Cocheco Mills

Cocheco Mill Number 1 burned in 1907 with the sprinkler system down. Six young women died on the looms. Their voices still work the empty floors.

"You mean my girls." That is what the janitor at Cocheco Mill Number 1 said when a new hire asked him about the strange things that happen in the building after hours. He was not alarmed, and he was not joking. He had been hearing them for years.

The mill sits at One Washington Center in downtown Dover, converted now into offices and apartments. From the street it looks like what it is: a five-story brick survivor of New England's textile boom. What happened inside on the evening of January 26, 1907, explains why people who work here late still turn around.

The fire broke out on the fourth floor around 6:30 PM. The sprinkler system was down for repairs, which was a detail that mattered. Flames ran through the cotton stores and the wooden floors within minutes. Fire crews from Dover and Portsmouth fought the blaze for 36 hours. Three stories collapsed into the pile below. The building was a million-dollar total loss. Six people died, most of them young women who worked the looms.

The mill was rebuilt, and it ran until the cotton industry moved south. By the time it was converted to mixed use decades later, the haunting had become an open secret among the maintenance crew.

What people report is specific and it repeats. Female voices in the two stairwells, often calling names by name. The sound of looms starting up on floors where no machinery has existed in decades. Childlike laughter nobody can quite place. Doors slamming on doors already closed. Lights in upper-floor windows when the building is empty, visible from the street. The auditorium seats are the spring-up kind that snap closed when you stand, and they are sometimes found the next morning in the down position, arranged in rows as if an audience had just sat through something.

The maintenance manager and his wife both say they've heard the voices. The janitor, the one with the line about "my girls," used to leave coffee in the break room at the end of his shift. He said it was just a habit.

Cocheco was a big mill. At its peak, Number 1 employed hundreds of women on floors packed with deafening machinery, where cotton dust hung thick enough to catch fire on its own. The 1907 blaze was not the first time the mill had burned, but it was the deadliest. The names of the six who died are recorded in the Dover fire history, though the building itself has no memorial on its brick walls.

A prisoner in the Dover jail watched the fire from his cell window that night and wrote a poem about it. The poem has been preserved. Its last stanza describes the sound of the collapse, and the silence afterward.

Current tenants don't get the history on the tour. Most of them find out on their own, usually around the second time they hear footsteps on the empty floor above theirs. The janitor retired a long time ago. His girls kept coming in.