Mark Twain House

Mark Twain's 25-room Hartford mansion, where he wrote Huckleberry Finn, is haunted by his daughter Susy who died of meningitis here at 24. Ghost Hunters found the house "filled with paranormal activity" after capturing a chair sliding on its own, and staff still smell Twain's cigar smoke in his third-floor billiard room 115 years after his death.

Mark Twain smoked roughly twenty-two cigars a day in the billiard room on the third floor. He's been dead since 1910. Staff and visitors still smell cigar smoke up there.

The Mark Twain House at 351 Farmington Avenue in Hartford is a 25-room High Gothic mansion designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter, where Samuel Clemens and his family lived from 1874 to 1891. Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and The Prince and the Pauper in this house. It is, by any measure, one of the most important literary sites in America. It is also, by multiple accounts, extremely haunted.

The most active ghost is probably Susy Clemens, Twain's eldest daughter. Susy died of spinal meningitis in the house in 1896 at age twenty-four. The family had already moved out by then, but Susy had returned to Hartford and was staying in the house when she got sick. She died in her old bedroom. The family never came back.

During the TAPS investigation for Ghost Hunters Season 5, Episode 23 (December 2009), investigators Jason and Grant sat on the staircase and watched an orb of light move from the master bedroom into Susy's bedroom. They believed it was Susy. In the billiard room during a follow-up investigation, a chair slid on its own while investigators Britt and K.J. were in the room, and they heard a female voice. In the nursery, Britt reported constant movement. In the dining room, Jason and Grant picked up two figures on a K2 meter. In the foyer, Kris and Amy detected a voice that belonged to neither of them.

TAPS concluded the house was "filled with paranormal activity." Most of the evidence was lost in a computer malfunction, which is either the worst luck in paranormal television or exactly what you'd expect from a house that doesn't want to be recorded.

The other suspected ghost is George Griffin, the family's butler, who is blamed for the knocking and banging sounds that echo through the house. Griffin was a formerly enslaved man who became a trusted member of the Clemens household. Twain wrote about him fondly. If Griffin is still in the house, he seems to be doing what he always did: maintaining the place on his own terms.

A semi-transparent woman in period clothing has been seen by multiple visitors walking through the house before vanishing. Researchers call her the Lady in White. Most think she's Susy. A security guard once watched a tray fly across a room and strike a pipe with enough force to make a sound.

The billiard room, where the cigar smell persists, was Twain's real workspace. He wrote there because the room was isolated on the third floor and his family couldn't hear him pacing and swearing at his manuscripts. The smell of his cigars in an empty room 115 years after his death is either the most persistent tobacco residue in history or something else.

Lorraine Warren visited the house. The Smoking Gun Research Agency investigated in 2009 and reported significant spirit energy. Steve Courtney wrote an entire book about the ghosts: We Shall Have Them With Us Always. The museum runs ghost tours every October and doesn't shy away from the subject.

Twain himself had complicated views on the supernatural. He attended seances. He wrote about prophetic dreams. He was skeptical of mediums but fascinated by what lies beyond death. Living next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was holding her own seances at the same time, the two most famous writers in the Nook Farm neighborhood were both, in their own ways, trying to talk to the dead. One of them may have succeeded.