B'chasdei Hashem, over the past almost 20 years, Beis Mevakesh Lev has produced over 13,300 audio shiurim and over 31,000 written posts, unmatched by any one-person website - all completely free of charge. There are no paywalls or anything else. Now we are turning to you for help so we can continue - any amount will help. Even 99 cents! Thank you to my sweetest and most beloved friends!!!:-)!!
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Edgar Allan Poe told the poet Sarah Helen Whitman that he experienced the presence of his late wife, Virginia, in the Swan Point Cemetery in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1848. Sources are at pains to say the presence was not the ghostly cliché “woman in white.” I did see a woman in white, though, one night in a Providence cemetery several decades ago.
It was the beginning of the summer vacation after my junior year at Brown University and since the campus had already closed, I was staying with a now former friend in the colonial revival home whose attic he rented at the time at 100 Brown Street. I had rented it myself the previous year.
It was a warm night with seemingly plenty of sun still left for a late afternoon walk, when we set out for the old North Burial Ground, not more than a half hour away on foot. Our objective was to find the graves of the Brown family, now controversial for their role in the slave trade, at the center of the cemetery, toward the back.
The front gates were still open when we arrived, but a sign said they would be closed and locked soon. At about this time, the warm night turned to rain, rapidly intensifying. We had no precise idea where the Brown plot or tomb was located and we did not realize that the cemetery itself was much larger than it looked from the entrance, extending far to the north.
Originally, the people of Providence had buried their dead on the plots of their own homes. It was only in 1700 that the need of a public burial place had become apparent. We made our way through this one, which is still in use to this day, and eventually became lost.
By that point it was thickly dark and pouring rain. We never found the Brown family plots, but instead, at this point, simply wanted to get out as quickly as possible. We trudged onward and at last seemed to spot a fence that we could climb over. Later I would find that the fence abutted a street, Cemetery Street, far to the north of the entrance.
It was then that I saw, standing on a small hilltop amid the graves, the trite, yet evident to my own eyes, woman in white. She glowed slightly and was, at least to my own mind in that moment, unmistakably what she was.
But that is not the real point of this story. Soaked and, at least in my case, scared, we climbed the north fence onto Cemetery Street, to a place neither of us recognized. But following the fence to the southeast we at great length returned to our starting point at the now locked burial ground entrance.
We made our way back along Benefit Street whose ancient homes still housed, in their yards, the graves of people buried in the town before 1700. At last, we reached 100 Brown Street, and prepared to go to sleep.
I was sleeping in a sleeping bag on the wooden floor, and before getting into bed himself, my friend knelt beside me. I told him about what I thought I had seen. He said, in a slyly insinuating manner, “David, have you ever thought about how much the dead must hate the living?”
He was smiling as he said it. He had in mind the malice and jealousy that must flow from the fact that we, young men at the time, were freely wandering around this burial place from which they, the dead, if modern prejudices are correct, are forbidden to leave.
Several years later, after we had both graduated from college and he was in law school where I was visiting him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we had our break. It was, of course, nothing to do with the cemetery. We were both of Jewish background but he, with a complicated personal life, decided he could not tolerate my religious observance and the evidence it gave him that I was, as he put it, “a bad person.” Though I have made attempts, we have not spoken since.
But now, all that, the loss of a close friend, was still in the future. “Good night,” he said, still with the smile, and got up to go to bed.
David Klinghoffer-Substack
