Barrett House

An 1800 Federal-style mansion museum in New Ipswich, also known as Forest Hall, maintained by Historic New England.

Barrett House, known locally as Forest Hall, stands on more than seventy acres of rolling New Hampshire countryside in the small town of New Ipswich, its Federal-style facade largely unchanged since Charles Barrett Sr. built it around 1800. Barrett was a mill owner, farmer, land speculator, and local politician who constructed the mansion as a wedding gift for his son Charles Jr. and daughter-in-law Martha Minot. According to family tradition, Martha's father promised to furnish the interior in as lavish a manner as Barrett Sr. could build the structure, setting off a friendly competition between the two wealthy families that resulted in one of the grandest private homes in rural New Hampshire.

Charles Jr. and Martha raised five children at Forest Hall during New Ipswich's economic golden age, when the town was a bustling mill village producing a variety of locally manufactured goods. Despite their remote location, the young couple maintained an elegant lifestyle that rivaled Boston society. They entertained guests in a third-floor ballroom, an unusual feature for a country house of that era, and filled the rooms with fine furniture and decorative pieces imported from Europe and the major American cities. Charles Jr. prospered in business alongside his partner Samuel Appleton, the grand-uncle of William Sumner Appleton, who would later found the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now Historic New England.

The Barrett family occupied the house for nearly a century and a half before it was donated to Historic New England in 1948. The estate encompasses perennial and annual gardens, a Gothic Revival summer house crowning the hillside with sweeping views of the grounds, and the main mansion with its original period furnishings still in place. Walking through Forest Hall is like stepping through a time capsule of early nineteenth-century rural aristocracy.

Staff members and visitors to the museum have reported unexplained phenomena within the house over the decades since it opened to the public. Footsteps echo through the upper floors when no one is present, and the sound of a piano playing has been heard drifting from the parlor during hours when the building is closed. Objects in the period rooms shift position between visits, and docents describe an unsettling feeling of being watched while giving tours in the third-floor ballroom, as though unseen guests still gather there for entertainments that ended two centuries ago.

The identity of the spirits, if spirits they are, remains a matter of speculation. Some believe Martha Minot Barrett never left the home her father furnished so extravagantly, while others suggest the presence belongs to one of the family's servants or children. The grounds themselves carry an atmospheric weight that visitors consistently remark upon, a stillness that feels less like peace than like something holding its breath. Historic New England hosts seasonal events at Barrett House, including October programs that acknowledge the property's reputation, though the organization maintains a careful neutrality on the question of whether Forest Hall is genuinely haunted.