In Brief
The Beal House Inn in Littleton, New Hampshire is an 1833 farmhouse in the White Mountains, and the haunting staff there keep coming back to is the pillows, found floating above the furniture. The owners insist the spirits are friendly.
The Full Story
The thing the staff at the Beal House Inn in Littleton, New Hampshire keep coming back to isn't a scream or a figure in a doorway. It's the pillows. They've reported pillows floating above the furniture, holding there, in this 1833 farmhouse on West Main Street in the heart of the White Mountains.
Nobody knows whose house it is now. New Hampshire Magazine says the resident ghost's identity is unknown, but the staff have logged the same small dislocations for years. A door closing with great force in an empty hall. A particular hallway that makes both staff and unknowing guests feel strange, for no reason they can name. Objects that aren't where they were set down, then turn up somewhere else. And down in the basement, shadows and shapes that move at the very edge of the light, just past where you can be sure of them.
The common room has its own habit. Staff have heard male voices in it again and again with no one there, sometimes carrying on when no living person is speaking at all. Other things landed closer. One housekeeper was painting a bedroom when she felt a sudden pressure on her hip, as if a hand had pinned her in place, and could not move for several seconds. A new hire lasted a week before quitting, unable to stand the atmosphere of the building.
The house was built in 1833 and farmed by the family that raised generations in it. It became the Beal House later, named for Mrs. Beal, a widow who opened her home to lodgers in the 1930s after the Depression took her husband. The activity, the staff say, only started around 2001, when the inn changed hands and went through a round of renovations. As if the work had woken something.
Who the something is stays folklore. Thomas D'Agostino, who wrote the house up in his book Haunted New Hampshire, corresponded with the owners; mediums and guests have suggested the presence might be Mrs. Beal herself, watching over the place she opened. The owners agree it means no harm. They say the spirits stay because they love the inn.
The wife once saw a shadow figure, went to look, and found no one there. Then a sudden warmth, pleasant, settled over her where the figure had been. Nothing here lunges. It just moves the furniture and waits to be noticed.
