Haunted Hikes of the White Mountains: Trails With a Body Count

The White Mountains do not really do ghosts. What they do is kill people, in specific and repeatable ways, and then keep the trail open.

Almost every haunted story up here resolves to the same thing: somebody died of exposure, or a slide came down, and the place carried the name afterward. The supernatural layer is thin. The underlying record is not.

If you hike these mountains — and if you're reading this you probably do, or you're about to — this is the version worth knowing.

Nancy Brook, and the reason the cascades are named that

In the winter of 1778, a servant named Nancy Barton set out from Jefferson to follow a man she intended to marry, who had left for Portsmouth with her savings. She walked into the notch in deep snow.

She was found frozen beside the brook that now carries her name. The Nancy Pond Trail follows it, past Nancy Cascades, and both appear on every White Mountain map printed since.

The folklore says you can hear crying near the cascades, and that the man went mad afterward. Take those as folklore. What is not folklore is that a young woman walked into a New Hampshire notch in winter with inadequate clothing and died of exposure, and that this remains — nearly 250 years later — the single most common way these mountains kill people. The story has survived because it is a warning that happens to have a name attached.

It's a genuinely good hike. Go in summer.

The Willey House, Crawford Notch

In August 1826, after weeks of rain, a landslide came down the mountainside above the Willey family's house in Crawford Notch.

The family ran. All of them died.

The house was untouched. The slide split on a ledge just above the roof and passed on either side. Had they stayed in bed, they would have lived.

It is the most famous disaster in White Mountain history, and its immediate effect was to make Crawford Notch a destination — Hawthorne wrote about it, painters came, and the tourist economy of the notch dates from the deaths. There is a site marker today, and there are people who won't stay in the notch overnight because of it.

No ghost is required. A house standing perfectly intact with the whole family dead around it is already the story.

The Mount Washington Hotel

At Bretton Woods, and the grandest building in the mountains. The resident ghost is Carolyn Stickney, widow of the hotel's builder Joseph Stickney, who remarried a European prince — hence the "Princess Caroline" of the tour scripts — and returned here after her second husband died.

She is associated with a particular room, and guests report the usual: a presence, a figure at the foot of the bed, cold.

Worth noting what we found when researching the haunted hotels list: almost none of New England's famous haunted hotels say anything at all about ghosts on their own websites. This one is a working luxury resort, and the story circulates through ghost-tourism writing rather than through the hotel.

Mount Washington itself

This is where the register stops being folklore.

Mount Washington has killed well over a hundred people since records began. It holds one of the highest surface wind speeds ever measured by humans. It sits where three major storm tracks converge, and it manufactures winter in July.

There are ghost stories up there — figures in the fog on the Alpine Garden, voices near Tuckerman — and the mundane explanation is well established: hypothermia produces confusion, paradoxical undressing, and hallucination, and the summit cone in poor visibility strips away every reference point a person navigates by.

In other words, the mountain generates the exact perceptual conditions that produce ghost sightings, and then sometimes kills the witness. That's more unsettling than a haunting.

How to actually do these

Every location above is on maintained trail or beside a road, and none of them require anything unusual. What they require is the ordinary White Mountain discipline: check the higher summits forecast, carry layers you think you won't need, and turn around early.

For trail conditions, route planning, and the incident record for these peaks, our sibling site HikerNerd covers the White Mountains properly — it's the same author, and it's where the hiking half of this lives.

For the Halloween half, the haunted inns of New England list includes Three Chimneys Inn in Durham and the Green Mountain Inn in Stowe, and the New Hampshire haunted attraction roundup covers what's actually operating this season.

The mountains will still be there in November, and considerably more dangerous.