About This Location
Historic 1758 house where naval hero John Paul Jones lodged during the construction of warships in Portsmouth Harbor.
The Ghost Story
The John Paul Jones House at 43 Middle Street in Portsmouth was built in 1758 as a wedding gift for sea captain Gregory Purcell and his bride Sarah Wentworth. The Georgian-style colonial with its distinctive gambrel roof and yellow exterior was considered one of the finest three-story homes in Portsmouth at the time, positioned at what was then the edge of downtown. When Captain Purcell died in 1776, Sarah was left to support herself and her children, and she opened the spacious rooms as a boarding house for paying guests.
Her most famous tenant arrived in 1777. John Paul Jones, the Scottish-born naval commander who would become the father of the American Navy, rented a room while his ship the Ranger underwent repairs at the Portsmouth shipyard. Jones returned to Portsmouth in 1781-1782 to oversee construction of the ship America. He was thirty years old during his first stay, already celebrated for his daring raids on British vessels, and he chose Sarah Purcell's boarding house for its comfortable appointments and central location. Jones never returned to Portsmouth after 1782, eventually dying in Paris in 1792 at the age of forty-five, largely forgotten by the nation he had helped create.
The Portsmouth Historical Society rescued and restored the house in 1920, establishing it as Portsmouth's first historical museum. The downstairs rooms contain museum exhibits and period furnishings, while the upper floors preserve the layout of the boarding house era. It is on those upper floors, and particularly in the attic, where the strange occurrences concentrate.
People have reported seeing a figure emerging from the attic dressed in nineteenth-century finery and walking into one of the rooms before disappearing. The apparition appears solid enough to be mistaken for a costumed docent until visitors realize no one matching that description works at the museum. According to Thomas D'Agostino's book Haunted New Hampshire, a group of paranormal investigators captured EVP recordings and flashlight responses while communicating with an entity they identified as John Paul Jones himself, apparently back in the room he once rented from Sarah Purcell.
Sarah's own ghost lingers as well. Her pale, white apparition appears looking wistfully out the windows, the pose of a woman who spent years watching the harbor for ships that might bring paying guests to sustain her family. A second female entity, believed to be Sarah Langdon, peers through the windows from outside the building, her face appearing and vanishing in the old glass. Inside, cabinet doors in the Shawl Room open and close on their own, the back door swings independently, and staff consistently report sensing unseen presences throughout the museum.
The John Paul Jones House is a featured stop on multiple Portsmouth ghost tours, and the number of personal experiences reported by visitors, staff, and investigators has led paranormal researchers to rate the haunting as one of the most credible in the city.
