Omni Mount Washington Resort

A grand 1902 resort hotel at the base of Mount Washington, listed by Thrillist as one of the 50 most haunted places in America.

Room 314 at the Omni Mount Washington Resort still contains Carolyn Foster Stickney's original bed, and guests who sleep in it report waking in the dead of night to find an elegant woman in Victorian dress sitting on the edge of the mattress, calmly brushing her hair. She occasionally looks up and smiles before dissolving into nothing. This is the Princess Room, and the woman is the ghost of the hotel's most devoted resident, who has never checked out. The Mount Washington Hotel was the vision of Joseph Stickney, a Concord, New Hampshire native who made a fortune as a coal broker in Pennsylvania before the age of thirty. In 1900, he hired architect Charles Alling Gifford and brought in 250 Italian artisans to construct what would become New England's largest wooden structure. The Y-shaped hotel opened on July 28, 1902, at a cost of $1.7 million, featuring a steel-frame superstructure, its own electrical power plant, and a sophisticated internal heating system that was revolutionary for its era. Joseph Stickney died mere months after the grand opening, leaving the entire resort to his wife, Carolyn Foster Stickney. She remarried in 1912, wedding Prince Jean Baptiste Marie de Faucigny-Lucinge, a French royal, which gave her the title of princess. Despite her European title, Carolyn spent every summer at the Mount Washington Hotel until her death in 1936, and Room 314 was always her suite. The hotel itself went on to host history: in July 1944, the Bretton Woods Conference convened here, establishing the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and reshaping the global financial order. But it is Carolyn's quieter legacy that draws visitors today. Her apparition is most frequently seen in Room 314, but she does not confine herself there. Staff members report encountering an elegant woman in period dress gliding through the third-floor hallways, sometimes accompanied by light taps on guest room doors when no one is in the corridor. In the hotel's towers, which are closed to guests, paranormal activity intensifies: unexplained cold spots, electromagnetic field spikes, and the sound of footsteps on empty staircases. In 2008, the TAPS team from the SyFy Channel's Ghost Hunters investigated the resort in Season 4, Episode 7, titled 'The Princess and the EVP.' The team recorded an electronic voice phenomenon in Room 314 that appeared to be a woman's voice responding to their questions, which they attributed to Carolyn. The investigators also documented strange temperature fluctuations and electromagnetic anomalies in the towers. Thrillist has named the Omni Mount Washington Resort one of the fifty most haunted places in America. Guests who request Room 314 are warned by the front desk that they may not be sleeping alone. The room is one of the hotel's most requested, and the guest book kept there is filled with accounts from visitors who felt the bed shift under an unseen weight, heard the soft rustle of a Victorian gown, or woke to the faint scent of perfume that had no earthly source. Carolyn spent every summer of her married life at this hotel, and by all accounts, she has never stopped.