The Barracks

At the Barracks, the oldest house still standing in Princeton, New Jersey, a young Hessian soldier is said to appear at the fireplace every Christmas Eve. The story has him doing the same thing each time: he shows up at midnight, smiles at whoever's in the room, and rises quietly up the chimney.

He's a German mercenary, the kind hired to fight for the British. The way it's told, he fled the fighting at Trenton after Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas Day in 1776, and died of a chest wound at this hearth seeking warmth. The story has settled into one figure people say they've seen since. Princeton Alumni Weekly describes him as "a slight figure in a huge burlap coat," a boy in a man's uniform, which is part of why the household that lived with him never seemed afraid.

The house at 32 Edgehill Street is old enough to have earned every story it carries. Daniel Brinson built it around 1684, the second European dwelling in all of Princeton. The Stocktons rented it, then bought it from his estate in 1696, and decades later Richard Stockton, who would go on to sign the Declaration of Independence, quartered troops in the old stone house during the French and Indian War. The name stuck: the Barracks. In 1783, when the Continental Congress met in Princeton, both Madison and Hamilton lodged here. Madison complained to Jefferson that the place left him "without a single accommodation for writing," that he was "obliged to write in a position that scarcely admits the use of any of my limbs."

So the soldier shares his hearth with a lot of history, and at least once someone tried to send him on. In 1939, a Reverend named Arthur Kinsolving came to be rid of him. He brought an old Church of England prayer book and ran the ritual against the soldier at his own fireplace. It had no effect at all. The household decided they weren't bothered, and in the family's words he stayed "an amiable ghost" — one who appears, as one of them put it, "each Christmas Eve at midnight, smiles, and quietly goes up the chimney."

Margery Cuyler grew up in the Barracks, and the Christmas-Eve story followed her into a children's book, *The Battlefield Ghost*, where a Hessian ghost searches for his horse lost on the battlefield. She bought the house herself in 1990. On Christmas Eves after that, people came by to test the legend for themselves, waiting near a fireplace for a soldier who'd been smiling at strangers and climbing the chimney since the winter no one in that house could pray him out of it.