Nassau Inn

Princeton's 1756 Nassau Inn hosted Revolutionary safety meetings and made Historic Hotels' 2025 Top 25 Most Haunted list without naming a ghost.

The Nassau Inn keeps one of the strangest haunted-hotel profiles in the country. It was founded in 1756, sits at 10 Palmer Square East directly opposite Princeton University, joined Historic Hotels of America in 2024, and was recognized on the HHA Top 25 Most Haunted Hotels list in 2025. The inn itself has never officially named a single ghost.

What it has is nearly 270 years of history on a block where the Battle of Princeton was fought. The Revolutionary-era Committee of Safety held meetings at the inn during the war. British officers occupied the property during the 1776 occupation of town. The Battle of Princeton happened in the streets outside in January 1777. The inn survived, was moved to its current Palmer Square building under the Edward Palmer redevelopment before World War II, and has hosted guests more or less continuously since. F. Scott Fitzgerald used to drink here while he was writing This Side of Paradise.

The Yankee Doodle Tap Room is the piece most visitors photograph. Norman Rockwell painted the mural on the tap room wall in 1937. It's titled Yankee Doodle Comes to Town and shows Revolutionary soldiers riding into Princeton. Regulars have been drinking under it for almost a century. The room is wood-paneled and low-lit. Old boards creak under customers who've been coming for decades.

The most-cited source on the inn's haunting doesn't document a single specific incident. Thinkaloud.net's writeup describes the building as creepy the way a 270-year-old building is creepy: the creaks, the shadows, and, as the author puts it, "what your brain does in a genuinely old building." That's the Nassau Inn's entire ghost file. No named woman in a certain dress. No specific room number everybody asks for. No "check into 219 at your own risk."

Aaron Burr Jr.'s name comes up in Princeton ghost tours often enough that visitors think he haunts the inn specifically. He doesn't. Burr grew up in a house nearby, and he and his father Aaron Burr Sr. are buried in Princeton Cemetery a few blocks up Nassau Street. Tour guides loop the inn in because the bar is where the evening tour ends, not because the man with the dueling pistol drinks there. Princeton Alumni Weekly is explicit that Burr Sr., the college president, haunts his old Nassau Hall office. The inn gets Burr Jr. by proximity.

The Nassau Inn is the rare haunted building that trades on atmosphere instead of legend. A 1756 inn on a Revolutionary battlefield, a Rockwell mural on the tap room wall, Fitzgerald's ghost at the bar if anyone's is, and nothing else. No named phantoms. No "most active" room. No canonical haunting. Just old floorboards and a HHA ranking that put it next to the Stanley and the Crescent.

A bar this old in a town this battered by war doesn't need a named ghost to earn the Top 25. It just needs to keep the floors creaking.