist. “You know, at twelve, you get a magic set,” he says, and then pauses, “—or maybe you didn’t, but the twelve years old guys did. And they’re interested in it for a little while. Well in my twenties I came back to it, but with more interest in the mental aspect.”
I ask the obvious question, “So you’re not claiming it’s real?”
“No. Am I a psychic? Of course not,” he dismisses the possibility. “It’s a theatrical performance.”
“So how does it work?”
“It involves a lot of different things –- having a good memory, being good at reading people, different kinds of psychology, some stage magic.”
“And you’re upfront about this.”
“Oh yeah, I’m not trying to lie to anyone. Of course, they don’t always believe me. I had one lady tell me that I’m the ‘other kind of fake.’ I said, ‘Oh really? And what kind of fake is that?’ She said, ‘The kind who says he’s not a psychic but really is and won’t reveal it.’” He laughs like he’s never heard something so absurd. “Now why would I do that?”
Rory’s attitude is a huge contrast from those who would call themselves believers in “mysticism.” One such man is a retired Brown professor whose special focus is mysticism and occult magic. We met in his office in the basement of the Slavic Studies department where he told me about leading numerous Brown students in activities like crystal ball gazing and card reading as well as performing exorcisms. Though he himself has never seen “a spirit” (though he has seen the “swirling fog” where another person saw a full ghost of a woman), he does believe that others see them.
When I bring up Rory Raven, he smiles like I’ve mentioned an idol. “What an elegant and powerful man,” he says sincerely. “Yes, he’s a very interesting man,” he adds as an afterthought, “though we’ve never met in person.”
I ask the professor what the difference is between someone who performs as a mentalist and someone who actually believes it. He says, “There’s a lot of overlap between a genuine occultist and a mentalist though neither wants to acknowledge it.” Both start with empathy-– sensitivity with people, picking up cues, things like skin tones, body language, and muscle tension. “So a spiritual counselor uses the same skills that Rory Raven would use to read your mind.”
“Rory Raven has worked hard to cultivate his abilities, both on stage and off, to a level that most people did not think could be done. He’s a much more impressive presence than I am,” he says. I feel that this is a pretty profound statement considering that it comes from a man who has never met Rory, looks like a six and a half foot tall Santa Clause, and talks casually about the exorcisms he’s performed.
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| Providence Athenaeum |
I ask Rory how many of the stories from the ghost walk he believes. “Well, I guess all of them. I mean, none of it’s fibs.” Of course some of the stories are spun in a specific way, and he tends to go with the traditional oral telling of the stories instead of only telling the facts that can be proven. I ask if anything strange has ever happened on the tour and he says no, “because it’s not that kind of tour. It has to do with the tone you set, and on the tour I’m not talking about orbs and things.”
I know what he means because the Providence Ghost Tour -– the “other ghost walk”— does just that, happening at night instead of the afternoon, and lead by a guide who carries a lantern and an EMF (Electro Magnetic Field) detector (which the guide is quick to warn is not entirely accurate and has been known to be set off by text messages), and encourages the audience to take pictures of the tour sites because of the possibility of finding orbs later. The tour charges eighteen dollars instead of Rory’s eight dollars, is run by a team of guides, and seems to be a sore subject for Rory who smiles and says, “Yeah, it’s the rip-off tour,” but won’t say much more on the subject.
When a South Carolina publisher contacted Rory and asked if he would write the stories from his tour, the result was his first book Haunted Providence: Strange Tales from the Smallest State.
They contacted him about the second book and asked if he would write about the mafia. He told them no –- because he has no interest, but also because “they’re still around. I told them, ‘I will if you come start my car every morning.’” So instead the second book, Wicked Conduct: The Minister, the Mill Girl, and the Murder that Captivated Old Rhode Island, is about Sarah Cornell -– a girl from Fall River who was found dead and pregnant with what was thought to be the child of a Methodist minister in Bristol. “It was the OJ case of the 1830s,” Rory says.
The third book, The Dorr War: Treason, Rebellion, and the Fight for Reform in Rhode Island, was released just a few weeks after our interview. It’s about the 1840s voting rebellion and Thomas Wilson Dorr, who Rory calls “one of the most remarkable heroes in Rhode Island history,” adding, “You know, there’s nothing more scary than politics.”
“So you are still doing English, just not exactly how you planned,” I say.
He agrees, “That’s true, I am, but I’m also doing history in a sort of popular media way -– I’m not an academic historian.”
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| St. John’s Cemetery in Providence |
Rory love what he does. He tells me that his touring has enabled him to travel to places he otherwise never would have seen. At first he would spend days online looking for small theaters in New England. Now he’s been to theaters all over the Northeast, and he even traveled to Istanbul where a friend invited him to do a show. His favorite venue might be the Haskell Opera House in Derby, Vermont, where the stage is in Canada and the audience is in the U.S. “I just want to keep touring, maybe in some bigger houses. I’m not looking for a Vegas act or NBC show. I’m happy doing this.”
He already has an idea for his fourth book. He wants to write about the Harvard chemistry professor, John White Webster, who was accused of murdering a man and hiding his body in a waste-disposal vault at the medical school. Rory said this was so publicized when it happened that when Charles Dickens came to America on a lecture tour, he asked to see the room where the body was found.
“I’ve never heard that story before,” I say. “It’s weird how the media can be so obsessed with something and then just forget it.”
“That’s what’s fascinating,” he says. “It makes me wonder what we’re obsessed with now that will go away in one hundred years.”
I close my notebook at the end of the interview and ask if there’s anything he’s willing to share that I haven’t asked about.
He shrugs, “I mean, do you want me to read your mind?”
I laugh and agree. This is a trick I’ve seen him do in online videos, but it’s far easier to accept things as simple tricks when they’re performed on a stage than when they happen in front of you in a coffee shop.
He pulls a small pad of paper and pencil out of his bag and asks me to think of a number between one and one hundred.
“Picture the number. Picture it in front of you and imagine that you’re pushing it towards me.” He stares directly in my eyes and writes something on the paper before handing me the pencil.
“What was the number?”
“Twenty-four,” I tell him.
“Why twenty-four?”
“It’s my favorite number.”
He nods his head. “So there was some significance behind it,” he says thoughtfully before he lays the pad in front of me on the table.
I look from the twenty-four he’s written to him, both of us smiling and silent.
“Well,” I finally say. “No explanation?”
“No,” he says pleasantly.
“Do it again,” I say.
He shakes his head, still smiling. “No.”
After the interview I ask him one follow-up question in an email. “Raven’s not your real last name, is it? Or will you never confess?”
In true Rory Raven style, he sends the reply, “You might say,’ When asked such a question, he laughs darkly and deftly changes the subject.’ Have you noticed the ants are getting larger these days?”
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| Providence Athenaeum, aka most beautiful library ever |
