In Brief
On the third floor of the Old State House in Hartford, Connecticut, behind the windows of a recreated museum of curiosities, people keep reporting a shadowy figure — the minister who built the collection in 1797 and never quite closed it down.
The Full Story
The Old State House at 800 Main Street in Hartford, Connecticut keeps a museum of two-headed livestock on its third floor, and a man in the windows of the room where it stands. Visitors and staff report a shadowy figure up there. They think they know who he is.
His name was Joseph Steward. In 1796 he set up a painting room in the brand-new capitol, and by June 1797 he had turned it into a Museum of Natural and Other Curiosities, charging 25 cents to look. The collection ran to a two-headed calf, a two-headed fetal pig, a dwarf cow, a "sagacious" goat, and wax figures of politicians. By some accounts it included a narwhal tusk sold as the horn of a unicorn. Steward was, at the same time, a Dartmouth-educated deacon of Hartford's First Church — a minister charging the public to see two-headed calves inside the seat of state government.
He ran it until he died, in 1822, at 69.
The collection has been recreated up there ever since. When curators rebuilding it needed a two-headed calf, the State House got word in 1996 of a stillborn one at a dairy farm in Michigan and brought it back. So the exhibit in those third-floor windows is, more or less, the one Steward stood in. And people keep seeing him in it.
Staff and visitors have reported footsteps, an elevator that moves on its own, and an incident where the heavy desks in the house chamber were found shoved into the center of the room overnight — though that last one is hard to pin to any date. In 2009 the Ghost Hunters team spent a night inside. In the empty Senate Room their recorder caught what sounded like a doorknob turning. In Steward's old museum room, with no women on the team, it caught "what sounded like a woman sighing." They left the case open.
Steward closed his museum two hundred years ago. The minister with the two-headed calf seems not to have gotten the message.
