Madame Sherri Forest Ruins

Madame Sherri's Roaring Twenties castle burned on October 18, 1962, leaving a grand stone staircase climbing into empty air.

The staircase at Madame Sherri Forest is what gets people. It climbs twenty-some feet out of the forest floor in Chesterfield and stops mid-air, pointing at a second floor that hasn't existed since 1962. The legend says if you stand on the top step at midnight, something pushes you off. It got so popular in the 2000s that the Chesterfield Historical Society started warning hikers about vandalism and broken ankles before the upper section of the staircase finally collapsed on July 20, 2021.

Madame Sherri was born Antoinette Bramare in Paris in 1878. She trained as a seamstress, danced in French clubs under the name Antoinette DeLilas, and married a conman named Anthony Macaluso in 1909. By the 1920s she was designing costumes for the Ziegfeld Follies and throwing Manhattan parties that landed in gossip columns. In 1929 she bought 600 acres of West Chesterfield forest and told local craftsmen to build her a castle without blueprints. She walked the property putting stakes in the ground. The result was part Roman ruin, part French chalet, with live trees growing through the roof, a basement bistro, and a cobra-backed chair she called the Queen's Throne.

The parties are the reason anyone still talks about the place. Madame Sherri would drive up from New York in a chauffeured Packard wearing a fur coat and nothing underneath, then stage weekend parties with Broadway performers who'd crossed state lines to get wilder than New York allowed. Neighbors remembered the music for decades. That's the detail that seeded the rest of the haunting.

Her husband died in 1924. By the late 1940s her money was gone. She spent thirty summers in an unheated farmhouse across the road with no electricity or running water, and ended up on public assistance in a Brattleboro nursing home. The castle sat empty, got vandalized through the war years, and burned to the foundation on October 18, 1962. Madame Sherri died almost exactly three years later, on October 20, 1965, at 87.

What people report now is mostly auditory. Laughter from the direction of the ruins when no one's there. Big band music bleeding through the trees on summer nights. The occasional party-sized crowd of voices, heard clearly enough that hikers have circled back looking for the source. The staircase story is the one that draws people. The music story is the one locals actually believe.

A fan named Anne Stokes bought the property after Sherri's death and eventually gave it to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, which manages it as the Ann Stokes Loop. It's free, the parking lot off Route 9 is small, and the foundation walls and chimney remain. The staircase that made the place famous is roped off now, its top half a pile of cut stone in the leaves. Plenty of hikers stand at the bottom anyway, looking up at the empty air where the second floor used to be.