Oceanic Hotel

A grand Victorian hotel on Star Island in the Isles of Shoals, operating since the 19th century as a seasonal retreat.

Six miles off the New Hampshire coast, Star Island rises from the Atlantic as one of nine rocky outcrops forming the Isles of Shoals, a cluster of islands that has attracted fishermen, artists, writers, and ghosts for four centuries. The Oceanic Hotel was first built on Star Island in 1873 by John Poor, president of the Stickney and Poor Spice Trading Company, at a cost of thirty-five thousand dollars. He organized a grand opening celebration in July 1874, but the hotel burned to the ground just two years later. Poor rebuilt it immediately, making sure to retain the expansive front veranda facing the open sea that had defined the original structure.

During the Grand Hotel Era of the late 1800s, the Isles of Shoals attracted notable visitors including Nathaniel Hawthorne, who visited in 1852 and later wrote about the islands' unsettling atmosphere, and the American Impressionist painter Childe Hassam, who captured the rocky shores in luminous canvases. The poet Celia Thaxter, who grew up on the islands and is buried on Star Island, documented many of the ghost legends in her writings and became as much a part of the island's mystique as the spirits themselves.

Thomas Elliott and his wife Lilla established the Shoals Summer Meeting Association in 1896, and the Star Island Corporation has owned and operated the island since 1916 as a retreat center rooted in Unitarian-Universalist and United Church of Christ traditions. The Oceanic Hotel retains its original nineteenth-century character: creaking wooden floors, narrow hallways, shared bathrooms, no televisions, and limited electricity. This deliberate rusticity heightens guests' awareness of every sound in a building where the Atlantic wind provides a constant backdrop.

The third and fourth floors of the hotel are the most active paranormal zones. Guests sleeping on these levels regularly hear sounds from the attic that suggest furniture being dragged across the floor or fingernails scratching methodically at the walls. Doors open and close on their own, and dresser drawers slide out as though someone is searching through them.

The hotel's most vivid apparition is an old man with white hair and a white beard who has been seen floating down the main staircase. He pauses on the landing, smiles warmly, and then dissolves into nothing. A woman dressed entirely in white lurks at the top of the stairs near the attic entrance, and guests who glimpse her describe a chill that goes beyond the normal Atlantic cold. Sudden temperature drops occur in rooms with no drafts, and visitors throughout the hotel report the persistent sensation of being watched.

The Ghost Hunters television team investigated Star Island and documented strange footsteps and scratching sounds in the Oceanic Hotel. While analyzing an old painting of a baby, their recording equipment captured a child's voice saying, "It's not that creepy." Outside the hotel, a mysterious black dog with glowing red eyes has been seen roaming the island at night, vanishing the instant anyone approaches. Locals maintain that the entire island is haunted, not just isolated buildings, and that the spirits belong to the generations of fishermen, children, and outcasts who lived and died on this exposed rock in the North Atlantic.