Notchland Inn

A headstone for Nancy Barton sits in the parlor of the Notchland Inn. She froze to death in 1788 chasing a fiancé who stole her dowry.

The Notchland Inn keeps a tombstone in the parlor. It reads '1778. Nancy Barton. Died in a snowstorm in pursuit of her faithless lover.' The date on the stone is a little off, by ten years from the version most local historians accept, but the rest of the inscription is the story in miniature.

Nancy Barton worked as a maid at a boarding house in Jefferson, New Hampshire, and had saved enough for a dowry by the winter of 1788. Her fiancé took the money and left without her. She suspected which way he'd gone, packed up, and set out on foot through the snow to catch him. Thirty miles of mountain trail in December. She reached the site where the Notchland Inn now sits and found a campsite, still warm, already abandoned. He'd moved on. She kept going, ran out of strength, and froze to death by the brook.

The landscape kept her name. Nancy Brook, Nancy Pond, Nancy Falls, Mount Nancy, Nancy's Rock. That's more real estate than most ghosts ever get.

The present Notchland Inn was built in the 1920s on the site of the older Mt. Crawford House tavern, where Nancy's pursuer had camped. A trail sign placed in 1931 ended up indoors, and it's the one you'll see in the front parlor now. Guests check in, notice the tombstone, and get the whole story before dinner.

The ghost stories at Notchland are soft. Nobody reports anything hostile. The one most often repeated involves a couple who napped in mid-afternoon and woke to find the name 'Abigail' written in steam on the bathroom mirror. No one had run water in hours. The couple didn't know an Abigail. The name was just there.

Another guest came back to his room after an afternoon walk to find a bouquet of fresh flowers on the bed and 'Happy Anniversary' written in lipstick on the mirror. He went to tell his wife. When they came back together, the flowers were gone and the lipstick was gone.

Staff mention other things, too: the sense of someone in a room that's empty, a figure in a long dress gliding through a hallway, no banging doors, nothing hostile. For a ghost story in the White Mountains, it's unusually gentle. Nancy, if it is Nancy, seems to be keeping house rather than haunting it.

Hart's Location, where the inn sits, is the smallest town in New Hampshire by population. In the 2020 census it had 41 people. The inn anchors one of the most dramatic stretches of Route 302 in Crawford Notch, surrounded by conservation land and some of the White Mountains' hardest-to-reach waterfalls. Nancy Brook cuts through the property. You can hear it from the porch.

The Nancy Barton story is also uncommonly well documented for 18th-century New England folklore. Lucy Crawford, whose family essentially built tourism in the Notch, wrote it down in her 1846 'History of the White Mountains.' The date discrepancy between the stone (1778) and the accepted historical date (1788) probably traces to a copyist error decades after the fact, not to there being two Nancys.

Ask the owners and they'll talk about her. She's been part of the inn since before anyone running it now was born. Somewhere between a resident, a legend, and a piece of furniture that happens to leave flowers on beds.