In Brief
A ruined stone staircase rises out of the forest floor in West Chesterfield, New Hampshire, and ends in the open air — the second floor it once led to burned away in 1962. Hikers call it the Stairway to Heaven, and some say Madame Sherri still waits at the top.
The Full Story
At the top of a ruined stone staircase in West Chesterfield, New Hampshire, visitors say they keep seeing a woman in fine dress standing on the top step — and then she's gone, flickering out into the mist before anyone can reach her. They take her for Madame Sherri, who built the castle these stairs once climbed into, and whose lavish weekend parties the woods around here never quite let go of.
The staircase is what everyone comes for. It rises out of the forest floor and stops in mid-air, leading up to a second floor that no longer exists. Hikers call it the Stairway to Heaven.
She was born Antoinette Bramare in Paris in 1878, trained as a seamstress, and danced in French clubs before she sailed to New York in 1911. There she designed costumes for Broadway, including the Ziegfeld Follies, and took the name Sherri. In 1929 she became a New Hampshire resident, bought hundreds of acres in West Chesterfield, and had the Castle built as a summer chateau for her city guests.
It was a strange and lavish place. Live trees grew up through the roof. The basement held a red-clothed bistro with a long bar, animal furs on the walls, mirror-lined bathrooms, and a cobra-backed chair she called the Queen's Throne. She kept it for the guests — and slept across the road in a bare farmhouse with no power, heat, or running water, summer after summer for some 30 years.
The lifestyle wasn't hers to afford for long. A Hollywood costume designer, Charles LeMaire, subsidized it for years, and by 1937 the property was mortgaged to him. His support stopped after the war, and the money ran out. The castle burned in October 1962, and Sherri died three years later in a Brattleboro nursing home, on public assistance, a ward of the town.
The other story locals tell is the one they actually believe. On summer nights, some say, you can still hear big-band music and party laughter drifting up from the rubble, as if the Jazz-Age weekends never stopped.
For decades you could climb the staircase yourself. Then, overnight on July 11, 2021, the top Roman arch gave way. The land trust roped the whole thing off. "Gravity is constantly at work, and this is a ruin," the Forest Society's president told the Boston Globe — "so it's no particular surprise that pieces fell down." The stairs to nowhere lead nowhere now, even for the living.
