Sise Inn

A Sise Inn clerk once followed a trail of ice cubes from the third-floor machine to the door of Suite 204 in Portsmouth. The floor was empty.

A night clerk at the Sise Inn once followed a trail of ice cubes from the third-floor ice machine to the door of Suite 204. The whole floor was empty. No guests had checked in, no staff had been up there, and nobody could explain why the ice had been arranged into a little Hansel-and-Gretel path down the hallway.

Suite 204 is the most requested room in the house. Guests ask for it by number. The Sise is a Queen Anne mansion at 40 Court Street in Portsmouth, built in 1881 by John Sise, a shipping merchant who lived there with his wife Lucy and daughter Mabel until the family sold it in the 1930s. After that the building had a long, strange middle career: doctors' offices, a beauty parlor, a fashion shop, apartments, and for a stretch a halfway house for mental health patients. It opened as a thirty-four-room inn in 1986 and rebranded as The Hotel Portsmouth in 2014.

The legend that grew up around Suite 204 is that one of John Sise's butlers had an affair with a maid, the relationship fell apart, and he killed her and then hanged himself in the room. There's no record of that ever happening at the Sise house. Researchers have pointed out that a 1905 murder-suicide did occur two doors down, where a man killed his wife, and that the story may have drifted along the block over time. The legend is probably wrong. The activity is not.

The ice machine is the running gag. It turns itself on, flings cubes across the floor, and occasionally spits ice into the hallway. The suite key disappears more than any other key in the building. The door locks and unlocks itself: one guest at 2 a.m. couldn't get in with her key, her backup key, or the locksmith's master, until suddenly the lock gave up resisting. A woman staying in the suite woke one night to the weight of a body pressing into the mattress next to her.

The haunting doesn't stay in 204. The elevator rides between floors with no one in it. An antique rocking chair by the front desk rocks on its own. Maids have walked into sudden pockets of cold air and, more than once, felt a pair of hands rest on their hips from behind. One maid said she was gently pulled toward an open closet before she broke loose. The male presence gets described as amused rather than menacing, a guy who likes the reaction.

Guests ask for Suite 204 hoping something will happen. Most of the time, it does. The ice in the hallway, the door that refuses to open, the weight on the mattress at two in the morning. A good half of the guests who request the room come back to the desk the next day with a new story to add to the file.