In Brief
The Wentworth by the Sea in New Castle, New Hampshire has been entirely non-smoking since it reopened in 2003. Guests keep smelling pipe tobacco anyway, drifting down the empty fourth-floor corridor. Nobody can say whose it is.
The Full Story
The thing people notice at the Wentworth by the Sea, a white Victorian grand hotel on the island of New Castle, New Hampshire, isn't something they see. It's a smell. Pipe tobacco, sometimes a cherry blend, sometimes plain, drifting down the fourth-floor corridor of a hotel that has been entirely non-smoking since it reopened in 2003.
Guests report it. Some say they've seen figures up there too, but the smoke is the detail that keeps coming back. "Guests at the Wentworth by the Sea Hotel in New Castle, New Hampshire report witnessing apparitions, and smelling the lingering scent of pipe tobacco, especially on the 4th floor," reads one haunted-places listing. Nobody can say whose it is. No record names a ghost here, and there's no investigation behind any of it, just the guests and the local reputation that follows the place around.
The hotel opened in 1874, one of the last surviving Gilded Age resorts on the New Hampshire seacoast. A Portsmouth brewing magnate named Frank Jones bought it in 1879 and built it into a luxury destination, three mansard towers and steam elevators and around 200 rooms. In 1905 the Russian and Japanese delegations negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War lodged here while they worked out the Treaty of Portsmouth, an effort that won Theodore Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1916 Annie Oakley, then 56, gave shooting demonstrations out on the grounds. This was a place people came to be seen.
Then it died slowly. The Wentworth closed in 1982 and sat vacant for roughly two decades. Whole wings were torn down, cutting the resort to about half its size, and it landed on the National Trust's list of America's most endangered historic places. For years it was a stripped, rotting shell on an island that boats and trains had once carried Boston's wealthy out to reach.
For a while the ruin had only one visitor that mattered. In 1999, before any restoration, Neil Jordan filmed parts of the horror movie *In Dreams* inside the rotting hotel, Robert Downey Jr. and Annette Bening walking the decaying corridors. The building didn't need a set. It was already the haunted place the movie wanted.
A multimillion-dollar restoration brought it back. The Wentworth reopened on May 16, 2003, white and tidy and smoke-free, and it has stayed that way. Except on the fourth floor, where someone keeps lighting a pipe.
