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Waterford Conn.

New England’s Historic Haunted Houses

Haunted houses belong to New England lore as much as Revolutionary battles or clipper ship races.

New England ghosts, witches, devils and monsters in human shape have populated the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. The region’s special brand of horror even has a name: Gothic New England.

Here are stories of six haunted houses, plus some extras suggested by our readers and added in 2017. We use the term ‘houses’ loosely, for they include hospitals, a library, a dormitory, a lighthouse and a fort. But all have drama or sorrow in their past. If you know of other historic haunted houses, please share them in the comments section.

Seaside Sanitarium

Seaside Sanitorium

Is it ghosts that haunt the sinister and bizarre Seaside Sanitorium in Waterford, Conn. — or its past?

In 1936, doctors treated children with tuberculosis with rest, sunshine, fresh air and good food. Seaside was built as a ‘heliotropic’ treatment hospital for children. Gothic Revival architect Cass Gilbert, who also planned the U.S. Supreme Court building, designed the sanitarium. The building faces Long Island Sound, with large terraces and porches for sunbathing.

Drugs made heliotropic treatment obsolete, and Seaside then evolved into a geriatric hospital, a medical hospital and a hospital for the mentally disabled. People accused its staff of abusing the patients, and it had an unusually high death rate.

The hospital finally closed in 1996. Now dilapidated, creepy and boarded up, abandoned playground equipment litters its grounds. The ghosts of abused patients are said to haunt the place.

Lately, there’s been talk of rehabilitating the old building. The State of Connecticut may redevelop it into a lodge.

35 Shore Rd., Waterford, Conn.

Other Connecticut Haunted Houses

Two other former insane asylums in Connecticut have reputations as hospitals of horror: Norwich State Hospital in Preston and Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown. Tales of cruelty and abuse in the creepy old buildings fostered rumors of hauntings.

Norwich State Hospital

An early lighthouse keeper named Ernie supposedly haunts the New London Ledge Lighthouse in the mouth of the Thames River. On the night before the lighthouse was automated, a Coast Guard officer wrote in the log: “Rock of slow torture. Ernie’s domain. Hell on earth—may New London Ledge’s light shine on forever because I’m through. I will watch it from afar while drinking a brew.”

Fort Knox

Fort Knox, Maine’s version of the Great Pyramid, was built in the mid-19th century to prevent the British from invading the region. They’d already done it during the American Revolution and the War of 1812.

The State of Maine bought the hulking granite fortress on the Penobscot River from the U.S. government in 1923. Back then it cost $2,100.

The fort provides ideal conditions for haunting: it stands next to swirling waters, it’s made of vast quantities of granite and it’s in a cold climate. It also has lots of dark tunnels.

People say they hear footsteps or laughter inside the fort, or they feel someone’s touch. Ghost hunters heard soldiers talking about the Civil War. A retired state trooper saw a white object with no head, arms or legs that moved, then vanished.

The ghost in the duster coat who wanders the fort’s dark, wet tunnels is Leopold Hegyi, the caretaker at the fort from 1887 to 1900. Of Hungarian ancestry, he served as a cavalryman who helped train George Custer’s army before moving to Maine. He then patrolled the fort for 13 years by himself, except when a few soldiers arrived during the Spanish-American War.

The fort hosts an annual paranormal/psychic fair. “Fright at the Fort,” a haunted house fundraiser that helps fund the preservation of the historic site.

Click here for a ghost tracker documentary of Fort Knox.

740 Fort Knox Rd., Prospect, Maine

Other Maine Haunted Houses

A woman in a nightgown climbs the spiral staircase of the Captain Lord Mansion, a Kennebunkport bed and breakfast. Some say she was the wife of Captain Lord, who built the house in 1812, but died before living in it.

Indian chief Taukolexis died by hanging from a tree, and he supposedly haunts the nearby fort, William Henry, now a museum near New Harbor.

The ghost of 19th-century poet Sylvester Beckett rips the bed sheets off guests at Beckett’s Castle, his former summer home on Cape Elizabeth.

