The Nutmeg Inn

The ghost at the Nutmeg Inn in Meredith is so helpful he installed an electrical outlet overnight. No electrician billed for it or would admit to the job.

The owners of The Nutmeg Inn wanted a new outlet in the Teaberry Room. The electricians they called all came back with the same answer: the wiring run was expensive, the wall was awkward, the job wasn't worth it. So the owners closed the Teaberry Room for the winter and figured they'd deal with it in spring. When they opened the room back up, there was a new outlet in the wall. In exactly the spot they'd picked. Professionally wired. Fully functional. Every electrician they called denied doing it. No invoice ever arrived. The outlet is still there.

Staff at the inn call him Charlie. Nobody knows which Charlie. The building dates to 1763, when it was built as the Eliphalet Rawlings Homestead on Pease Road in Meredith, a short walk from Lake Winnipesaukee. It's had more than twenty owners since, and it has lived a lot of lives: private home, farm, boardinghouse, Underground Railroad stop with hiding spaces for escaped slaves heading north to Canada, and, during the 1930s, a lodging that expelled two guests for being members of the Hitler Youth. Any of those tenants could theoretically be Charlie. None of them has volunteered a last name.

Charlie hides things. Bath mats vanish off tub edges and turn up somewhere else in the room. Guests' personal items leave nightstands and end up in drawers they were never put in. Cleaning supplies relocate between rooms without anyone seeing the move. The trick that works, according to staff, is to ask him out loud to please give the thing back. It usually comes back.

He fixes things too. Charlie is credited with helping a carpenter line up panels in the entryway when the work was going badly, and with coaxing flowers that had never bloomed to bloom the day the current owners took over. He shows up in guest photos occasionally, a shadowy shape nobody remembers being in the frame. The temperature drops without pattern in certain rooms. People who stay here tend to feel watched, but not watched unkindly.

The Nutmeg Inn is a working bed-and-breakfast on Pease Road, and the outlet in the Teaberry Room is the one piece of Charlie that a new owner could not possibly fake, remove, or explain to the next electrician they called.