John Paul Jones House

Sarah Wentworth Purcell rented rooms to John Paul Jones out of her Portsmouth boarding house in 1777. She's still in the upstairs window, watching.

Sarah Wentworth Purcell has been watching the harbor from an upstairs window at the corner of Middle and State for more than two centuries, and people walking down Middle Street still keep looking up. She's pale enough that they check twice. She's been waiting for two different men, one of whom built her the house and the other of whom made it famous, and neither of them ever came back.

Sarah's husband, sea captain Gregory Purcell, built this yellow Georgian as a wedding present for her in 1758. The gambrel roof, the eight fireplaces, the bones of the house that still stand at the corner of Middle and State streets are Purcell's work. He died suddenly in 1776, leaving Sarah in debt with five children, and she did the only practical thing a widow in eighteenth-century Portsmouth could do. She turned her home into a boarding house.

The most famous tenant was John Paul Jones, the Scottish-born naval captain whose "I have not yet begun to fight" would become one of the most quoted lines in American history. Jones boarded with Sarah twice. First in 1777, when the Continental Congress sent him to Portsmouth to oversee construction of the sloop-of-war Ranger on Badger's Island. He sailed her across the Atlantic and into the books. Then again in 1781 and 1782, when he came back as a hero to supervise the fitting-out of the ship America. Sarah kept house for the most famous fighting sailor of the American Revolution. He ate at her table. He slept in her rooms. Then he left.

The house sat through the nineteenth century and would have been torn down in 1917 like a lot of colonial Portsmouth did if the Portsmouth Historical Society hadn't bought it. It's a National Historic Landmark now, open to the public as a museum. And somewhere inside the museum, at least according to a century of docents, volunteers, and paranormal investigators, two ghosts are still there.

Sarah is the one people see. The figure in the upstairs window, described as a pale woman in period dress looking out toward the Piscataqua, has been reported by enough passersby that the museum mentions her in its own programming. Staff have caught her from the corner of their eyes walking through rooms during closing checks. Nothing aggressive. Just a woman moving through her own house, waiting for someone to come in through the front door.

Jones is the one people hear. Investigators running EVP sessions in the upstairs bedroom he rented have come away with audio they say is Jones himself, responding to questions about the Ranger and about his life in Portsmouth. The evidence there is only as good as the investigators and the equipment, which is true of every EVP ever recorded, but multiple teams working independently have come away with responses in that specific room. The museum does not advertise this. The paranormal community has been circulating the recordings for decades anyway.

The Portsmouth Historical Society leans toward Gregory in its docent scripts, which is the sentimental read. The paranormal community leans toward Jones, which makes for a better ghost story. Sarah, in the window, declines to clarify. She just watches the harbor, the same way she watched it when Gregory's ship was due back, the same way she watched it when the Ranger cleared the mouth of the Piscataqua and took her most famous lodger out of the house for good.