Boston Athenaeum

The Boston Athenaeum today

As an aspiring writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne frequented the Boston Athenaeum, a private library across from the Statehouse. In April 1842 he visited the Reading Room and encountered Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, Harvard’s librarian. Harris sat in his usual chair, reading a newspaper. Hawthorne didn’t think anything about it until later that evening, when a friend told him Harris had died. Hawthorne said that was impossible, as he had just seen him in the Athenaeum.

Then the next day, Hawthorne returned to the Athenaeum only to see Harris in the same chair. The writer speculated he was reading his own obituary. Of the encounter he wrote,

I remember—once at least, and I know not but oftener—a sad, wistful, disappointed gaze, which the ghost fixed upon me from beneath his spectacles; a melancholy look of helplessness, which, if my heart had been as hard as a paving-stone, I could hardly have withstood. But I did withstand it; and I think I saw him no more after this last, appealing look.

The minister’s ghost isn’t the only creepy thing about the Boston Athenaeum. The library holds a copy of a criminal’s memoirs bound in his own skin.

James Allen robbed and shot a man on the Salem Turnpike. In 1835, Allen received the death sentence for attempted murder and was held in Charlestown State Prison.

Allen then told his life story to the prison warden. Before his execution, he asked that his skin be used to bind two copies of his memoirs. One copy ended up at the Athenaeum after Allen’s family passed it down. It had been used to spank children who misbehaved.

10½ Beacon St., Boston, Mass.

Other Massachusetts Haunted Houses

The Lizzie Borden House

The ghosts of the Borden family roam the halls at the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, now a bed and breakfast. Lizzie Borden famously …’took an axe/And gave her mother 40 whacks/When she saw what she had done,She gave her father forty-one.”

Jerusha Howe, an early innkeeper at the Wayside Inn before it was the Wayside Inn, rejected many suitors attracted by her beauty. She couldn’t resist an English gentleman who promised to return for her. He never came back, and Jerusha’s ghost waits for her lover in her bedroom, Room 9.

Novelist Edith Wharton built an estate called the Mount in Lenox around the turn of the century. She avidly collected ghost stories, and now visitors say they see ghosts in period dress — even Wharton herself reading — wandering what is now a house museum.

Ipswich has quite a few haunted houses, including the Treadwell-Hale house in North Main Street. It had a ghost that whispered from the top of the stairs to the rear bedroom.

Huntress Hall, Keene State College

Huntress Hall at Keene State College was named after Harriet Huntress, a New Hampshire Department of Education administrator. Her abandoned wheelchair is still stored in the attic of the building, built in 1926. The creaking chair can be heard wheeling around the attic at night, according to students who live there.

Huntress does not like to be mocked and wreaks revenge on anyone who dresses up like her at Halloween. Students who have done so – usually with a gray wig and a wheelchair — failed tests, broke their legs or been involved in bad car accidents.

The genesis of the Huntress haunting is said to be World War II. Keene State was then a teaching school and Huntress Hall was an all-female dormitory. During the war, the U.S. Navy began training pilots at Keene and housed the trainees in Huntress Hall. Huntress was said to hate men and promiscuous women, and it was then that she began to haunt the hall. Some say she is most active when students are having sex inside its walls.

Appian Way, Keene, N.H.

Other New Hampshire Haunted Houses

In the late 19th century, orphans lived in The Chase House on Middle Road in Portsmouth. According to legend, a young girl hanged herself in her room and now haunts the hallway.

Ocean Born Mary, as her name suggests, was born at sea. Pirates boarded the vessel that sailed from Ulster to New England, and the pirate captain heard the cries of a newborn baby — Ocean Born Mary Wallace, of course. He gave her mother a bolt of light green silk, which was later made into Mary’s wedding dress. Mary’s husband died and she moved to Henniker, where her ghost supposedly protects her house from harm.

