Blackberry River Inn

A 1763 colonial farmhouse turned bed and breakfast in Norfolk, Connecticut, with full-height tunnels in the basement believed to be from the Underground Railroad. Guests in rooms 8 and 9 report seeing a calm, smiling woman in white named Francis on the second floor, who enters through the back of the house and never frightens anyone.

The basement has tunnels. Not small crawlspaces or root cellar extensions, but full-height passageways big enough to walk through, running underneath a colonial farmhouse that has no obvious reason to need them. Local historians believe the Blackberry River Inn, originally the Moseley House-Farm, served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. The tunnels don't serve any agricultural purpose, and nobody has offered a better explanation.

The house was built in 1763 on what is now 538 Greenwoods Road in Norfolk, Connecticut. For most of its life it was a working farm, owned for decades by Seth H. Moseley, who also ran the Collingwood Hotel in New York City. Moseley died on December 7, 1938. In the 1920s, New York architect Alfredo S.G. Taylor of the firm Taylor and Levi redesigned the place in Colonial and Georgian Revival style, adding the semi-elliptical arches that give the front its distinctive look. The National Register of Historic Places listed the property on February 17, 1984.

After Moseley died, Dorothea and James Schwarzhaupt bought the property and turned it into a bed and breakfast. That's when Francis showed up. Or, more accurately, that's when paying guests started reporting her.

She appears on the second floor, usually in or near rooms 8 and 9. An older woman in white. She doesn't speak. She doesn't approach. Guests who see her describe feeling calm rather than scared, which is unusual for a haunted hotel. One TripAdvisor reviewer who had no idea the inn was haunted wrote about seeing "an older woman in old-fashioned clothes" on the second floor landing who "smiled and disappeared."

Staff treat Francis like a fixture. She enters through the back of the house and sticks to the upstairs hallway. One theory links her to a former owner named Mrs. Keyes, who died in the house in the early 1800s. Another connects her to the Underground Railroad era, a woman who helped harbor people fleeing slavery and never stopped watching the door. Neither theory has hard evidence.

The other activity on the second floor is more generic. Footsteps in the hallway when nobody's there. A temperature drop near the staircase that comes and goes without explanation. Rooms 8 and 9 generate the most reports, though the inn doesn't advertise them as haunted rooms.

Norfolk is one of the smallest and coldest towns in Connecticut. At 1,760 feet elevation in Litchfield County, it calls itself the "ice box of Connecticut." The Blackberry River Inn fits. Ten acres split between Norfolk and North Canaan, quiet enough that the loudest thing most nights is the river.

Francis might be the politest ghost in New England. No slamming doors, no objects thrown across rooms, no 3 a.m. screaming. She checks on guests, she smiles, and she leaves through the back. The tunnels underneath are the more interesting mystery. Whatever happened down there in the 1800s, the house remembers it one way or another.