Whitehall Mansion

Lucy Woodbridge, daughter of the self-taught physician who built this 1771 mansion, fills the halls of this Mystic bed and breakfast with phantom laughter. The adjacent Whitehall Yard burial ground dates to 1644 and holds 175 graves, including formerly enslaved preacher Quash Williams.

Dr. Dudley Woodbridge's headstone reads: "A tender Parent & a kind Friend." The soul effigy carved into the sandstone has kind eyes, a gentle smile, and beautiful wings. It's one of the most charming gravestones in Mystic, which is saying something for a cemetery that dates to 1644.

Woodbridge never went to medical school. He came from a long line of ministers, started in the ministry himself, but switched to medicine and mastered it without formal training. He became one of the most respected physicians in the area. In the 1750s he opened a tavern that doubled as his medical practice. You could get a drink and a diagnosis in the same visit. He served as Groton's representative in the General Assembly at Hartford on and off between 1735 and 1762, bought land from the Gallup family around 1764, and built Whitehall between 1771 and 1775 on the foundation of the old Gallup homestead. He named it after an ancestor's home in Essex, England.

He and his wife Sarah Sheldon raised nine children here. He died on October 4, 1790, at age 86. Sarah followed in 1796. Three of their children, William, Benjamin, and Lucy, are buried nearby in the Whitehall Yard burial ground, the oldest cemetery in Mystic.

The cemetery holds 175 graves. Of those, 140 carry one of five family names: Dean (18), Gallup (27), Wheeler (17), Williams (70), and Woodbridge (8). Among them is Quash Williams, a formerly enslaved man who preached at Fort Hill Baptist Church in Groton. His gravestone, alongside wife Hannah's, bears the motto: "walk as well as talk."

The ghost story belongs to Lucy. Guests at the bed and breakfast hear laughter in the halls, sometimes from one room, sometimes from another, as if she's moving through the house the way she did when she was alive. Doors open and close on their own, startling people who assumed they were alone.

The mansion almost didn't survive. When Interstate 95 was being built in the early 1960s, the highway expansion threatened to demolish the property. Florence Grace Bentley Keach donated ,000 and five acres of land to the Stonington Historical Society, and the mansion was physically moved to save it. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 12, 1979. The Historical Society maintained it until 1993, when it was sold to private partners with preservation requirements. It operates today as the Whitehall Mansion Inn. The original house was natural wood, later painted red, then white in the 20th century.

The architecture still has real 18th-century details: high ceilings, 12-over-12 windows, turned balusters on the front stairway, all-brick chimney, brick nogging for insulation, cornices, and paneled wainscoting.

Seaside Shadows Haunted History Tours runs walking tours through the burial ground, stopping at the Woodbridge family stones. Ghost tour operators in Mystic consider this one of the essential stops.

Lucy's haunting isn't dramatic. No screaming, no unsolved murder. Just laughter in empty rooms and doors that won't stay shut. Woodbridge raised nine children in this house, practiced medicine, served his community, and died at 86 after a genuinely full life. If his daughter is still here, she seems to be in a good mood about it.