A Hometown Ghost Story

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.

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.

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.

We're not even trying, anymore.

Be back soon with more ghost stories!

Happy Halloween!