General Nathanael Greene Homestead

The story

Nathanael Greene is remembered as the Revolutionary War general second only to George Washington in command, and before the war he lived in this farmhouse above the Pawtuxet River in the village of Anthony, part of Coventry, Rhode Island. His father had prospered running forges and mills at Warwick and extended the family's iron business to Coventry; around 1770 it was settled that Nathanael would live at the new works. He designed and built the house himself. The date is given as 1770 by the homestead association and Rhode Island Monthly, and as 1774 by the 1971 National Register nomination and Wikidata. The estate originally spread across about two thousand acres.

While living here, Greene helped organize the Kentish Guards in East Greenwich, a militia company chartered on October 29, 1774. When word of the fighting at Lexington arrived in April 1775 he enlisted with the Guards as a private, and he rose rapidly to the rank of general. In the first year of the war the house served as a place of recovery for officers who had been inoculated against smallpox. Greene came back after the war, but in 1783 he moved his family to Newport, and later to Mulberry Grove, a plantation near Savannah given to him by the state of Georgia as a reward for expelling the British from the southern states. He died there on June 19, 1786.

The homestead passed to his brother Jacob Greene and Jacob's wife Margaret and stayed in Greene hands until 1899. In its later decades it declined and was used as a tenement. The last family member to live there was Elizabeth Margaret Greene Warner, the general's grandniece, born in the house in 1814; she died in 1899 and lies in the family burial ground behind it. A preservation group, the Nathanael Greene Homestead Association, formed in 1919 to restore the building, and it opened as a museum in 1924. It gained National Historic Landmark status in 1972 and became part of the Anthony Village Historic District in 2010. The house is also called Spell Hall; the association's president believes the name most likely refers to a room where children were taught to spell, not to anything magical.

The legend

The ghost lore of the Greene Homestead is modern and comes almost entirely from the people who look after it. In 2023 and 2024 the association's president, David Procaccini, and its trustee and caretaker, Josh Wojnar, shared their experiences with Rhode Island Monthly, and in 2025 the New England Legends podcast (Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger) devoted episode 389 to the house. No dated report from earlier generations is known. One online list claims hauntings were recorded as early as 1925, but nothing reliable supports that.

The presence most often described is a stern, disapproving one that staff associate with Elizabeth Margaret Greene Warner. She was active in the temperance movement, and the stories fit: when alcohol is brought into the house, people say they hear heavy feet pounding on the staircase and latches shaking on doors from room to room. An older woman has also been glimpsed briefly in a bedroom mirror. It is tempting to assume this is Elizabeth too, but the sources do not make that link.

Other reports are less personal. Visitors and staff mention the smell of fresh bread in a house where no one has baked for decades. Procaccini says that while he was in the bathroom, someone tried the door, although everyone else present was up in the attic. Staff and volunteers describe unexplained noises and movement at the edge of their vision. Outside, children are said to be heard crying in one corner of the yard; two girls, perhaps seven to ten years old, have been described, possibly the children of local workers who may lie in an unmarked cemetery beside the Greene family plot. On one occasion a horse reportedly refused to approach that spot and reared up.

According to Wojnar, an unnamed team of ghost hunters visiting privately heard a thud and later spotted a figure in their thermal camera footage that appeared to look toward them and move toward the back door. The podcast also floated Julia Greene, a daughter of Jacob whose husband Theodore Foster died in debt in 1821, as a possible ghost, but this is speculation from a single source.

Two popular claims should be set aside. First, the general himself is sometimes named as the ghost, but he spent his last years in Georgia and died there; Rhode Island Monthly calls this doubtful, and the podcast notes the stories do not involve him. Second, several online lists say the TAPS team of Ghost Hunters filmed here in 2007. We found no such episode. The Ghost Hunters episode "Ghosts From Hale" was filmed in Coventry, Connecticut, at the Nathan Hale Homestead, so the claim seems to confuse two historic homesteads in two towns named Coventry.

What remains today

The house survives in remarkably original condition, set on about thirteen acres of fields and woods above the Pawtuxet River. The 1971 nomination describes a two-and-a-half-story, five-bay clapboard farmhouse with two interior brick chimneys on a granite foundation, with a center-hall plan of four rooms per floor. The front door, with its transom, is framed by fluted pilasters under a pediment carved with dentils and a fan. Inside, the original interior remains, including a two-run stair at the back of the hall and a wide kitchen fireplace with paneled side ovens. The hardware throughout is original and is thought to have come from the Greene family's own nearby ironworks. The rooms hold Greene memorabilia, and the family cemetery lies behind the house.

Visiting

The homestead is a house museum run by a nonprofit association, and visiting is straightforward and legal. As of 2024 it was open for tours from April to October, Friday through Monday; check the association's current schedule before you go. No regular ghost tour is known, so the guided house tour is the way in. The family burial ground behind the house deserves the same respect as any cemetery.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #71000014 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #71000014) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : General Nathanael Greene Homestead — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Providence, RI 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Kent, RI 1890 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1890 · Public domain (USGS)
6. "16 Real-Life Haunted Places in Rhode Island" (Kaitlyn Murray, 18 Oct 2024) — Rhode Island Monthly — Rhode Island Monthly
7. "Episode Recap: Ghosts From Hale" — Syfy — Syfy
8. "Inside the Nathanael Greene Homestead in Coventry" (John Kiernan, 24 Oct 2019) — Rhode Island Monthly — Rhode Island Monthly
9. "Podcast 389 – The Haunting of the Nathanael Greene Homestead" (27 Mar 2025) — New England Legends — New England Legends
10. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.