Ocean State Paranormal Tells Ghost Stories at Warwick Public Library

[CREDIT: Rob Borkowski] From left, Stacie Sullivan of Coventry speaks with Dale Belluscio at Warwick Public Library’s Haunted History presentation Wednesday.

[CREDIT: Rob Borkowski] Buddy Thayer tells the crowd his personal ghost story at Warwick Public Library Wednesday night.

The story, aimed at the skeptics in the crowd, was of his experience as a social worker at a group home, overnight, in an old Woonsocket house, blanketed with motion detectors to help caretakers monitor the building and its residents. One of the motion detectors meant to alert him to young people getting up to use the restroom went off, but it wasn’t a teenager who left the room in question.

Instead, Thayer watched incredulously as a black silhouette exited the room, passes his desk and disappeared, he said.

“I’ve never been so terrified in my life,” he said. The experience converted him from a skeptic into a believer in the paranormal, he said.

The introduction set the stage for a two-hour powerpoint presentation peppered with tales of disturbing RI history, which were in turn punctuated by what Thayer and the group call EVPs, Eletro-Magnetic Voice Phenomena, explained Dale Belluscio, a member of Ocean State Paranormal.

Belluscio has some personal experience with ghosts outside the group, too. Her Johnston house is haunted, she said.

The EVPs, faint and not-so-faint voices recorded at the scene of each of the historic sites the group has visited, undoubtedly tingled a few spines from the reactions evident on many faces in the  crowd. Ghostly musings and reactions to the investigators were recorded at several spots throughout the state: Smith’s Castle in North Kingstown and the old Kent County jail house in East Greenwich, to name a few.

The group will next meet at Cranston Public Library Nov. 4, from 4 to 6 p.m.