Amos J. Blake House Museum

Caretaker Terri Harlow counts eleven ghosts in this 1837 Fitzwilliam museum, twelve if you count the cat she watched vanish.

Caretaker Terri Harlow counts eleven ghosts in the Amos J. Blake House. Twelve if you count the cat she says she watched vanish in front of her. The antique toys in the upstairs children's room move when her back is turned, and she's not the only staff member who's noticed.

The house sits on the town common in Fitzwilliam, a small southwestern New Hampshire town that barely breaks 2,400 people. It was built in 1837 as a combined store and residence. Amos J. Blake, a prominent local attorney, bought it about thirty years later and ran his law office out of the front room while living upstairs with his family. His descendants deeded the property to the Fitzwilliam Historical Society in 1966, and it's been operating as a thirteen-room museum ever since. Each room covers a different slice of nineteenth-century life: antique toys, military artifacts, medical equipment, costumes.

The paranormal side of the Blake House picked up real attention in 2009 when TAPS, the team behind Syfy's Ghost Hunters, filmed an episode there. During the investigation they captured a chain in one of the rooms swinging on its own with no one near it. Skeptics have pointed out that a crew member may have walked past seconds earlier and created air movement, and that's a fair critique, but the footage is clean enough that the episode leaned on it as a highlight. The TAPS visit put the house on regional haunted-tourism lists and drew a steady stream of paranormal investigators in the years that followed.

One of those investigators, author Joni Mayhan, recorded what's become the most-cited piece of evidence from the house. Walking through the second floor with a digital recorder, she didn't hear anything in real time. Playing back the audio later, she caught a clear voice saying "Behind you." Mayhan has written about the Blake House in her books on New England hauntings, and the EVP gets passed around in paranormal podcasts and blogs as one of the better Class A recordings out of New Hampshire.

The apparition reports are quieter than the Mayhan clip suggests. Visitors and volunteers describe a small boy glimpsed in a doorway, a cat weaving between legs before vanishing, and the feeling that someone is standing in the next room over. The toys get the most volume. Balls that roll when no one's there. Dolls that shift position between tours. Harlow, who has worked at the museum for years, has stopped flagging it as unusual. She mentions it the way a longtime bartender might mention a regular who's been in for decades.

The building's small enough that you can walk it in under an hour, and the historical society runs it on a shoestring. There's no theatrical lighting, no staged jump scares, no ghost tour script. It's a New England historical museum that happens to be on every short list of haunted places in the state, and the people who run it treat the ghosts as part of the collection.

Whether the chain on Ghost Hunters was wind or a child nobody can see, the Blake House has earned its reputation through accumulation. One witness per ghost would be a coincidence. Eleven ghosts over decades, with a TAPS segment and a documented EVP in the archive, starts to look like a pattern the museum has simply accepted.