In Brief
At the Amos J. Blake House Museum in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, curator Terri Harlow keeps a count of the resident ghosts the way you'd inventory a display case: eleven confirmed, she says, not including the cat she watched dissolve into a misty fuzz ball.
The Full Story
The curator of the Amos J. Blake House Museum in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire keeps a count of its ghosts. By Terri Harlow's tally there are eleven, not including the cat she says she watched dissolve in front of her into a "misty little fuzz ball." She says it plainly, the way you'd recite the contents of a display case.
The house was built in 1837 as a store and residence on the Fitzwilliam common, a southwestern New Hampshire town of about 2,400 people. Around the 1860s a lawyer and state legislator named Amos J. Blake bought it, ran his practice from a front room, and lived upstairs. He died in 1925. In 1966 the place was given to the local historical society, and it's been a museum of 19th-century life ever since, roughly a dozen themed rooms holding old desks, a working cash register, a 12th New Hampshire Regiment artillery flag, a red Confederate blanket. The building still stands in the town's National Register historic district, a contributing Greek Revival face among the antique houses ringing the common.
The eleven are never listed out. The count is Harlow's, not an itemized roll, and no source ever names the full set. What gets reported instead is the children's room, where antique balls roll on their own and toys set on the mantel turn up scattered across the floor. A young boy seen somewhere in the house. And the cat, the twelfth, the one she leaves off the official tally.
In 2009, the *Ghost Hunters* team drove out for an episode they called "New Hampshire Gothic." In the basement, following a thermal hot spot down from the living room, they caught a strong smell of cat urine and a rustling purr with no animal in sight. Upstairs, a chain hanging on a wall lifted itself up into the air and dropped back. By the end they agreed the house was active, though they also debunked one claim on camera: a bedroom closet door that opened "on its own" turned out to swing whenever someone stepped on a nearby floorboard.
Paranormal author Joni Mayhan toured the house later and ran a recorder and a Spirit Box through its rooms. She called the attic a hot spot. But her best-known capture came in a hallway, a voice she never heard in real time and found only on playback. Two words.
It said, "Behind you."
