As I mentioned before, I love
everything about Halloween, especially the spooky ghost stories that pop up
again and again this time of year. So
grab a bottle of pumpkin beer, settle in, and enjoy!
Ok, you may have noticed that my
last ghost story was low on actual ghosts.
Fair enough, but do you know how hard it is to find real, totally true
ghosts stories? If there were more of
them, people wouldn’t always be telling their kids, “There’s no such thing as
ghosts.”
Hogwash, I say, and to prove
it, this next story features a ghost who testifies in her own murder trial! For
this story, we must go all the way to my own hometown of Portsmouth, Rhode
Island.
This story takes place in the late
1600s, while Rhode Island was thriving British colony. (Yeah, I said, “thriving colony,” not “den of
heretics and criminals,” or “tiny, insignificant backwater.” You got a problem with that?) At the time, Portsmouth was a rural farming
community, right close to the wealthy trading port of Newport, meaning you has some very rich families living there.
One of them was the Cornell family, led by the matriarch Rebecca
Cornell.
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| Note to Google Images: Different Cornell. |
In her later years, she lived in
her large (relatively speaking) house with her son and his wife. One night, Rebecca was sitting by the fire,
wrapped in a blanket to keep warm. She
had just fallen asleep when, supposedly, embers from the fire drifted out of the
hearth and landed on her blanket.
Soon, her blanket, and
consequently Rebecca herself, was engulfed in flames. Before her son could respond to her screams
for help and put out the fire, Rebecca was dead. She was buried, and her son inherited the
house and most of her estate.
Not too spooky, yet (except that
bit about burning to death), but it seems Rebecca had a brother who lived in
Newport, and shortly after her death, she came to visit her brother.
The ghost of Rebecca Cornell
appeared to her brother, and told him that she had been murdered. And not just murdered, but shot in the chest by her own son!
Then, according to the brother,
she showed him the bullet wound on her chest.
This was a more
superstitious time, so when Rebecca’s brother brought this “evidence” to the
authorities, they did not laugh and throw him in the drunk tank, like they probably
would today. Instead, they exhumed the
body, and found the bullet wound, right
where the ghost had said it would be.
Rebecca’s son was arrested, tried,
and execute for her murder. He was
supposedly buried not in the family plot with his mother, but ten feet away
from the family house in an unmarked grave.
The house is still there, though
it has been converted into a restaurant.
The whereabouts of Rebecca’s grave and her son’s grave are unknown.
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| Not pictured: the dead body buried under the driveway. |
So, to sum up, a woman is killed
by her own son, and he is arrested and execute for the crime, based solely on
the testimony on her ghost. This is the
only case in the history of American law where a ghost has been admitted as
evidence in a murder trial. That means
the next time people tell you ghosts aren’t real, tell them that even if ghosts
aren’t real, they do have real legal standing!
Take that, Mythbusters!
Funny corollary: Thomas (Rebecca’s
son) had a wife who was pregnant at the time of his execution. She eventually moved to Fall River, where her
daughter, Innocence Cornell, lived out her life, and whose descendants
eventually married into the Borden family.
In other words, Lizzie Borden is a directly descendant of Rebecca
Cornell.
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| We're not even trying, anymore. |
Happy Halloween!
