“She’s here,” said Lisa King as she hustled alongside her 13-year-old daughter, Sierra, toward a local lighthouse on a gloriously sunny Saturday afternoon.
The “here” was Watch Hill, the affluent seaside neighborhood in Westerly, R.I., replete with members-only clubs, Gilded Age mansions and ample souvenir shops selling crew neck sweatshirts and nautical keepsakes.
The “she” was Taylor Swift.
King, a 48-year-old from Bedford, N.H., had booked the mother-daughter trip months ago, after tabloid reports claimed the singer would wed the football player Travis Kelce on June 13 at the Ocean House, a luxury hotel where the sailcloth tent rental fee alone is $75,000.
The reports, though unconfirmed, seemed plausible, said King, a commercial insurance broker and Swiftie.
The singer, a numerology fanatic, has a longstanding fondness for the number 13; a June wedding would work with Kelce’s offseason; and, perhaps most convincingly, Swift has owned a home in Watch Hill since 2013, when she purchased an 11,000-square-foot “cottage” for $17.75 million.
And Holiday House, as it’s known, is just a stone’s throw from the Ocean House.
In 2020, Swift chronicled the life of the home’s former owner, the oil heiress Rebekah Harkness, in the song “The Last Great American Dynasty,” drawing parallels between Harkness’s star-studded parties and her own life.
To some fans, a Watch Hill wedding seemed like a fate Swift had written herself, an Easter egg — a hallmark of the artist who is known to leave clues in her work for fans — to be found.
King and her daughter were walking to the lighthouse after a local shopkeeper told them she’d heard Swift’s parents were spotted there earlier in the day.
The duo knew it was a long shot — earlier this spring, a wedding planner who previously planned Blake Lively’s wedding to Ryan Reynolds came forward claiming she was overseeing a June 13 wedding at the Ocean House and the bride was not Swift. More recently, tabloids have speculated the couple will wed in New York City in July.
When they arrived at the lighthouse, no Swifts were to be found. There were, however, plenty of other Swifties.
Four women sat staring out at the undulating Block Island Sound after being directed there by the same shopkeeper. The group — Trish Hipolito of Syracuse, N.Y., her sister Karen McCaffrey of Albany, N.Y., and McCaffrey’s adult daughters, Tess and Emma — was on a “sister-sister trip.” They had booked an Airbnb months earlier, hoping to spy even just the flutter of a veil or a glimpse of a bridesmaid.
“We had a source,” said Hipolito, a 62-year-old retiree, describing a friend of a friend who claimed to have intel. “Turns out, he’s a liar,” she added to laughter from the group, who had taken a similar trip to Toronto during the Eras tour despite not having tickets.
Next to the gated entrance of Swift’s house is a path leading to East Beach, a long stretch of public oceanfront. After purchasing the property, Swift put up “No Trespassing” signs, shored up the stone sea wall and added a chain-link fence, changes that drew some criticism. (Before Swift bought the place, the wall was something of a hangout for locals.)
Similar grumblings resurfaced when reports began circulating that Swift and Kelce might marry in Watch Hill. “I think the locals were a little annoyed,” said Lainey Marcille, a recent graduate of Chariho High School in Richmond, R.I. “Like, ‘Oh they’re going to shut down the whole town.’” She was wearing a neon-yellow vest and standing at her post at the path’s entrance as a summer intern with the local police department.
Colby and Braydon Champlin, brothers and lifeguards on East Beach, also described “old-timers” with similar concerns, but added that Swift appears to keep a low profile when she’s in town.
Watch Hill is postage-stamp tiny. You can lap the heart of it in 20 minutes if you walk fast and don’t stop to ride the carousel, the oldest operating merry-go-round in the United States.
“There’s just one road in and one road out,” said Danny Connell, a 41-year-old Lyft driver who lives in Westerly.
On Friday evening at the bar at Ten Sandwiches, a restaurant on the main drag, a couple at the bar said they had booked their hotel room back in December, hoping to catch a glimpse of the big day.
“I came for her wedding, and she’s not even here,” said Ken Meletta, 87, from Ridgewood, N.J., adding that he and his partner visit a few times each summer.
On Saturday, florists loading swaths of white hydrangeas into the Watch Hill Chapel drew onlookers. A large tent on the backside of the Ocean House also raised some speculation.
Cathy Carrano, 60, a realtor who lives in Fairfield, Conn., and owns a house in Watch Hill, said she had walked over to check out the scene. The tent’s location struck her as unusual. Most weddings she had seen at the hotel were held on the croquet lawn next to the hotel, which is much more visible to passers-by. (Multiple Ocean House employees declined to comment for this story.)
Instead, guests in tuxedos and gowns could be seen walking toward a large tent that was behind the hotel, overlooking the water. Across the road, a blonde bride, but not that blonde bride, emerged from a flower-decorated car at the Watch Hill Chapel.
Kathy LaGrone, a 54-year-old sales executive from Hawthorne, N.J., was visiting for the weekend with “three generations of Swifties,” she said. “We thought this weekend could be her bachelorette weekend because of the Knicks matching T-shirts,” LaGrone said, referring to Swift’s recent appearance with the Haim sisters at Madison Square Garden.
Down on East Beach, Becky Firth sat with friends and their children, who had drawn Swift’s initials and the number 13 in the sand. One of the children, Nora Taraszkiewicz, 11, who wore a shirt for the album “The Tortured Poets Department,” declared she had been a fan “since birth.”
Firth, a 45-year-old ceramist from Duxbury, Mass., whose family has a home in Watch Hill, said she expected Swift might marry at Ocean House, where Firth herself wed. But she doubted it would happen this weekend. When famous folks are in town, it’s hard not to notice. Last summer, she spotted both Kelce brothers, the model Gigi Hadid and the actor Bradley Cooper at Swift’s home.
As the sun began to set, a group of women sat on the sand chatting and listening to “Folklore.”
They had been friends for decades, meeting as neighbors when their children were little, said Maggie Henderson, 53, of Mystic, Conn. The group gets together annually for a beach day and picked this one, like many others in Watch Hill that day, hoping to hear wedding bells. Instead, they posed for a group photo in front of Holiday House.
The sounds of a wedding emcee drifted from the celebration beneath the Ocean House tent nearby. If you listened closely, you could hear the faintest notes of a James Taylor song — fitting given that Swift was named after the singer-songwriter.
It seemed the pop star had, without even trying, left one final Easter egg for fans on her not-wedding day.
The post Taylor Swift Didn’t Marry in Rhode Island. Fans Showed Up Anyway. appeared first on New York Times.
