In Brief
The Canfield Casino in Saratoga Springs, New York is a Gilded Age gambling palace turned museum. It ran mostly quiet until staff mounted an exhibit of antique dresses worn by long-dead local women. After that, the third floor stopped behaving.
The Full Story
The Canfield Casino in Saratoga Springs, New York is a museum now, but for years it kept a woman in white who walks the third floor. Staff see her appear out of nowhere and move room to room in a Victorian dress. Many of them think they know who she is.
"People say they see a woman in white who goes from room to room, and many of us believe that it's Reubena Walworth," the museum's director, Jamie Parillo, has said. Reubena was a real Saratoga woman, a nurse who cared for soldiers at Camp Wikoff during the Spanish-American War, caught typhoid, and died young. She was the daughter of Ellen Hardin Walworth, a founder of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Walworth family's possessions are kept in the building, mostly on the third floor, which is where most of the activity stays. The earliest modern sighting goes back to the mid-1990s, when a woman in Victorian dress appeared suddenly in front of a visitor.
The building opened in 1870 as a gambling club for John Morrissey, a former bare-knuckle prizefighter turned congressman. He ran it on three rules: no women in the gambling rooms, cash only, and no locals. Richard Canfield, the "King of Gamblers," later poured a fortune into the place and made Saratoga the American Monte Carlo. Reformers shut the gambling down, and the building became the Saratoga Springs History Museum.
For a long time the strangeness was sporadic. Then the museum hung an exhibit called "Fashion of Saratoga Springs," antique clothing once worn by prominent local women, all of them long dead. After that opened, the reports spiked. From roughly 2007 through 2010 the incidents piled up. At a 2009 exhibition opening, a patron had a glass slapped out of her hand by nothing anyone could see. A volunteer and an employee watched a garbage-can lid leap into the air and crash to the floor on its own.
There's phantom cigar smoke in non-smoking rooms, which fits a building that spent decades as a men's gambling club. Cold spots. Hair pulled, shoulders tapped. Objects moving in locked rooms. The reports got loud enough that SyFy's "Ghost Hunters" came to investigate in 2010, and in 2019 the Travel Channel ranked the place number 4 on its list of America's most terrifying. The clothes are in the permanent collection now, and the activity never settled back down.
Parillo doesn't claim to have seen a ghost. He claims something else. "I have never seen her, I have never seen a ghost in the building, but I've been touched. I've had doors fly open and closed."