Belcourt Castle

The Newport mansion Belcourt Castle features a screaming suit of armor, a haunted gold coronation carriage, chairs that toss people off their seats and apparitions dancing in the ballroom.

Belcourt Castle was built by Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, the wastrel son of financier August Belmont and grandson of Commodore Matthew Perry. (His brother August financed the Cape Cod Canal.) Richard Morris Hunt designed the mansion according to Perry’s wish to devote the first floor to carriages and stables for his beloved horses. He modeled the 60-room house on Louis XIII’s hunting lodge at Versailles.

Belmont married Alva Belmont, the ex-wife of his best friend William K. Vanderbilt, in 1896, and she began redesigning the mansion. After the Belmonts died, Harold and Ruth Tinney bought Belcourt in 1956 and filled it with their own collection of art and antiques. The Tinneys opened the house to the public for ghost tours and as a museum.

When the Tinneys owned Belcourt, suits of armor stood in a row at one end of the ballroom. People say they’ve heard screams from one suit of armor as the owner relives his death. A spear tip pierced his eye through a slit in the helmet.

A carved wooden statue of a monk brings a ghost of a brown-robed monk along with him. The ghost always appeared in the same room as the statue.

In 2012, the Tinneys sold Belcourt. Read more about it here.

657 Belleview Ave., Newport, R.I.

Other Rhode Island Haunted Houses

During the American Revolution, University Hall at Brown was converted into an army hospital where many soldiers died. A contorted soldier’s face appears in a second-floor window.

The body of Providence Mayor Thomas Doyle lay in state at City Hall after his death in 1886. His ghost is now said to haunt the building, smoking a cigar, moving chairs and whispering.

Edward Hamlin Everett Mansion

Hamlin Mansion

Edward Hamlin Everett got rich as the Glass Bottle King and inventor of the fluted bottle cap. He grew up in Bennington, Vt., and in 1886 married Amy King. Her father owned a Newark glassworks that Hamlin bought before their wedding.

Amy King died suddenly. Some said she committed suicide, others said she was murdered, still others say she drowned while swimming. Her obituary said she died after a severe operation following an unnamed illness.

Everett remarried, but his three grown daughters disapproved of the new wife. When he died, he left most of his wealth to his second wife, leaving only a tenth of it to his daughters. The daughters challenged the will in court, claiming their father wasn’t in his right mind. During the trial, known as The Second Battle of Bennington, the eldest daughter was staying at the house when she said she heard weeping coming from her father’s study.

She went to the room and found her mother lying on the floor, clearly a murder victim. Security guards say doorknobs turn in empty rooms and doors close by themselves. Students say they see a woman in white, roaming the house and grounds. Perhaps it’s the ghost of Amy King Everett.

In 1957, writer Shirley Jackson decided she wanted to write a novel about a haunted house. She began collecting postcards and newspaper clippings of ornate old houses. She likely chose the Edward Hamlin Everett home as the setting for her novel, The Haunting of Hill House. He book, a National Book Award finalist, inspired two feature films and a play.

The court, by the way, sided with the Everett daughters and gave them a third of the estate.

982 Mansion Dr., Bennington, Vt.

Other Vermont Haunted Houses

Hartness House Inn.

James Hartness, a factory owner and Vermont governor, built the Shingle-style Hartness House in Springfield in 1904. He built a labyrinth of tunnels under the house that included a library, workshop, study and bathroom. Today the house is run as a small hotel and his ghost is said to be down there still.

Ira Allen, a railroad magnate and relative of Ethan Allen, built the Marble Mansion in 1867 in Fair Haven, Vt. Today it’s an inn, and the ghost of a former owner, dressed in a gray suit, awakens guests by standing over their beds. A young woman supposedly haunts the basement and several ghostly children run around the halls.

End Notes

Photos: Norwich State Hospital, By CLK Hatcher – Norwich Hospital District – Admin BuildingUploaded by LongLiveRock, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15506667; Boston Athenaeum, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=722802; Belcourt photo by Charles V. Hamm; Hartness House Inn By Tyler Goodrich – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28509336. Seaside Sanitorium by By Victor Solanoy from Silicon Valley, USA – Seaside Sanitorium – Waterford, CTUploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29847509.

