About This Location
An 1881 Queen Anne-style mansion converted into an inn in 1986, located in the heart of historic Portsmouth.
The Ghost Story
The Sise Inn is a Queen Anne mansion built in 1881 by John Sise, a successful Portsmouth businessman who spared no expense on the three-story residence with its ornate Victorian woodwork, period furnishings, and elegant proportions. After serving as the Sise family home until the mid-1930s, the mansion cycled through a series of commercial uses that seem designed to attract restless spirits: it housed doctors' offices, a beauty parlor, a fashion shop, apartments, and most notably a halfway house for mental health patients before being converted into a thirty-four-room inn in 1986.
The haunting centers on Suite 204 on the third floor, the most requested room in the house despite, or perhaps because of, its supernatural reputation. The legend holds that a butler employed by John Sise fell in love with one of the household maids, and when the relationship soured, he murdered her in what is now Suite 204 and then hanged himself in the same room. There is no factual evidence that this ever happened, and some researchers have suggested the story may have migrated from a documented 1905 murder that occurred two houses down, where a man killed his wife. Regardless of the origin, Suite 204 is undeniably the epicenter of the activity.
The room's ice machine activates on its own and flings ice across the floor. Doors lock and unlock without anyone touching them, and the suite key disappears far more frequently than any other key in the building. Guests have reported a potted plant flying off a coffee table and items sailing across the room. One woman woke in the night to feel an unseen presence lying beside her in bed, the weight of a body pressing into the mattress next to hers.
The haunting extends well beyond Suite 204. The building's elevator operates independently, riding up and down between floors and opening its doors to reveal empty cars. Near the front desk, an antique rocking chair rocks steadily with no one sitting in it. Maids cleaning the rooms encounter cold spots that appear without warning and vanish just as suddenly, and several have reported feeling hands placed gently on their hips from behind. When they spin around, no one is there. One maid described being grabbed gently by an unseen presence that attempted to pull her into a closet.
The male entity has been described as cheeky rather than threatening, a presence that seems amused by the startled reactions of the living. The female presence, if there is a separate one, manifests through more subtle cues: perfume in empty rooms, the sense of being watched, and an emotional weight that some guests describe as sadness rather than fear.
The Sise Inn, now operating as the Hotel Portsmouth, continues to welcome guests who specifically request Suite 204, hoping for an encounter with whatever presence has claimed the third floor as its own. The hotel neither confirms nor denies the haunting, but the rocking chair near the front desk keeps moving.
