Captain Daniel Packer Inne

There's a tavern in Mystic, Connecticut, at 32 Water Street, where small fingerprints keep showing up on one upstairs window. The Captain Daniel Packer Inne has served food and drink for decades, but the far-left pane on the second floor is the one people talk about. Child-sized prints appear on it, and they come back. Look up from the street, people say, and a little girl is sometimes waving from behind that same glass.

They say her name was Ada Byron Clift, a young relative of the Packer family. By the accounts told there, she died of scarlet fever in 1874, in a second-floor bedroom, at seven years old. That room is the one behind the far-left window. She is the inne's most famous ghost, and by every telling, she never left it.

Guests and staff report her on the staircase up to the second floor, and in the restrooms — a small figure running through the rooms, disembodied giggling, a game of hide-and-seek with the children dining downstairs. Courtney McInvale, who runs a Mystic ghost tour, says that on her first visit she asked the owner, "Do you have a daughter? because I saw a little girl." The bar keeps notebooks of handwritten accounts. The menu keeps a cocktail named "Ada's Choice."

The man who built the place is the other ghost, and he keeps to the floor below. Captain Daniel Packer finished the building in 1756, ran a rope ferry across the Mystic River, and died in 1825. Late at night, staff report heavy footsteps downstairs — "the sound of boots walking across empty rooms," as one account puts it. Doors slam on their own. Glasses fly off the shelves.

No death record for Ada has surfaced — the story is well-worn lore, not a documented fact. But the prints keep returning to the glass. Staff wipe them away. They come back, small, on the window of the room where the girl is said to have died.