Captain Grant's 1754 Inn

A 1754 inn in Preston built by Captain William Grant for his wife Mercy Adelaide, who never stopped waiting after he was lost at sea off Cape Hatteras. Adelaide appears at the foot of beds with two ghostly children, pulls down shower curtains, and has made this small B&B one of the most investigated haunted inns in New England, featured on Netflix, Travel Channel, and A&E.

Captain William Grant sailed out of Poquetanuck and never came back. He fell from the mast off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, leaving his wife Mercy Adelaide Avery pregnant with their third child. The house dates to the mid-1700s, right there in Poquetanuck Village, Preston. She waited for him in it.

Staff at the inn that now bears his name say she's still waiting.

Adelaide's room is the most active spot in the house. Guests wake up to see her standing at the foot of the bed, sometimes alone, sometimes with two small children beside her. She pulls the shower curtain down. Staff rehang it. She pulls it down again. This happens often enough that the inn stopped treating it as a plumbing issue years ago. Televisions flicker on and off. Objects relocate themselves between rooms. None of it is threatening. It reads like a woman who never stopped checking on the house her husband built for her.

The building has layers. During the Revolutionary War, Continental Army soldiers garrisoned here. During the Civil War, escaped enslaved people were sheltered inside. Captain Grant's house has been a lot of things over nearly three centuries. But the ghost story belongs to Adelaide.

She's not the only one. A young girl named Deborah Adams also haunts the property. One employee reported that Deborah walked straight through her. Visitors hear knocking sounds that don't correspond to anything structural. Paranormal investigators who've visited have recorded EVPs, including what they identified as a young girl's voice.

Carol Matsumoto bought the inn and has owned it for over 30 years. She wrote a whole book about it: The Ghosts of Captain Grant's Inn, published by Llewellyn Publications in 2017. The book covers events starting before she even purchased the property, including what she describes as miraculous coincidences that led her to acquire it. "I think what happened was we became known as haunted," Matsumoto told Fox 61. The inn now has more than 800 regulars.

Television has come calling more than once. A&E's Psychic Kids, If Walls Could Talk, Travel Channel's Portals to Hell in 2021, Netflix's 28 Days Haunted. CNN and USA Today have both listed it as a haunted inn. For a small bed and breakfast in rural eastern Connecticut, that's a lot of camera crews.

Adelaide is buried at nearby St. James Cemetery. The inn runs annual Halloween tours through St. James and the Poquetanuck Cemetery, connecting living guests to dead residents. The cemeteries are a short walk from the inn, close enough that the whole experience feels like one continuous story rather than separate attractions.

The shower curtain thing is almost funny. A ghost whose signature move is a minor bathroom inconvenience. But that's the light side. The heavy side is seeing her at the foot of the bed with her children, a mother who lost her husband to the Atlantic and spent the rest of her life (and apparently her afterlife) waiting for him to walk back through the door of the house he built for her.