In Brief
The Notchland Inn in Hart's Location, New Hampshire leans a gravestone against its parlor fireplace. It marks Nancy Barton, a teenage servant who froze in the snow chasing a thief. Guests say she never left the place.
The Full Story
The Notchland Inn, a granite mansion in Hart's Location, New Hampshire, keeps a gravestone in its front parlor. It leans against the fireplace where guests can read it on the way to dinner: "Nancy of Jefferson, New Hampshire perished here in 1778. Following the wild path of the Notch for thirty miles in a vain attempt to overtake her faithless lover, she perished in a snow storm by the stream and is buried here."
The stone is older than the inn's ghost stories, and the woman it names is older than that.
Nancy Barton was a servant, commonly given as sixteen, working for Colonel Joseph Whipple on his farm in Jefferson. She fell for a fellow farmhand named Jim Swindell, and she trusted him with her savings so the two could marry. Jim took the money and left without her, walking out into the dead of winter through Crawford Notch.
Nancy went after him on foot. The way through Crawford Notch is roughly thirty miles of snow-covered trail, and she covered about twenty of them before she found the cold remains of a fire by the path. Then she crossed a brook that soaked her dress through, sat down beside the water to rest, and froze to death there. A search party found her body later.
The marker carries the year 1778, though some older tellings put her death in the winter of 1788; the date carved in stone is the one the inn keeps. It started as a trail sign by the brook in 1931, then moved indoors. The brook still runs past the property, audible from the porch, and it carries her name now, along with half the surrounding landscape: Nancy Brook, Nancy Cascades, Nancy Pond, Mount Nancy.
Guests and staff report a "not alone" feeling in certain rooms and a woman who glides down a hallway and is gone. The sources only call her a woman; visitors are the ones who decide she's Nancy. One guest said he woke from a nap to find the name "Abigail" written in steam on a bathroom mirror, though no water had run for hours. Another came back from a walk to fresh flowers on the bed and "Happy Anniversary" in lipstick on the glass, both gone by the time he returned with his wife.
Nothing here is hostile. Flowers, a name in the steam, a woman keeping to the halls. Whoever she is, she seems to be keeping house rather than haunting it.
