Concord's Colonial Inn

Room 24 is the most requested room at Concord's Colonial Inn in Concord, Massachusetts, and the guests who ask for it usually don't know what it used to be. In the summer of 1966, two of them found out the hard way. Judith and M.P. Fellenz, newlyweds from Highland Falls, New York, checked in for their honeymoon and left after a single night.

Two weeks later, innkeeper Loring Grimes opened a letter from Judith. "I have always prided myself on being a fairly sane individual," she wrote, "but on the night of June 14 I began to have my doubts. On that night I saw a ghost in your Inn." She described a shadowy mass in the shape of a standing figure. It held still, then drifted to the foot of the bed and toward the fireplace, and was gone. Her husband took it lightly. The ghost, he said, "was included with the price of the room."

Here is what the Fellenzes hadn't been told. The eastern part of the inn was built around 1716 by Colonel James Minot. After the battle at the North Bridge on April 19, 1775 — half a mile from the front door, where the shot heard round the world was fired — a Minot descendant, Dr. Timothy Minot Jr., turned his home into a field hospital for the wounded militiamen. The Liberty Room was the ward. Room 24 was his operating room. The men who didn't survive were carried down to Room 27, which he used as a morgue.

Guests in Room 24 still report the television switching on by itself, whispers from the closet, the door slamming shut, and the feeling of being tucked into bed. Some describe a middle-aged woman the lore calls Rosemary, a nurse, and soldiers in colonial dress. The figure Judith saw has been guessed at over the years — Dr. Minot, Thoreau, even Emerson, a joke the innkeeper himself once floated — but nobody has pinned a name to it.

The rest of the house has its own residents. In the sitting room, people describe an older woman and a tall, slim gentleman in a top hat. A young girl in a bonnet has been seen near the front desk. SYFY's "Ghost Hunters" came to film an episode here, "A Shot in the Dark," and the inn has drawn paranormal investigators for years.

Henry David Thoreau lived in the building from 1835 to 1837, his aunts running it as a boarding house, eight years before Walden Pond. The eastern and central and western houses were combined into one inn under John Maynard Keyes in 1897, and the place has been taking guests ever since. None of which is why people book Room 24. They book it because it's the room with the surgeon in it.