Captain Grant's 1754 Inn

At Captain Grant's 1754 Inn in Poquetanuck Village, Preston, Connecticut, there's a shower curtain in the Adelaide Room that won't stay up. Staff rehang it on its rod, and it comes down again — often enough that the inn long ago stopped treating it as a plumbing problem.

They have a name for who's doing it. They say it's Mercy Adelaide Avery, and the room is named for her. Guests report seeing her, too: a woman in a colonial gown standing at the foot of the bed, sometimes holding the hands of two small children.

To understand her, you go back to the man who built the house. Captain William Grant raised it in 1754 for his wife Mercy and their children. Then he was lost at sea, off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Mercy stayed. She lived in the home he'd built into her 80s, and three generations of Grants followed her through its rooms. By the lore, she never stopped tending the house — which is one way to read a curtain that keeps coming down in the room that bears her name.

She isn't the only one reported there. A young girl named Deborah Adams, said to be buried in a cemetery near the inn, is told to have walked straight through a skeptical employee, and has turned up in the Adelaide Room as well. Staff also report televisions clicking on and off, loud banging, objects vanishing and reappearing, and Mercy spotted on the main staircase. Investigators say they've recorded voices on the property, one of them a young girl's.

Carol Matsumoto bought the place in 1994 and opened it to guests in 1995; she later wrote a book about its ghosts. The inn calls itself Connecticut's most haunted, and television crews have agreed enough to film here — Travel Channel's "Portals to Hell" in 2021, Netflix's "28 Days Haunted" in 2022.

And the Adelaide Room, where the curtain keeps falling, stays booked all year.