In Brief
At the hotel that was the Sise Inn in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, one room does the haunting. Guests ask for Suite 204 by number, hoping its resident ghost will do something. Most of the time, the staff say, it obliges.
The Full Story
The hotel at 40 Court Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, has one room that guests request by number. They ask for Suite 204 hoping its resident ghost will do something, and the staff say it usually does.
Here is the story they tell about it. A night clerk working the desk on an empty night heard the upstairs ice machine running. He rode up to check and stepped off the elevator into a trail of ice cubes leading down the hall, all the way to the open door of Suite 204, where a heap of ice sat in the doorway. No one had checked into that floor.
The room collects this kind of thing. Its key constantly goes missing, the way no other key in the building does. One couple was locked out at 2 a.m.; neither the desk clerk's passkey nor the manager's would open the door, and they waited until a locksmith arrived around 4, at which point their own original key turned in the lock easily. A woman lying in bed there said she felt an unseen weight settle onto the other side of the mattress, pressing it down beside her. Maids working the halls report a man's hands on their hips from behind; one said she was gently pulled toward an open closet before she broke free.
None of it is mean. The spirits read as fond of the reaction, more annoying than harmful. A guest watched a potted plant fly off a coffee table. Scissors turned up moved from a storage room to a desktop. The antique rocking chair by the front desk rocks on its own, and the elevator rides between floors with no one aboard, its doors opening and closing for an empty car.
The building started out as a home. John E. Sise, an insurance agent and a proprietor of the Portsmouth Athenaeum, tore down an older house on the lot at the corner of Court Street and Haymarket Square, and by 1881 had replaced it with the Stick Style and Queen Anne mansion that stands there now. His daughter Mabel later owned it; she married Reverend Alfred Gooding, who built an addition that doubled the place. It opened as the Sise Inn with thirty-four rooms in 1986, and in 2014 it was sold and reopened under the name it trades by now, The Hotel Portsmouth.
The lore behind the room is bloodier than the haunting. The story goes that a butler of John Sise fell in love with a maid, killed her, and hanged himself in what is now Suite 204. Every source that repeats the tale adds the same caution. There is no factual evidence that this ever happened. What there is, instead, is a room people drive in to sleep in, asking the front desk for it by number, hoping the door will lock against them.
