1754 House (Curtis House Inn)

The 1754 House in Woodbury, Connecticut — known for generations as the Curtis House Inn — has a guest room people don't always sleep through. In Room 1, guests tell it, a man in old-fashioned clothes stomps in, drops into a seat, peels off his boots, and fades into the wall. One account has him grumbling first: "I've had a rough ride."

Room 1 was an innkeeper's quarters. The innkeeper, by the legend, was Lucius Foot, who ran the place in the 1850s and won big at a high-stakes poker game one night. He cut home through the cemetery and never made it. They found him the next morning frozen to death in a shed behind St. Paul's Episcopal Church, his winnings gone. No record of the murder survives — it lives only in the retelling — but the man in Room 1 keeps coming back from the cold.

He isn't the only one. On the second floor, staff blame a young woman they call Sally for covers pulled off the beds in Room 16, and for a chair found during renovations twisted around to face the wall. "Sally, which is what we call her, could not stand it," former owner T.J. Brennan said. Down in the basement, the help report a man named Joe, a dishwasher said to have died in the 1980s, sitting on the stairs eating a plate of mashed potatoes, the way he did in life. "I can't go down there," one young staffer told Brennan. "There is a guy sitting on the stairs eating his mashed potatoes."

The house dates to the 1730s, built by Anthony Stoddard before it ever took in guests. Lorraine Warren said she'd "been aware of the haunting of the Curtis House for a very long time." Gordon Ramsay walked the building for Hotel Hell in 2014.

Stoddard's portrait used to hang upstairs. Staff disliked the way it watched them. They moved it down to the dining room — where it still hangs, where everyone eats.