Blackberry River Inn

At the Blackberry River Inn in Norfolk, Connecticut, guests keep seeing a woman in white on the second floor. She drifts the upstairs hallway, enters through the back of the house, and the strange part is how people describe the encounter — not frightened, but calm. The inn's lore calls her Francis. "Her name is Francis," one visitor wrote. "She is generally friendly or at least not mean in any way."

The house is older than the country. It was built in 1763 as the Moseley House-Farm and stayed a working farm for nearly two centuries. Seth Moseley owned it until his death in 1938 — a Connecticut farmer who also ran a hotel down in Manhattan, the Collingwood, which still stands as the Hotel Metro. In the 1920s a New York architect named Alfredo Taylor reworked the facade, adding the semi-elliptical arches over the entrance that are still there. After Moseley died, the farm became an inn, and the inn is still open today.

Nobody can say who Francis was. No death in the house is on record, no named witness, no paranormal team that ever came through and published a finding. She's a story guests pass to other guests — a woman in old-fashioned dress, gliding the hall and heading toward a separate empty house at the back of the property. One woman who lived there in the 1970s left a comment saying she'd had several encounters with the spirit. Some accounts add doors that lock and unlock on their own, lights that flicker. But the detail that keeps coming back is the gentlest one: people feel watched over, not threatened.

The harder mystery is in the basement. Full-height tunnels run under the house — passageways with no farming reason to exist. Ghost-history write-ups point to them and claim the place was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and Norfolk was a real one: the town had its own anti-slavery society and hid the Mars family from recapture in the 1790s. But no record ties this house to any of it. The town's history is documented. The tunnels under this particular floor are not.