This story about haunted houses was updated in 2022.

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Marian MacDowell Founds the MacDowell Colony

Marian MacDowell was a 50-year-old woman tending a sick husband in 1907 when she founded the New Hampshire institution that nurtured some of America’s greatest composers, writers and artists.

Edward MacDowell and Marian MacDowell.

Two tragedies sent her on the path to starting the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. One, the death of her mother; the other, the death of her husband, four decades later.

Marian MacDowell

Marian Griswold Nevins was born in New York City on Nov. 22, 1857, the third of Cornelia and David Nevins’ five children. Her father was a successful Wall Street banker. Her mother died when she was eight — and her father was away. The doctor and her grandmother made her give her father the news. She recalled,

I heard the carriage come up to the front door and then they all looked at each other with consternation; neither one could dare to go out and meet him… knowing the very strong affection my father had for me, they pushed me out into the hall and said, “You have got to tell Father Mother is dead.” He came in, looked at me and said, “What is the matter?” I said, “Mother is dead,” and he fell as though he had been knocked over the head with a heavy blow.

David Nevins sent the children to live with two aunts, Lucretia and Caroline Perkins, in Waterford, Conn. Caroline, who taught music, recognized Marian’s musical talent and encouraged her to pursue the piano.

he 1910 Peterborough Pageant used MacDowell’s music to dramatize the history of Peterborough, N.H., set on the grounds of the MacDowell Colony. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Choices

In 1880, 23-year-old Marian Nevins sailed to Europe – where all serious American musicians studied — to train with Clara Schumann. Schumann wasn’t available, however, and Marian studied instead with a young American composer, Edward MacDowell. Three years later, he asked her to marry him. She agreed on one condition: That he would devote his life to composing and live off her savings. They were married in 1884 in Waterford.

The young couple eventually settled in Boston, which gave MacDowell membership in the group of New England classical music composers known as the Boston Six. Three months into the marriage, Marian MacDowell realized she had to choose between her husband’s career and her own. She chose his. (Listen to MacDowell’s piece To A Wild Rose from Woodland Sketches here.)

Quiet

Leonard Bernstein at the MacDowell Colony.

Realizing he needed a quiet place to work, she bought Hillcrest, an abandoned farm in Peterborough, N.H., in 1896, without consulting him. She telegraphed the news to him and he replied, “All right, in your name, your responsibility.”

Nevertheless, he loved Hillcrest. Marian surprised him after their first summer by having a log cabin built with a view of Mount Monadnock. It was a perfect place for him to compose, and he wrote most of his significant piano works from it. (Listen to From A Log Cabin here.) She would leave his lunch in a wicker basket and leave it on his doorstep so he could work undisturbed – a tradition that continues to this day at the art colony.

Edward MacDowell had taught music at Columbia University since 1896, but in 1904 he quit his job during an academic dispute. Soon afterward he was hit by a Hansom cab and he went into a severe mental decline. A friend said, “His mind became as that of a little child. He sat quietly, day after day, in a chair by a window, smiling patiently from time to time at those about him, turning the pages of a book of fairy tales…”

Even as they relied on friends for financial support, Marian MacDowell began to realize their dream of a summer colony where artists could find inspiration in quiet and solitude. In 1907, she deeded their farm to the Edward MacDowell Association and founded the MacDowell Colony. During that first season, the guests were sisters Helen Farnsworth Mears, a sculptor, and Mary Mears, a writer.

The MacDowell Colony

Marian MacDowell near the log cabin studio. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Edward MacDowell died on Jan. 23, 1908. Marian MacDowell was 50 years old, but she would remain involved with the art colony for the next 48 years. She resumed her career as a pianist and went on the road to raise money, visiting 600 cities in a 15-year period. Again, at the age of 73, she embarked on a concert tour to raise money in the United States and Canada.

