About This Location
A grand seaside resort hotel built in 1874, where the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War was negotiated in 1905.
The Ghost Story
The Wentworth by the Sea is the last surviving Gilded Age grand hotel on the New Hampshire seacoast, and its history reads like a novel spanning wars, diplomacy, abandonment, and resurrection. Daniel E. Chase, a liquor distiller from Somerville, Massachusetts, purchased the land on New Castle island in 1873 and opened the original hotel in 1874, featuring an expansive entry hall, a grand piano parlor, a reading room, and a dining room seating four hundred guests.
In 1879, beer magnate and former congressman Frank Jones permanently acquired the property and transformed it into one of the premier resorts on the Atlantic coast. Jones added an entire story, three distinctive mansard-roofed towers, and doubled the building's length to 160 feet. He was a technological pioneer as well: in July 1880, he installed seven outdoor electrical arc bulbs that bathed the New Castle shoreline in a flickering, futuristic glow for the first time. Under Jones's stewardship, the Wentworth attracted presidents, industrialists, and society figures from Boston to New York.
The hotel's greatest moment in history came in 1905, three years after Jones's death, when Russian and Japanese delegations stayed at the Wentworth while negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Jones's executor, Judge Calvin Page, offered suites to both delegations free of charge. The delegates shuttled daily by navy cutter between the hotel and the secure Peace Building at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. The resulting Treaty of Portsmouth earned President Theodore Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize, and the hotel earned a permanent place in diplomatic history.
The Wentworth survived both World Wars but could not survive changing American vacation habits. The Smith family operated it from 1946 to 1980, maintaining strict dress codes and old-world formality, but declining patronage forced closure. For twenty-two years, the grand hotel sat empty and deteriorating. Multiple decaying wings were demolished, shrinking the resort to half its original size. During this period of abandonment, the vacant hotel was used as a location for the 1999 psychological thriller In Dreams, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Annette Bening, its decaying grandeur providing a naturally eerie setting.
Guests who stay at the restored hotel, which reopened in 2003 after a twenty-six-million-dollar renovation by Ocean Properties, report encountering remnants of its long past. Apparitions have been seen in the hallways and guest rooms, and the lingering scent of pipe tobacco permeates the fourth floor with no identifiable source. Some guests have reported seeing figures in period clothing that vanish when approached, and unexplained cold spots in rooms that were warm moments before. Whether these spirits belong to Frank Jones himself, to long-departed guests from the Gilded Age, or to some echo of the decades the hotel spent abandoned and crumbling remains an open question.
