In Brief
The Boardman House Inn in East Haddam, Connecticut bans smoking indoors. Guests in the library report the smell of old cigar smoke anyway — and sometimes a man in period clothing, seated in the chair, smoking one. He never turns up anywhere else.
The Full Story
At the Boardman House Inn in East Haddam, Connecticut, the first sign is the smell. Sit in the library of this 1860 bed-and-breakfast and you may catch the scent of heavy cigar smoke, even though smoking has been banned inside for years and no one on the property has lit anything. Then there's the man. Guests describe him in period clothing, seated in the reading chair, a cigar in hand — the posture of someone who owns the place.
Two separate haunted-place listings report him the same way, and the detail that holds across both is where he sits. Not the guest rooms, not the dining room, not the grounds. The library, every time, doing the same quiet thing.
Local lore holds that the man is Norman Boardman, who built the house and lived here until he died in 1905. The record is murkier than the story. The National Register lists it as the Luther Boardman House — Luther was Norman's father — while an 1880 map labels it the residence of N.S. Boardman. The inn and most sources credit Norman, but who actually built it is genuinely mixed.
The fortune behind the house was spoons. Luther Boardman set up his silversmith works in East Haddam in 1842, having patented a better mold for stamping britannia — a pewter-like metal — and in 1864 he and Norman formed L. Boardman & Son. The business peaked in the 1860s, the decade the mansion went up: a Mansard roof, a three-story tower, heavy Italianate cornice brackets, a front porch on squat square columns.
By 1880 cheaper tinned-iron spoons were taking the market, and the company faded. A fire destroyed the factory in 1907. The house outlasted all of it. It's a contributing property in the East Haddam Historic District, on the National Register since 1983, and it opened as an inn in 2010 with five guest rooms — the French Room, the Boardman Room, the Garden Suite.
There's nothing more than the reports. No investigation, no recording, no named witness, no dated sighting. Just the smell that shouldn't be there, and a man in the chair, in a house that hasn't allowed a lit cigar in years.
