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The original was posted on /r/highstrangeness by /u/DetectiveFork on 2025-08-11 15:39:10+00:00.
The Puritan leader who founded Rhode Island and championed religious freedom might have met his final fate in a “hungry” orchard.
Puritan Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, arrived from England in the New World in 1631. He was a man ahead of his time, bringing with him a fervent belief in the total separation of church and state (i.e. the Church of England). This resulted in his banishment from Massachusetts five years later. Williams and his followers moved to a new site along Narragansett Bay, establishing Providence in 1636 as a bastion for religious dissidents. Williams was notable for his fair treatment of the Narragansett Indians and protecting them from greedy European settlers who wanted their land. He also founded the first Baptist church in North America, although as a skeptic of organized religion, he did not remain a member for long. This American architect and icon of religious liberty has another groundbreaking accolade to his name—he was completely devoured by an apple tree.
OK, before you tell your friends that Roger Williams was the victim of a Man-Eating Tree, perhaps I should explain. Williams died in early 1683 (aged 79, presumably of natural causes). He was buried in a family plot behind his Providence home and the exact location was forgotten over ensuing generations.
There was renewed interest in Williams’ legacy in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. In 1771, Providence appointed a committee, including Deputy Governor of Rhode Island Darius Sessions, to erect a monument over the pioneer’s grave. The burial plot was believed to be about 165 feet southeast from the remaining foundation of Williams’ former plantation house (eventually located on the east side of North Main Street). But the exact spot, a family plot with seven graves, wasn’t discovered and disinterred until March 22, 1860. Two months later, Zachariah Allen presented his “Memorial of Roger Williams” to the Rhode Island Historical Society, revealing the strange state of Williams’ final resting place.
“The utmost care was taken in scraping away the earth from the bottom of the grave of Roger Williams,” wrote Allen. “Not a vestige of any bone was discoverable, nor even of the lime dust which usually remains after the gelatinous part of the bone is decomposed. So completely had disappeared all the earthly remains of the Founder of the State of Rhode Island, in the commingled mass of black, crumbled slate stone and shale, that they did not ‘leave a wreck behind.’” The grave beside Williams, presumed to belong to his wife, Mary, was similarly vacant of human remains with the exception of a wonderfully preserved lock of braided hair.
Just what had happened to the bones of Rhode Island’s founding father and his wife? According to Allen:
On looking down into the pit whilst the sextons were clearing it of earth, the root of an adjacent apple tree was discovered. This tree had pushed downwards one of its main roots in a sloping direction and nearly straight course towards the precise spot that had been occupied by the skull of Roger Williams. There making a turn conforming with its circumference, the root followed the direction of the back bone to the hips, and thence divided into two branches, each one following a leg bone to the heel, where they both turned upwards to the extremities of the toes of the skeleton. One of the roots formed a slight crook at the part occupied by the knee joint, thus producing an increased resemblance to the outlines of the skeleton of Roger Williams, as if, indeed, moulded thereto by the powers of vegetable life.
This singularly formed root has been carefully preserved, as constituting a very impressive exemplification of the mode in which the contents of the grave had been entirely absorbed. Apparently not sated with banqueting on the remains found in one grave, the same roots extended themselves into the next adjoining one, pervading every part of it with a net-work of voracious fibres in their thorough search for every particle of nutritious matter in the form of phosphate of lime and other organic elements constituting the bones.
At the time the apple tree was planted, all the fleshy parts of the body had doubtlessly been decomposed and dispersed in gaseous forms; and there was then left only enough of the principal bones to serve for the roots to follow along from one extremity of the skeleton to the other in a continuous course, to glean up the scanty remains. Had there been other organic matter present in quantity, there would have been found divergent branches of roots to envelope and absorb it. This may serve to explain the singular formation of the roots into the shape of the principal bones of the human skeleton.
In other words, the apple tree “ate” Roger Williams and one of its roots assumed the form of his corpse.
So thought the group conducting the exhumation, in any case. All present turned to the innocent-looking apple tree, viewing it as the thief that had stolen away the remains of Roger Williams. “There was no mistake, for it had been caught in the act of robbing a grave and of appropriating the contents to its own use, re-incorporating them into its living trunk and branches,” said Allen. “The swollen buds showed that it was preparing to show off its spoils in a new suit of green leaves, with gay blossoms of many colors, as banners rejoicingly hung out. It was readily anticipated that it would soon incorporate a portion of these spoils into golden cheeked apples to tempt the owner of the orchard to participate in the fruits of this robbery.”
One of the gentleman assisting in the excavation turned to the owner of the orchard, who was present, and questioned if the partaker was not as bad as the thief. “It is sufficiently manifest why nothing is left of Roger Williams, for you have been eating him up in the shape of apples,” accused the gravedigger.
The orchard proprietor admitted that appearances were against him but argued that, since his own father had planted the tree and consumed most of the fruit, might not he himself be considered among the offspring of Roger Williams?
Allen offered a more philosophical take on the apple tree’s supposed absorption of Williams and his wife, emphasizing the transmutation of the human body into new plant life. “Under this view, the entire disappearance of every vestige of the mortal remains of Roger Williams, teaches after his death an impressive lesson of the actual physical resurrection of them, by ever-acting natural causes, into renewed states of existence constituting a physical victory over the grave, as his precepts and example, before his death, have taught the greater moral victory of the Christian faith over worldly oppression.”
Williams finally got his memorial in 1939, just over three centuries after he first set foot in Providence. The 14-foot-tall granite statue rises between two pylons in Prospect Terrace. It depicts Williams standing at the bow of a ship, overlooking the city he founded. Despite Allen’s assertion that nothing was left of the Williamses, some type of remains were moved to a family crypt in the Old North Burial Ground in 1860 following the dig. According to 1939 news reports about the memorial’s unveiling, “the dust of Williams” was transferred from the vault of the Rhode Island Historical Society and interred in the base of the statue.
The apple tree root that was said to have taken on the shape of Williams’ body, perhaps in the process of absorbing him, has been preserved and can be seen today at the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown House Museum. According to Director of Collections Kirsten Hammerstrom, “It’s a popular item, and no matter how unlikely it is that an apple tree ‘ate’ Roger Williams, school children love to think of it that way and it is a story [worthy] of cable TV.”
SOURCES:
Allen, Zacariah. Memorial of Roger Williams. Paper Read Before the Rhode Island Historical Society, May 18, 1860. Providence, RI, Cooke & Danielson, Printers, 1860.
Berlitz, Charles. Charles Berlitz’s World of Strange Phenomenon, Vol. 2: Strange People and Amazing Stories, Sphere Books Limited, 1990.
“Collection Catalog: Roger Williams’ Apple Tree Root.” Rhode Island Historical Society, https://rihs.minisisinc.com/rihs/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/RIHS_M3/LINK/SISN+63194?SESSIONSEARCH. Accessed 19 Jun. 2025.
“Darius Sessions.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_Sessions. Accessed 11 Aug. 2025.
Hammerstrom, Kirsten. “The Root of the Matter.” *Rhode Island His…
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