In Brief
Book Room 314 at the Omni Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and guests report waking to an elegant woman seated at the foot of the bed, calmly combing her hair. It was her private summer suite. The hotel still owns the story.
The Full Story
Guests who book Room 314 at the Omni Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire report waking in the night to a woman seated at the foot of the bed. She is elegant, in Victorian dress, sometimes combing or brushing her hair, watching them sleep. By morning she's gone.
The staff have a name for her. They call her the Princess.
Room 314 was Carolyn Stickney's private summer apartment, and it still holds her four-poster bed. Her husband, Joseph Stickney, was a Concord coal broker who spent $1.7 million building the great hotel here between 1900 and 1902. He brought in 250 Italian artisans for the granite and stucco masonry, hung Tiffany stained glass, and wrapped the building in a veranda 903 feet long. At the grand opening he raised a glass and said, "Look at me, gentlemen ... for I am the poor fool who built all this!" Within a year of that opening, he was dead.
Carolyn kept summering at the hotel for the next decade. She dined in the main dining room every night of the season, and she built the Stickney Memorial Chapel in her late husband's memory. In 1913 she remarried into the French Faucigny-Lucinge family and took the title that stuck to her ghost: the Princess.
She is reported descending the main staircase toward the dining room and vanishing partway down. Guests in 314 describe lights switching on and off, light taps on the door with no one outside, objects that disappear and turn up again in their original spot, bathtubs that fill on their own, and the scent of floral perfume drifting through the room at night.
In 2008, the SyFy team from *Ghost Hunters* spent a night in the room. In their recordings, a woman's voice answers back. "Hello? Is there someone there?" she says on one. On another, after they ask the Princess to let them know she's present: "Of course I'm in here. Where are you?"
She died in 1936, not here but in Providence. No record ties her death to the room she keeps returning to; the woman in 314 is lore and eyewitness account, never a documented death on the floor. The hotel doesn't argue with any of it. This is the place where 730 delegates from 44 nations founded the IMF and the World Bank in 1944, where every bedroom afterward carried a plaque naming the country whose delegate had slept there, a National Historic Landmark since 1986. And it puts the whole story of Room 314 on its own official ghost-stories page, which is a telling thing for a luxury resort to do.
