Oceanic Hotel

At the Oceanic Hotel on Star Island, six miles off the New Hampshire coast, the story guests tell most often is about the staircase. An old man with white hair and a white beard floats down the main stairs, pauses on a landing, smiles at whoever is watching, then disappears into thin air. Nobody knows who he is. He just comes down the stairs and goes.

The thing that unsettles the staff more is upstairs, above the fourth floor. The fourth is the most active floor in the hotel, and the noise comes from the attic over it: heavy furniture being dragged across the boards. There are no guest rooms up there and nothing stored in it to drag. People hear it anyway. They hear it at night, in the season, with the hotel full of guests who came out for a quiet conference and a week away from the mainland. A woman dressed all in white is reported at the top of those stairs, near the attic door.

The Oceanic is a strange place to keep ghosts. The current hotel went up in 1876, built by a Boston spice merchant named John R. Poor after his first hotel burned down the year before. It is a rare survivor, the last of New Hampshire's grand Gilded Age resort hotels never to have had a major renovation. Since 1915 it has been run by the nonprofit Star Island Corporation, affiliated with the Unitarian Universalists, as a conference and retreat center. It opens roughly mid-June to mid-September. It does not advertise any of this. Most guests find out after the lights go out.

The island has earned its dead. On July 17, 1902, a whaleboat carrying Oceanic waitstaff capsized in a sudden squall, and 14 of them drowned, mostly young women, in what locals still call the Tragedy of the Waitresses. The boat went down off the next island over, watched from the porches of hotels across the Shoals. Some accounts tie the woman in white to one of those drowned waitresses; others reach further back, to Karen Christensen, one of two Norwegian women murdered in 1873 on neighboring Smuttynose Island. Neither attribution is more than folklore. No record connects a name to the figure on the stairs.

In 2009 the TV crew from Ghost Hunters came out to investigate. They climbed to the attic where the furniture drags, looking for whatever was making the sound. They found animal droppings and some skeletal remains, and decided it was mice and rats.

Which would close the case, except the staff weren't reporting scratching. They were reporting furniture, heavy and slow, dragged across a room with no furniture in it. The crew named the mice and went home, and the dragging above the fourth floor kept on.