Haunted Hotels in New England: The Master List for 2026

A haunted stay is the only ghost experience you're supposed to sleep through. That's the appeal — and it's why these rooms are the highest-ticket thing in this whole business, running two to four times a ghost tour on an October Saturday.

We went through seven properties, one in every New England state, and checked each against its own website rather than against the other haunted-hotel lists — which is how you end up with Concord's Colonial Inn filed under New Hampshire, as one aggregator currently has it. It's in Concord, Massachusetts, forty minutes from Boston.

The list

The thing nobody mentions: almost none of them claim it

Here's what fell out of checking the properties' own sites. Six of these seven hotels and inns say nothing whatsoever about ghosts. Not a page, not a paragraph, not a line in the history section. The Hawthorne Hotel — probably the most famous haunted hotel in New England — does not use the word.

The single exception is Captain Grant's, 1754 in Preston, Connecticut, which calls itself Connecticut's most haunted inn on its own front page and sells a Halloween event with a ghost tour, storytelling, and seances.

This is worth knowing before you book, for two reasons. First, if you're expecting the staff to lean into it, most of them won't — you are checking into a nice New England inn that other people have written ghost stories about. Second, it means the legends below come from folklore and ghost-tourism writing, not from the properties. We've kept those separate throughout.

What each one actually is

Massachusetts

Hawthorne Hotel, 18 Washington Square W, Salem. Opened 1925, which is worth sitting with: the trials were 1692. Whatever people report in rooms 325 and 612, it has nothing to do with the witch panic 233 years earlier. The hotel's genuine history is maritime — it stands on land tied to the Salem Marine Society, and the Society's 1830s cabin was reconstructed on the roof as a condition of the sale. If you're staying here, pair it with a Salem ghost tour; the city is the attraction and the hotel is the base.

Concord's Colonial Inn, 48 Monument Square, Concord. The main inn dates to 1716 and stands yards from where the North Bridge fight opened the Revolution on April 19, 1775. Room 24 is the one people request. The frequently repeated detail that Room 24 served as a field hospital is tradition rather than documented record — a distinction the inn itself makes no claims either way about.

New Hampshire

Three Chimneys Inn, 17 Newmarket Road, Durham. The inn's own site states a 1649 build, which makes this one of the oldest buildings in America you can book a room in. The ghost is said to be Hannah, daughter of Valentine Hill, drowned in the Oyster River. Hill was a real Durham settler who milled on that river. Hannah's death is where the paper trail simply stops — no date, no circumstances, no record. The story fills a silence rather than explaining one.

Vermont

Green Mountain Inn, 18 Main Street, Stowe. The tale is Boots Berry: born in room 302, worked at the inn, died in 1902 falling from the roof while pulling someone off it, and still tap-dances up there on snowy nights. It is the best story on this page and the thinnest. It circulates almost entirely through ghost-tourism write-ups; the inn doesn't mention him.

Maine

The Kennebunk Inn, 45 Main St, Kennebunk. Silas, a former night clerk, gets blamed for glassware leaving the shelf, and is said to pick on staff he doesn't care for. The name usually given is Silas Perkins — which was also the name of a well-known Kennebunk poet who died in 1952. The ghost-tour versions rarely pause on that.

Connecticut

Captain Grant's, 1754, 109 Route 2A, Poquetanuck Village, Preston. Built 1754, and the only property here that markets the haunting itself. Take that as you like: it's either the most honest place on the list or the one with the clearest incentive. Its Halloween event with seances is the closest thing to a packaged experience in this roundup.

Rhode Island

The Jailhouse Inn, 13 Marlborough Street, Newport. Built 1772, and the hotel says plainly what it is — an adaptation of Newport's actual historic jail and police station. It makes no ghost claims at all, which is somehow more effective. You are sleeping in a building where, for most of its life, nobody could leave.

Booking these in October

None of them publish October rates. All seven run dynamic pricing with no rate card, so any list quoting you "$180–$300 a night in October" is guessing. Check your dates.

These are small properties. Three Chimneys, Captain Grant's, the Kennebunk Inn, and the Green Mountain Inn are inns, not chains. When we say the named rooms book out, we mean there is exactly one Room 24 and one Room 302.

Foliage stacks on top of Halloween. Northern New England — Vermont and New Hampshire especially — hits peak leaf season and peak Halloween demand in the same three weeks. Stowe and Durham are competing with leaf-peepers, not just ghost hunters.

Ask by room number, not reputation. Six of these properties don't acknowledge the ghost. "Can I have Room 302?" gets a straight answer. "Which room is haunted?" may get you a blank look from a front desk that fields it forty times a week.

The WickedStrange October Guide

Every haunt, tour, and date worth knowing across New England — verified, not copied from last year. One email before the season, then we leave you alone.

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