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As a young woman, the author married Donald Tinney, whose family had recently purchased Belcourt Castle in Rhode Island. She began to suspect that there was something unusual about her new home after waking up one night and seeing a man walk through the wall of her bedroom. She later learned that there had once been a door in the precise spot where the apparition vanished.
Over the years of the couple’s marriage, tales of ghostly doings at Belcourt proliferated. A group of girls on a tour claimed to have been accosted by an empty suit of armor. On one occasion, the spirit of a friend appeared to Donald at the moment of death, leaving instructions on how to approach his wife with the news and where to find important documents. When Donald himself disappeared mysteriously one evening in January 2006, a friend reported that his spirit guided him to the location where the older man had drowned. Shortly after that, a photographer snapped what the author describes as a ghostly orb in the grand ballroom where she and her late husband had danced.
Tinney’s book is a brisk and aggressively charming account of her years spent living in Rhode Island’s most haunted building. Even readers with little patience for tales of the beyond may warm to her descriptions of the cavernous manor with its seven furnaces and sixty rooms. The author’s charming book is a worthy addition to the canon of Gothic literature and a good read for anyone who enjoys being pleasantly spooked.