Oceanic Hotel

At the Oceanic Hotel on Star Island, an old man with a white beard was seen floating down the main staircase, pausing on the landing, and vanishing.

The story on Star Island goes that an old man with a white beard was seen floating down the main staircase of the Oceanic Hotel, paused on a landing, smiled at whoever was looking, and vanished. That one gets repeated enough that it's probably the place to start. The hotel has a lot of ghost stories for a single building, but most of them trace back to a single stretch of sea and two centuries of bad luck in it.

Star Island is one of the nine Isles of Shoals, sitting about ten miles off the coast of Portsmouth. It's the only one open to casual visitors, and the Oceanic Hotel is essentially the whole reason it's open. Built during the mid-19th-century island-resort boom, the hotel runs seasonally, feeds a hundred guests family-style in a big dining hall, and has one of the best wraparound porches in New England. Most people come for the porch, the quiet, and the stars. The ghosts are a bonus most of them don't know about until the lights go out.

The fourth floor is the one guests talk about. The top floor of the Oceanic is mostly attic space, and for years staff and guests have described sounds coming from up there that don't have an obvious explanation: drawers opening and closing, furniture moving across the floor, footsteps. There are no guest rooms up there to account for it. Any time someone walks up to check, it stops.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, who visited the Isles of Shoals in September 1852 and kept a journal about it, wrote about a local ghost called Old Bab. Old Bab was supposed to walk the stretch of coast between the hotel and the sea, never speaking, never coming close. The Hawthorne mention is part of why the Star Island hauntings get taken more seriously than most island folklore, since he was writing it down as reported legend before the hotel boom really got going.

The other presence guests describe is a woman in old-fashioned clothing. She drifts through corridors, pauses in doorways, and walks through walls. She's usually attributed to one of two women. The first is one of the 1902 drowning victims, when Captain Frederick Miles' whale boat capsized in a sudden squall off Star Island on July 19. Seventeen people were aboard, including hotel staff and guests. Multiple waitresses drowned. The Rev. Charles E. Park watched the whole thing from the hotel porch.

The second woman is Karen Christensen, one of the two Norwegian immigrants murdered by Louis Wagner on neighboring Smuttynose in March 1873. Her death is the most notorious event in the Shoals' history, and her ghost is reported up and down the island chain, not just on Smuttynose where she was killed. Some of the Oceanic sightings get pinned on her.

Staff who work the full summer season tend to collect their own stories. Rooms where something moves the bedding before morning. Guests who won't go back to particular floors. A night cook who swore a woman stood at the end of his bed for a full minute and then walked backward through the wall. None of it gets written down in any official way. The hotel doesn't market the hauntings, and the island's current operator, Star Island Corporation, runs it primarily as a conference and retreat center, not a ghost-tour destination.

Which is part of why it stays interesting. The Oceanic isn't leaning on the stories. The stories are leaning on the building, and they've been leaning for 170 years. A night cook, backing through his bedroom wall. A white beard pausing on the landing. An attic that walks while the top floor sits empty.