In Brief
The Stowe House at 73 Forest Street in Hartford, CT was home to a woman who buried four children and spent her last years trying to reach them. Harriet held séances; her husband Calvin saw the dead at his bedside. Whatever lingers here may be what the household invited in.
The Full Story
The Harriet Beecher Stowe House at 73 Forest Street in Hartford, Connecticut is the gray brick cottage where the author of *Uncle Tom's Cabin* spent the last 23 years of her life. She did not move into a haunted house. By every account, she tried to make one.
Stowe had buried child after child. Charley died of cholera in 1849, not yet two. Her son Henry drowned in the Connecticut River in 1857 at 19, a Dartmouth student, and she was tormented that the boy had died "unconverted." Her son Frederick, wounded in the head by a shell fragment at Gettysburg, drank himself loose from the family and vanished on his way to San Francisco in 1871, never heard from again.
The hard Calvinism she was raised on had no comfort for that. Spiritualism — "the belief that spirits of the dead can and do communicate with the living" — did. So Stowe attended séances and sat with mediums through her Hartford years, trying to keep talking to the children she had lost.
Her husband Calvin needed no medium. A theology professor, he saw ghosts regularly and wrote about it — fairies and demons at his bedside in the night, and the apparition of his first wife, Eliza, who had died young in 1834. The Stowes named one of their twin daughters Eliza, after her.
Harriet died in her upstairs bedroom in 1896. The Stowe Center runs the house now, and staff and visitors report things no one can place: window shades in the parlor raising and lowering on their own, footsteps in empty rooms, flashes of light from the bedrooms, an apparition in the old carriage house that's now the visitor center.
In 2010, the *Ghost Hunters* team filmed an episode here. By the episode's account they explained away the carriage-house figure as a trick of light, then caught a sound in a closed and empty room they couldn't place: checkers sliding across a board.
No single ghost is named here. In a house where the living spent decades calling out to the dead, maybe the name was never going to be the point.
