COVENTRY – Visitors to the Paine House Museum should expect to see items from local history. It’s the unseen history that might surprise them.

Does the spirit of a member of the Paine family still inhabit the house?

Members of the public will have the chance to hear about the house’s seldom-seen tenant during the Spirits of Washington Village Tour at the end of the month.

According to documented historical record, Sarah Paine lived in the Paine House in the 1800s. She died there at the age of 11.

Today, tours of the house are occasionally offered and many who have visited the dwelling have reported encounters with a “presence” thought to be Sarah’s spirit, according to the museum’s curator.

Coventry resident Maggie Florio, a paranormal-investigator, was called upon to research reported encounters to try to determine if there was any truth behind what visitors were saying. Florio said her research indicated some valid possibilities that the spirit of Sarah Paine might be present at Paine House Museum.

“We do feel that the Paine House does have a ghost of a little girl named Sarah that lives there,” Florio said. “I have experienced it personally and other people have, too.”

Florio said there have been incidents where people’s shopping bags were looked in, where images not seen by the naked eye appeared in people’s photographs and where objects moved when no one was present to move them.

“Two years ago, a young man was on the Spirits of Washington Tour and he took a picture through the grate in one of the walls and when he got it back it had a child’s face looking back at him through the other side of the grate,” Florio said. “You couldn’t distinctly see the face but you could clearly tell that it looked like a child.”

“Another time, we were going through the house with a reporter and a photographer and the photographer had this beautiful camera and when we got upstairs he tried to take pictures of us but he couldn’t get the camera to work,” she said. “He tried everything and then finally said that he was going to have to go downstairs and get a new battery. Well, as soon as he got downstairs, the camera worked again.”

“Equipment malfunctions like a drained battery is a very typical thing to happen when you are dealing with spirits,” Florio said. “It is believed that a spirit will draw energy from whatever is available in order to manifest. That is the theory behind cold spots; they will draw heat right out of the air around you if they really want to.”

Florio said she and her team of investigators have experienced several incidents such as this over the course of the last four years that they have been investigating the house. She said she has come in with a variety of tools to technically document the encounters.

One of the tools was an EMF, an electro-magnetic field device.

“When we came in with the EMF, we found that, every once in a while, the fields will increase and decrease rapidly,” Florio said. “This means that something is charging up the air.”

“There are many things that could cause it that are man-made, like cell phones or electrical outlets, but, when this was happening, nothing like that was around and we never really stayed in one place, so it was like we were being followed,” she said.  “Another time, our director was talking to an investigator in the hall of the house and he had some extension cords in a bag he was holding in his hand. Well, the bag swung forward and came back as if someone pulled it over, peeked inside and then let it go.”

“We have had her hold our hands, she has played with my hair, sometimes she leaves us things, like a little ring one time,” she said. “There have been a lot of the experiences like that, very childlike and playful — things that a curious little girl might do.”

It was from these incidents as well as other research the team of investigators did at the house, along with reports from others who had encountered the “presence,” Florio said, that they reached a conclusion about who the spirit might be.

“We actually found a picture of Sarah in the music room of the house but we didn’t have a last name for her; so, we looked at the census over the course of the 1800s — that is when the newer part of the Paine House was built — and we found a Sarah Paine that had died in the mid-1800s. It said that she died at 11 years old in the Paine house and that was a wonderful discovery for us because it proved indeed that she had lived there,” Florio said.

Finding a case such as this is rare, Florio said. According to the paranormal investigator, most reported hauntings, about 90 percent, turn out to be natural or man-made. That is why this house is so special, she said.

“The age of the house doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with it, although this house has gone through so many reincarnations,” she said, “it may have something to do with it.”

“The Paine House was a boarding house, a private residence, a meeting hall and a tavern,” Florio said. “There were so many people going in and out of it over the years, there is obviously energy left in it from all of those people.”

More detail about the Paine House’s resident spirit as well other things that have occurred at the house and details of the house’s history and its significance to the Town of Coventry and the communities around it will be shared on the Spirits of Washington Village Tour at the Paine House Museum. Tours are scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 27, at 7, 8 and 9 p.m. Advance ticket purchases are recommended but tickets will be sold at the door if space is still available.  For more information or to obtain tickets, call Luane McDonald, curator of the Paine House Museum, at 615-2426.  The Paine House Museum is located at 7 Station St. in Coventry.

Jessica Selby

Daily Times

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