Mark Twain House

The Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut is a no-smoking museum, and the billiard room on the third floor keeps filling with cigar smoke anyway. That room was Twain's writing workspace, set off on its own so the family couldn't hear him pace and swear at his manuscripts, and he was a famously heavy smoker. Staff and visitors report the smell drifting through it long after his last cigar.

The other thing they report is a woman. A semi-transparent woman in Victorian white, walking room to room before she vanishes. It is the most common sighting in the house, and most who tell it are fairly sure who she is.

Samuel Clemens built the 25-room mansion in 1874 and lived here with his family until 1891 — the years he wrote *Tom Sawyer*, *Life on the Mississippi*, and *Huckleberry Finn*. Then financial losses pushed the family to Europe, and they left the house behind.

His eldest daughter, Susy, came back without them. She had been staying in Elmira, New York, and traveled to the Hartford house she loved to visit it. She fell ill there. It was spinal meningitis, and on August 18, 1896, she died in it — laid in her parents' own mahogany bed, the one with carved angels on the posts that detached, the angels she and her sisters had played with as children. She was 24. The family's Irish maid, Katy Leary, slept on a sofa in the room and cared for her to the end. Her mother and sister had set sail to reach her. They were still mid-Atlantic when she passed.

The Clemenses never lived in the house again. And the woman in white that staff and visitors keep reporting, room to room — they think she's Susy, the daughter who came home and never left, though no one at the museum will say it's her for certain.

What the museum will tell you is plainer. "People hear things," the director of interpretation said. "They'll hear a door close and there's nobody there."