Wentworth by the Sea

Pipe tobacco keeps showing up on the fourth floor of Wentworth by the Sea, a Grand Victorian hotel that has been non-smoking since 2003.

Pipe tobacco in an empty fourth-floor corridor is the detail guests at the Wentworth by the Sea mention most. The hotel in New Castle has been non-smoking since its 2003 reopening, and the housekeeping staff know better than to light anything near the carpets in those rooms. But the smell keeps showing up. Cherry blend, sometimes, sometimes plain pipe tobacco, always on the fourth floor, usually in the hallway outside rooms 421 through 429. Guests who grew up around pipe smokers recognize it immediately. Nobody at the front desk has a good explanation.

The Wentworth opened in 1874 on the bridge-accessible island of New Castle, a Grand Victorian summer resort built to catch the rail-and-steamship trade pouring north from Boston. Frank Jones, the Portsmouth beer tycoon, bought the hotel in 1879 and owned it until his death in 1902. Under Jones it hosted the 1905 Russo-Japanese peace conference negotiations. Teddy Roosevelt shuttled delegates back and forth to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and the treaty that ended the war was signed fifteen minutes up the road.

Then came the slow collapse. The grand resorts of New England stopped being profitable in the 1970s, and the Wentworth closed for the last time in 1982. It sat abandoned for twenty-one years. Local kids broke in. Vandals stripped the copper. By the mid-1990s the roof was failing, windows were gone, and the Seacoast Current ran photo spreads calling it the ghost hotel of New Castle. In 1999 Neil Jordan shot portions of the psychological horror film In Dreams inside the empty building, using the water-damaged ballroom and the rotting fourth-floor corridors without set dressing. Robert Downey Jr. and Annette Bening walked those halls while the building was a ruin.

That's the period people point to when they talk about the hotel picking up company. The Wentworth Hotel Preservation Trust and a developer named Ocean Properties saved the building from demolition in 2003 after a fight that nearly failed twice. The restoration cost over forty million dollars. It reopened as a Marriott resort on May 16, 2003, sixteen years after most observers had written it off.

The pipe tobacco is the sensory complaint. The visual one is quieter: a male figure in a dark coat spotted in the fourth-floor east wing, usually by guests returning to their rooms late. A few staff have described a woman in a long light dress in the ballroom in the hour before breakfast setup, though the hotel politely does not confirm this in print. No one has named the ghosts. The usual guess in historical society circles is Frank Jones himself, who loved the hotel and died in it in 1902.

The hotel runs a Halloween ghost tour now, a concession to how persistent the stories have become, but staff are careful about how they pitch it. Guests book rooms on the fourth floor specifically. Most smell nothing. A few walk back to the elevator at 2 a.m. convinced someone was smoking in the hallway, then check the hall and find it empty, the cherry-blend smell fading as they watch.