About This Location
An 18th-century mansion overlooking Henniker, tied to one of New Hampshire's most romantic and tragic legends involving pirates and murder.
The Ghost Story
One of New Hampshire's most enduring legends began on July 26, 1720, when pirates boarded a ship called the Wolf as it carried emigrants from Londonderry, Ireland, to their namesake town in New Hampshire. As the pirate captain -- known in legend as Don Pedro -- prepared to kill everyone aboard, the cry of a newborn baby rose from below decks. Elizabeth Fulton Wilson had just given premature birth to a daughter, and the sound stopped the captain mid-order. He told Mrs. Wilson that if she named the child Mary, after his own mother, he would spare the ship and every soul on it. She agreed. The captain returned briefly to his own vessel and came back with a bolt of green brocaded silk, a christening gift for little Mary, which he said was for her wedding gown.
Mary Wilson grew up in Londonderry, New Hampshire, and on December 18, 1742, married James Wallace. The green silk was indeed fashioned into her wedding dress. The couple had several sons and lived together for thirty-nine years until James died on October 30, 1781. In 1798, the elderly Mary moved to Henniker to live with her son William. She died on February 13, 1814, at the remarkable age of ninety-three, and was buried in the Center Burying Ground in Henniker, where her grave can still be visited.
The haunting legend centers not on the burying ground but on a house in Henniker that Mary's son Robert built around 1760. The twist that makes this ghost story unique in New Hampshire is that much of it was deliberately fabricated. In 1917, a man named Louis "Gus" Roy from Wisconsin purchased Robert's old house and began calling it the "Ocean-Born Mary House," despite the fact that Mary herself had never lived there. Roy filled the home with antiques he claimed were Mary's, dressed his mother in period costumes, and offered paid tours. He invented tales of Captain Pedro visiting Mary in later years, marrying her, being murdered over buried treasure, and being interred beneath the hearthstone. He told visitors that Pedro's gold was buried somewhere on the property.
Roy's fabrications took on a life of their own. By the mid-twentieth century, the Ocean-Born Mary House had become one of New Hampshire's most famous haunted landmarks. Visitors reported seeing a six-foot-tall woman with red hair and green eyes dressed in white, appearing in the upstairs windows. Every October around midnight, witnesses claim a phantom coach-and-four pulls up to the house. A tall woman in flowing white emerges, walks to the side of the house, throws a packet into the old well, and boards the coach, which vanishes.
The reality is more complicated than the legend, but no less fascinating. Mary Wallace was a real person, the pirate encounter on the Wolf really happened, and the green silk wedding dress existed. What did not happen was any of Roy's invented romance between Mary and Captain Pedro. Yet the ghost sightings at the house -- reported by people who had no connection to Roy's tourism scheme -- persist to this day. The woman in white has been seen in upstairs windows by passersby who did not know the house's reputation. Whether the real Mary Wallace somehow became attached to her son's house, or whether decades of belief and storytelling conjured something entirely new, remains one of Henniker's most compelling mysteries.