Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House

The home where Louisa May Alcott wrote "Little Women" and lived with her family from 1858 to 1877. The house has been preserved as a museum dedicated to the Alcott family and their literary legacy.

Orchard House stands on Lexington Road in Concord, Massachusetts, where Louisa May Alcott wrote her beloved classic "Little Women" in 1868. The house was the most permanent home of the Alcott family, in residence from 1858 to 1877. Built in the 1600s, it underwent various modifications before Louisa's father, the transcendentalist philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott, purchased it in 1857 along with twelve acres of land and a flourishing apple orchard of over forty trees. Louisa wrote her masterpiece in her room on a special shelf desk built by her father, basing the characters on her own family and setting the story within these very walls.

Concord, Massachusetts has long been considered a haunted place. Until recently, the ghosts of Room 24 at the Colonial Inn—which served as a morgue during the Revolutionary War—were the town's most prominent supernatural celebrities. But Orchard House has its own spiritual residents.

Louisa May Alcott herself reportedly said she felt the spirit of her deceased sister most strongly at Orchard House, and that presence inspired her to write the character into "Little Women." More recent visitors swear that Louisa's own spirit permeates the house, bringing many to tears with her stirring presence.

During the filming of the 2019 "Little Women" movie adaptation, actress Laura Dern shared what locals told her about the author's ghost. "What's incredible about being in Concord is that you'll say in this shy way, 'I sort of feel the spirit of Louisa,' and locals will say, 'Oh yeah. That's haunted. We see her all the time. She walks with the girls all the time.'" Writer and director Greta Gerwig said she was "seized by the spirit of Louisa May Alcott" and compelled to write the script. Cast members told interviewers they felt Alcott's presence throughout filming in Concord.

The house has been described as "a funny, friendly, rambling sort of house on the outskirts of town, two houses knocked into one in fact, with stairways in unexpected places and rooms leading to other rooms leading to more stairways." Some writers have suggested that both sets of ghosts live on there still—the real Alcott family and the fictional March family—most happily and energetically so.

Today, Orchard House operates as a museum, retaining eighty percent of its original furniture. Visitors tour the kitchen, dining room, parlor, Louisa's room, May's room, an art studio, and the master bedroom. The ghost tours of Concord include Orchard House among their haunting landmarks. In a house where one of America's most beloved novels came to life, the boundary between fiction and reality, between the living and the dead, has always been thin.