Boardman House Inn

A Victorian-era Italianate villa in East Haddam built around 1860 by silversmith Norman Sweet Boardman, who may still be using the library. Guests consistently report the smell of cigar smoke and sightings of a man in period clothing sitting among the antiques in the same room, always calm, always in the library, never anywhere else in the house.

The cigar smell is the part that gets people. Guests walk into the library at the Boardman House Inn and catch it immediately, rich and heavy, the kind of tobacco you'd expect from a man with money in the 1890s. Smoking has been banned inside for years. Nobody on the property has a cigar. But the scent lingers, particularly around the leather chairs and the nineteenth-century furnishings, and then it fades.

Sometimes there's a man in the chair.

He wears period clothing. He doesn't look up. He doesn't acknowledge anyone in the room. He sits among the antiques with the posture of someone who owns the place, which, if the local theory is right, he did. For forty-five years.

Norman Sweet Boardman built this house around 1860 at 8 Norwich Road in East Haddam. His father Luther had established a silverware factory in town in 1842, manufacturing Britannia spoons, nickel ware, and silver-plated flatware. By 1864, the two had formed L. Boardman and Son. The business made them wealthy enough to build an Italianate villa with a Mansard roof, elaborate cornice brackets, and a three-story tower that still dominates the view from Norwich Road. Norman lived here until he died on July 21, 1905, at sixty-four.

The house tells you how well the Boardmans did. Two and a half stories of Victorian ambition, documented on an 1880 bird's-eye-view map as the residence of N.S. Boardman. The National Register of Historic Places lists it as part of the East Haddam Historic District. After the Boardman era it cycled through owners, spent time as an antiques shop, and eventually became the luxury bed and breakfast it is now.

Here's the interesting thing: the ghost only shows up in the library. Not the guest rooms, not the dining room, not the grounds. Just one room. People describe the same scene every time. A man, old clothes, a cigar, the reading chairs. Then nothing. The consistency makes it harder to dismiss as imagination. If guests were reporting random ghosts in random rooms, you could chalk it up to old-house nerves. But they keep describing the same man in the same spot doing the same thing.

East Haddam punches above its weight for hauntings. The Goodspeed Opera House sits a short walk away with its own phantom. The abandoned ghost town of Johnsonville is a quick drive north. The Boardman House fits the neighborhood, but its ghost is quieter than the others. No slamming doors. No rearranged furniture. No 3 a.m. hallway drama.

Norman Boardman (if it's Norman) just wants to sit in his library with his cigar. He built the house, furnished the library, and apparently decided that dying wasn't enough reason to stop using it. The inn doesn't advertise the haunting. It's a proper Connecticut River Valley bed and breakfast, more focused on weekend charm than paranormal tourism. But the library is still there, the antiques are still there, and every so often, so is the smell of something nobody lit.