Most Haunted Places in New Hampshire: the Ghost in the Wrong House

Some ghosts in New Hampshire don’t rattle chains, they rattle doors. At the Tilton Inn, built in 1875 and burned three times, the story is that a child named Laura still slips in and out of rooms like she owns the place, stroking guests’ hair, opening doors, and vanishing the second someone steps into the hall.

Then there’s the Chase Home in Portsmouth, where a third-floor tragedy is said to linger in the same space that once sheltered orphaned children, and the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods, where Room 314 allegedly gets visits from Carolyn Stickney, the widow who returned after Joseph Stickney’s death and may never have left.

And once you start stacking those stories, the question is not if New Hampshire has ghosts, it’s whose unfinished business is still walking around.

The Most Haunted Places in New Hampshire Are Old Inns

New England runs on old inns, and the haunted ones in New Hampshire carry their ghosts like house pets. The Tilton Inn, built in 1875, has burned three times. One of those fires is said to have killed a 12-year-old girl named Laura, and guests now report a child who strokes their hair, opens doors, and bolts from rooms when someone walks in.

Staff describe her as friendly. The inn once hosted guests like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, and it has appeared on paranormal TV more than once, which is true of a surprising number of these places, the kind of catnip that draws ghost-hunting crews and ghost films alike. Down in Portsmouth, the Chase Home carries a sadder story, that of a young girl said to have hanged herself on the third floor of what was once a refuge for orphaned children.

Up at Bretton Woods, the Mount Washington Hotel has a more refined spirit. Carolyn Stickney was the widow of Joseph Stickney, who built the grand resort. After her second husband died in 1922, she came back to live in the hotel, and some say she stayed. Guests in Room 314 report a woman brushing her hair at the foot of the bed.

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That’s the Tilton Inn version of “wrong house,” Laura’s friendly chaos, but it gets darker fast when you jump from fires and hair-stroking to the Chase Home’s third-floor hangings.

Witches, Frozen Brides, and a Cemetery That Points

Not every New Hampshire ghost gets a comfortable inn. On a bitter night in 1778, a young woman named Nancy Barton set out on foot near Jefferson to chase a fiancé who had vanished with her savings. She froze to death beside a brook.

It carries her name today, Nancy Brook, and the woods around it are said to still echo with her cries. If you find old New England forests unsettling, you are not the first, and the same uneasy feeling clings to stranger stretches of woodland elsewhere in the world.

The state's witch history is real, not just lore. Goodwife Eunice Cole, the "Witch of Hampton," was the only person ever convicted of witchcraft in New Hampshire, jailed on and off for years in the 1600s. The colonial panic that fed cases like hers wasn't unique to New England, either. Waves of mass hysteria have a long, documented history, and Cole sat right in the middle of one.

Then there's Pine Hill Cemetery in Hollis, better known as Blood Cemetery for the family buried there. Abel Blood's gravestone shows a hand with a finger pointing up toward heaven. Visitors claim that at night the finger points down instead.

More Haunted Places in New Hampshire Worth the Drive

A few other Granite State stops earn their reputation:

Speaking of cursed history, this Tilton Inn story hits different after Connecticut’s witch hanging.

Amos J. Blake House Museum (Fitzwilliam): an 1837 home said to host eleven spirits and a phantom cat, and a repeat target for paranormal investigators.

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Monson Center (Milford): the cellar holes of an abandoned 1700s settlement, one of New England's quiet ghost towns, now a preserved historic site.

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New Hampshire State Hospital (Concord): opened in 1842 as the "New Hampshire Asylum for the Insane," with the cold spots and unexplained footsteps that old asylums always seem to keep.

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Vale End Cemetery (Wilton): home to the "Blue Lady," a glowing figure reported above one particular headstone.

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And right when the inns and hotel rooms start to feel familiar, Nancy Barton’s frozen death near Jefferson turns the mood into something colder, with Nancy Brook still “echoing” her cries.

Many of these older homes now sit empty or half-restored, the way abandoned colonial houses tend to, which only deepens the stories told about them. A handful, like the Ocean-Born Mary House, remain private residences, so the legends are best chased from the road or on an official tour rather than someone's front lawn.

What ties the haunted places in New Hampshire together isn't gore. It's grief, mostly, frozen into the buildings and burial grounds of a state that has been keeping records since the 1600s.

The rest of the region keeps its own ghosts. The same colonial New England past runs through the haunted corners of Maine and New York, and the haunted battlefields of Virginia carry it further south.

In New Hampshire, the scariest part is that the ghosts don’t just visit, they keep the same routine.

Want more New England hauntings, like Vermont’s dead-hosting farmhouse and named covered bridge?