Windham Restaurant

At the Windham Restaurant, EVP specialist Karen Mossey captured a voice saying "get the camera" inside the 1812 Dinsmoor family house on Route 111.

"Get the camera." That phrase, captured in an EVP recording at the Windham Restaurant, is one of the more specific pieces of evidence any haunted restaurant in New Hampshire has on file. EVP specialist Karen Mossey of the New England Ghost Project caught it during one of several investigations at the 1812 building on Route 111 in Windham. The spirit, she believes, was giving an instruction.

The building went up around 1812 on a farm site that goes back to 1729. It belonged to the Dinsmoor family, including Samuel Dinsmoor Sr., who served three terms as governor of New Hampshire from 1831 to 1834. When Lula and Vess Liakas bought the property and opened the Windham Restaurant, they inherited a house that had been accumulating activity for two centuries.

The staff name their ghosts. The most often seen is Jacob, who staff and NEGP investigators identify as a man who died on the stairs, most likely of a heart attack. Diners have watched a man fall down the staircase and vanish before they reach him. Others see him as a man in a blue suit, seated or standing on the second floor. The psychic medium Maureen, who has investigated here with NEGP, identified a young boy by name: William. There is also a little girl who wanders the dining rooms, and who has been photographed.

Blonde waitresses have their hair played with. One waitress had her necklace unclasped at the back of her neck while she was carrying plates. Chairs and place settings are rearranged overnight. Wine glasses have shot off the bar without a hand near them. Expensive dishes have flown off the kitchen racks and landed intact across the room. Around Christmas, empty gift-wrapped display boxes get stacked into towers or, more than once, suspended somehow above the floor.

The third-floor key to an upstairs room disappeared for weeks, then turned up jammed into the frame of a window on a floor where no one had been. Lights that get turned off are on again within the hour. Windows that close themselves find themselves open. Some of this is the normal drift of an old building. Not all of it.

Photographer Leo Monfet, on assignment with NEGP, took a sequence of photos on the second floor. One frame shows a young boy in a doorway. The next frame, shot seconds later, shows an empty doorway with a streak of light running through the space where the boy had been. The image has been published in a handful of ghost investigation writeups, and it's the piece of evidence that most often gets trotted out when staff talk to skeptical customers.

The restaurant doesn't hide any of this. Hosts sometimes mention the activity when seating tables, and staff have their own rules about which jobs to do alone after close. The second-floor wait station is the spot for the little boy. The staircase belongs to Jacob. The kitchen, according to Karen Mossey, belongs to whoever wanted the camera.

The Dinsmoor house has been a home, a farm, and a restaurant across 200 years. "Get the camera," the voice said. Someone has been listening for a long time.