In Brief
Guests at the Whitehall Mansion Inn in Mystic, Connecticut report laughter that drifts from room to room and doors that open and close with no one near them. The story pins it on Lucy — a daughter of the 1771 house's first owner, buried in the cemetery next door.
The Full Story
The Whitehall Mansion Inn in Mystic, Connecticut is a five-room historic hotel, and the guests who stay there keep hearing someone laugh. The laughter drifts from one room to the next, with no one there to make it. Doors open and close on their own. Connecticut's tourism office, listing the place among the state's haunted stops, names the main ghost outright: Lucy.
She has a reason to still be there. The house was built around 1771 by Dr. Dudley Woodbridge, a local physician who'd descended from a line of ministers, started in the ministry himself, then taught himself medicine without any schooling. In the 1750s he ran a tavern on the site that doubled as his medical practice. He and his wife Sarah had nine children. Lucy was one of them. She's buried in the cemetery next door, alongside her father, her mother, and two of her brothers.
The cemetery is the oldest burial ground in Mystic. Woodbridge's own sandstone headstone there reads "A tender Parent & a kind Friend."
The house nearly didn't survive to be haunted. In the early 1960s, Interstate 95 was coming through, and the late-Georgian colonial sat in its path. A woman named Florence Grace Bentley Keach offered the Stonington Historical Society $15,000 and five acres if they'd take ownership and save it. They did — and the entire building was lifted off its foundation and moved about a hundred yards north, intact, out of the highway's way. The Waterford Hotel Group bought it in 1996, and it's been an inn ever since.
The stories pin the laughter on Lucy, though they come from travel write-ups and ghost tours rather than any dated record, and some accounts add her mother or a brother to the haunting. No one knows quite why she stayed.
But the house she's said to wander isn't standing where she lived. It was picked up and carried a hundred yards to escape a road — and by every account she came along with it.
