Does Giles Wing’s great-great-grandma haunt a Rhode Island restaurant?

By Terry Davis 

The death of Rebecca Cornell 352 years ago in her family’s Portsmouth, Rhode Island, home has generated reports of ghost sightings at a restaurant that was formerly a house built on the foundation of the original Cornell home. The connection of this story to our Wing Family is that Rebecca Cornell’s granddaughter, Catherine/Comfort Cornell married Joseph Wing, a grandson of Stephen and Sarah Wing, in 1717, at Dartmouth, Mass.

In the present time, the Cornell house is the home of the 80-seat Valley Inn Restaurant which has built a reputation for authentic pasta dishes, seafood, steak and pizza. Ennio “Mario” Occhi, an emigrant from Parma, Italy, was looking for a place to open his own restaurant. He bought the Cornell house from a Cornell descendant, and after extensive remodeling, opened the Valley Inn with Ennio’s father as its chef.  It has been led by Ennio’s son, Joe, since 2003, and today’s chef is Joe’s son, another Mario. 

But the Valley Inn’s reputation as home to a ghost, or ghosts, is perhaps even bigger.

Once, a woman was leaving the restroom when a bottle flew from a bar shelf as she passed by. Occhi found her crouched by the fireplace in the private portion of the house talking to someone not there.

The story of Rebecca Cornell may be the only case in American history in which dream testimony and a visit by a ghost played a such a significant role in a murder conviction!

On the fateful evening in February 1673, Rebecca, then a widow of about 73, had told her son Thomas, that she didn’t wish to dine with the family because the mackerel being prepared made her sick. Thomas, then 45, his wife Sarah, and their four sons and daughter lived in the large two-story house, too.

Thomas later sent a son to ask grandma again if she wished to eat with the family. The son returned to tell his father something terrible had happened: Thomas found his mother burned to death.

The Cornell home had a large “walk-through” fireplace in the middle of the house. Since it was early February, there was likely a large fire in the fireplace to heat the home.

Rebecca had been wearing a long, heavy dress typical of colonial American women and was known to smoke a pipe, something common for women then.  Rebecca’s dress could have caught fire as she passed by, or embers from her pipe could have ignited her clothing. Her son Thomas had been the last to see her alive.

With great sadness, the family buried their matriarch next to her husband and tried to move on with their lives. But within a few days, Rebecca’s brother, John Briggs, an uncle to Thomas, came forward to tell officials that Rebecca had come to him in a dream and said, “See how I was buried with fire.”

The body was exhumed. A coroner’s panel, which earlier had ruled Rebecca’s death an “Unhappie Accident,” found upon closer examination a puncture wound to her abdomen. In a book about the strange event, the author presents modern medical opinions that such a wound could result from fire, not necessarily that Rebecca had been hurt before being burned.

However, neighbors testified that Rebecca said that her son Thomas was sometimes mean to her. He wanted his mother to sign over to him the 400-acre Cornell estate on the west side of Aquidneck Island near Narragansett Bay.

Thomas was charged with murder “and after a trial that now reads like a farce,” was convicted and executed - hanged on May 23, 1673, on Newport’s Miantomoni Hill.  He was buried on the Cornell estate, but as far away as possible from the family burial plot a few hundred yards west of the home.

After the original Cornell home burned to the ground in 1889, Rev. John Cornell rebuilt the home in 1895 on the original foundation in much the same style and floor plan as the 1640s house. 

Joe Occhi, who has led Valley Inn since 2003, believes Thomas’s grave is beneath the restaurant’s parking lot. Ground penetrating radar used in recent years appears to have shown what could be a coffin. He tells guests they likely drove over him coming to the restaurant.

In another interesting modern connection, Fordham University history professor Elaine Forman Crane’s book, Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell, was published by Cornell University Press in 2009. Cornell University co-founder Ezra Cornell was a fourth-great-grandson of Rebecca Cornell and her husband Thomas Cornell Sr.

In one last intriguing twist, Thomas’s wife, Sarah, was pregnant when he was hanged. She named the daughter born a couple months later Innocent. Innocent Cornell grew up and married Richard Borden. They are the fourth great-grandparents of Lizzie Borden, who was accused, and acquitted, of killing her father and stepmother with an ax at their home in Fall River, Mass., in 1892.

Wing Family note: Rebecca Cornell’s second great-grandson, Giles Nelson Wing, married their third great-granddaughter, Mary Jane Cornell, and Giles and Mary Jane are the fourth great-grandparents of this writer.