Haunted Inns of the Connecticut River Valley: A Shorter List Than You've Been Told

The Connecticut River Valley should be prime haunted-inn territory. It is one of the oldest continuously settled inland corridors in North America, it saw sustained frontier violence, and it is full of eighteenth-century buildings.

What it does not have is a long list of verifiable haunted inns. We went looking, and the list is shorter than the roundups suggest.

What we could verify

Deerfield Inn, Old Deerfield — and the thing that actually happened

81 Old Main Street, Deerfield, MA. 413-774-5587.

The inn dates its hospitality to 1884 on its own site. That matters, because the events its ghost stories borrow from happened a hundred and eighty years earlier, and the inn is honest enough not to blur the two.

Here is what happened on that street.

In 1704, a combined French and Native force attacked Deerfield before dawn in deep winter. Dozens of residents were killed. More than a hundred were taken captive and marched north to Canada — hundreds of miles, in winter, on foot. Many died on the way. Some of the survivors never came back, and a number chose not to, which was a scandal in New England for generations afterward.

That street is still there. Old Main Street in Deerfield is a preserved mile of colonial houses, and you can walk it, and the raid happened on it.

No ghost story on this page comes close to that, and the inn does not try to compete with it. It sells itself as a good country inn on a historic street, which is exactly what it is.

The Old Riverton Inn, Riverton, Connecticut

860-379-8678. A former stagecoach stop on the old post road, with the usual roster of reported activity and no claims from the inn itself.

One correction: Riverton is on the Farmington River, a tributary — not on the Connecticut. It appears on Connecticut River Valley lists routinely, and if you're planning a route along the river itself you'll find it's a detour.

That's the third geography error we've had to fix on this site, after Concord's Colonial Inn filed under New Hampshire and the Lucerne Inn filed under coastal Maine when it's inland near Bangor. Whoever wrote the first version of these lists was working from a map they didn't check, and everyone since has copied it.

Why the valley's list is short

Worth being straight about this rather than padding.

The valley has plenty of old buildings and plenty of grim history. What it lacks is the ghost-tourism infrastructure that Salem, Newport and the Maine coast have — no operators building tours, no properties marketing hauntings, no ecosystem generating and circulating stories.

That's not an absence of history. It's an absence of an industry. The 1704 raid is better documented and considerably more disturbing than most of what gets sold as haunted in New England, and almost nobody packages it, because it is not entertaining.

Practical notes

Historic Deerfield is the reason to come. A preserved street of colonial houses, open to visitors, in a village that has been left largely alone. Go in daylight; this is a history trip, not a ghost trip.

Neither inn publishes rates. Both dynamic.

The valley is long. It runs from Long Island Sound up through Massachusetts into Vermont and New Hampshire, so "Connecticut River Valley" covers several hours of driving. Check where a property actually is before you build a route — as the Riverton example shows, the lists don't.

If you want the valley's darker material with somewhere to put it, our Massachusetts attraction roundup covers what's operating this season, and the Massachusetts folklore further east is where the older stories live.