Over time the colony expanded and produced a considerable body of work.

Fellows

An estimated 6,000 artists have been supported in residence, including the winners of at least 61 Pulitzer Prizes.

Fellows included Leonard Bernstein, who wrote MASS while there, and Amy Beach; poet Edwin Arlington Robinson; painter Lilla Cabot Perry; novelists Willa Cather, James Baldwin and Spalding Gray; and playwright Thornton Wilder, who was inspired by nearby Peterborough to write Our Town. L. M. Kit Carson wrote The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 while at the MacDowell Colony, and Michael Chabon worked on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

In 1946, on her 89^th birthday, Marian MacDowell resigned her job as head of the MacDowell Colony but continued on as ‘corresponding secretary.’ On her 96^th birthday, the Town of Peterborough sent her a cake with the message ‘To Marian MacDowell, Peterborough’s First Citizen, Beloved by All New Hampshire.’ It was the last year she managed to come to the Colony. She died three months shy of her 99^th birthday, on Aug. 23, 1956.

She summed up her achievements simply: “I am a very ordinary woman who had an opportunity—and I seized it.”

This story was updated in 2021.

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Beatrix Farrand Breaks the (Green) Glass Ceiling

Famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted in 1893 dismissed 21-year-old Beatrix Farrand as a dilettante gardener, but six years later she had risen to the top of the field.

Beatrix Farrand. Photo courtesy Yale University Library.

At 27, Beatrix Farrand had earned a reputation that allowed her to help found the American Society of Landscape Architects.

Her clients had estates in Newport, the Berkshires and Maine, but she also consulted with universities such as Yale and Princeton. She also designed public gardens such as the rose garden at the New York Botanical Garden and the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden.

Throughout her life she insisted on calling herself a landscape gardener.

Beatrix Farrand

She was born June 19, 1872, the only child of a New York society couple. Her rich father, Frederic Rhinelander Jones, had no ambition and loved to have fun. His serious little sister Edith became the novelist known as Edith Wharton. Beatrix’s mother, Mary Cadwalader Rawle, was also rich, but lively and bookish.

Beatrix’s parents’ marriage failed, and then after she turned 10 her father absented himself from her life.

She grew up surrounded by her mother’s women friends and, occasionally, Philadelphia lawyers, soldiers, artists and writers. “Always beautifully turned out, with an awesome briskness of manner,’ wrote Jane Brown in Arnoldia. ”She was formal, not jolly and good fun,” a friend of the family told the The New York Times in 2003.

“She had an elegant reserve, a perfectionism that suffered no fools,” the Times reported.

Reef Point gardens, managed by Beatrix Farrand. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

Reef Point

Beatrix and her mother spent summers at her family’s summer home, Reef Point, on Mount Desert Island in Bar Harbor, Maine. There she learned to love the outdoors, especially plants and trees. While still a teenager she took over the management of the Reef Point gardens.

Charles Sprague Sargent, who helped Beatrix Farrand with her gardening.

She also had the good fortune to meet Charles Sprague Sargent, director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. He was perhaps the only person at that time who was willing and able to help her enter the exclusively male world of landscape architecture. Sargent, a stern and aloof Brahmin, appreciated Beatrix Jones’ knowledge and enthusiasm for plants.

Flowering trees at Holm Lea. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

On their trips between New York and Maine, Beatrix and her mother stayed at the Sargents’ Brookline home, Holm Lea.

Frederick Law Olmsted

In October 1893, the Sargents took Beatrix Farrand to Chicago to see Frederick Law Olmsted’s landscape settings for the World’s Columbian Exposition. The next summer they took her and her mother to see Olmsted’s gardens at the Biltmore estate in North Carolina.

Olmsted, then at the height of his fame, commented that Beatrix was ‘inclined to dabble in landscape architecture.’ The slight was widely quoted in landscape architecture circles.

The Arnold Arboretum in 2005.

