About This Location
A historic 1832 farmhouse along the Kancamagus Highway, preserved by the US Forest Service as a window into White Mountain life.
The Ghost Story
One fall afternoon in 1891, forty-one-year-old Thomas Colbath told his wife Ruth he was stepping out to run some errands. 'I'll be back in a little while,' he said, and walked down the road from their farmstead in Passaconaway, a remote settlement along what is now the Kancamagus Highway. That evening, Ruth lit a lantern and placed it in the front window to guide him home. She would repeat this ritual every single night for the next thirty-nine years. The Russell-Colbath House was built in 1832 and is the sole surviving original structure from the vanished town of Passaconaway, which once stood in the Kancamagus Pass area of Albany, New Hampshire. The house had been in the Russell family before passing to the Colbaths, and by the time Thomas disappeared, it was already the most isolated homestead for miles. What happened to Thomas Colbath remains a mystery. Some accounts suggest he simply abandoned Ruth for another life. Others speculate he met with foul play in the unforgiving White Mountains. Whatever the truth, Ruth Colbath never wavered in her vigil. Through the brutal New Hampshire winters when temperatures plunged below zero, through the slow decay of a farmstead maintained by a woman alone, through nearly four decades of silence, that lantern burned in the window. Ruth died in November 1930 at the age of eighty, the lamp still faithfully lit on the night of her passing. The story took its strangest turn in 1933, when Thomas Colbath actually returned to the homestead, forty-two years after walking away. He found Ruth dead, the property in other hands, and no explanation for his decades of absence that has survived in the historical record. By then, the town of Passaconaway itself was being absorbed into the White Mountain National Forest, and the old settlement was slowly disappearing. The United States Forest Service now maintains the Russell-Colbath House as a historic site along the Kancamagus Highway, its rooms furnished with period artifacts from the 19th century. A Forest Service interpretive panel tells Ruth's story, and the New England Legends podcast dedicated a full episode to her unwavering devotion. But it is after dark that the house becomes something more than a roadside museum. Travelers driving the Kancamagus at night have reported seeing a warm glow emanating from the front window of the darkened house, a flickering light where no electricity runs and no candle has been placed. Some describe it as a soft amber lantern light, visible for just a moment before it vanishes. Others have pulled over to investigate and found the house locked and empty, every window black. The Forest Service has no explanation for the reports. Ruth Colbath waited thirty-nine years for a husband who never came home, and the light she kept burning appears to have outlasted them both.