After her visit to Biltmore, she stayed at Holm Lea for a summer, studying at the Arboretum. Sargent took her to see H.H. Hunnewell’s rhododendron collection at his home in Wellesley, Mass. He also took her to Frederic Law Olmsted’s home office – when Frederic Law Olmsted was away. There, Beatrix saw how designers sketched layouts for gardens on tracing paper over site surveys. She saw as well how they made plans for planting by referring to a card index describing each plant.

Clashing Azaleas

And she returned Olmsted’s slight (which she probably never heard) by recording in her notebook some badly arranged shrubs and clashing azaleas in pinkish blue and bright orange. (Anyone can visit Olmsted’s home office now; it’s now a National Historic Site run by the National Park Service.)

That fall she arranged for private tutors from Columbia University’s School of Architecture to teach her technical drawing and surveying. During a trip to Europe she studied formal gardens and the natural landscape. By 1897, Sargent had found her first job: thinning trees and remodeling plants on a garden slope. At 25, she was on her way, working from the top floor of her mother’s brownstone on East 11^th St. in New York City.

Farrand designed this rustic bridge in a birch grove at the Herbert Livingston Satterlee house, Bar Harbor. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston collection.

As a woman she was excluded from public projects, but she managed to find private clients among her family friends in Bar Harbor. Her Aunt Edith Wharton also helped with her connections. She designed the rustic bridge and the birch grove pictured above for the Herbert L. Satterlee estate in Bar Harbor.

White House garden designed by Beatrix Farrand. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

In 1913 she designed the East Colonial Garden at the White House for the first Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. It was replaced by the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.

Aerial view of Harkness Memorial Park.

She designed the Italian, Oriental and cutting gardens for Eolia, the Waterford, Conn., estate of wealthy philanthropist Edward Harkness. Harkness left Eolia to the state of Connecticut in 1950. It is now open to the public as Harkness Memorial State Park, and the 42-room mansion can be rented for weddings and parties.

Maine Undertakings

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Another philanthropist, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., hired her to design plantings that framed vistas and bridges along his 45 miles of carriage roads, now part of Acadia National Park. Much of her work was destroyed by fire in 1947. Above is the Duck Brook Bridge, spanning Duck Brook between Witch Hole Loop and New Eagle Lake Road in Bar Harbor.

Beatrix Farrand remained single until she was over 40. In 1913, she married Max Farrand, chairman of the Yale History Department.

Max and Beatrix Farrand set up Reef Point as an educational institution, but attracted few students. She used the grounds as a laboratory for her plants, studying soils and finding ways to protect tender plants.

By 1955, Max Farrand had died and she couldn’t find an institution willing to undertake the expense of maintaining Reef Point. In 1955, she ordered the house torn down and gave away her plants, keeping some of her favorites. She gave her library of 2,700 books and her herbarium to the University of California at Berkeley.

Charles Savage, an artist and innkeeper, took most of the plants, building the Asticou Azalea Garden and Thuya Garden in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Both are now open to the public.

Asticou Azalea Garden.

Garland Farm

Beatrix Farrand then moved six miles down the road, to Garland Farm, owned by Lewis Garland, her driver and handyman. His horticulturist wife Amy supervised the Reef Point gardens. She built an addition to the house that included a room for Clementine Walters, her companion and caregiver.

She lived at Garland Farm until her death on Feb. 28, 1959.

Garland Farm had two private owners until 2004, when the Beatrix Farrand Society bought the farm. It is open to visitors on Open Days and by appointment. The Society renovated the barn as an educational center for workshops, lectures and other programs.

With thanks to Lady into Landscape Gardener: Beatrix Farrand’s Early Years at the Arnold Arboretum by Jane Brown in Arnoldia. The photo Arnold Arboretum – Aug 2005(b) courtesy of Daderot at Wikipedia. The photo of the Asticou Azalea Gardens “Asticou Azalea Garden 2003 1” courtesy of Dudesleeper at Wikipedia. This story about Beatrix Farrand ws updated in 2022.

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