Captain Lord Mansion

The Captain Lord Mansion stands on Pleasant Street in Kennebunkport, Maine, a three-storey Federal house built in 1812 by the shipbuilder Nathaniel Lord. It was raised during the War of 1812, when a British blockade had nearly stopped the town’s trade, and Lord is said to have put idle shipwrights to work on it, so that it was built “like a ship.” A freestanding elliptical staircase is the highlight of the interior, which retains much original woodwork and early wallpaper. The house passed through a continuous line of Lord women, giving it many names, until the last Lord descendant sold it in 1972. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 20 September 1973 and has been used as an inn.

The family story behind the haunting is a sad one. Nathaniel Lord died on 24 February 1815, aged 39, a few weeks after the war ended; one account says he had been captured and imprisoned by the British and fell ill after returning home, another that he died of influenza. His wife, Phoebe, was left to raise their children alone, and she lost several of them young: a daughter Lucy Jane in June 1815, another daughter in January 1818 and a third in adulthood. Phoebe herself lived to the age of 83, and one ghost writer notes that she is said to haunt the rooms she lived in during the decades that followed.

The apparition is described as a woman in nineteenth-century dress who walks the hallways, perches on the spiral staircase and watches guests in the Lincoln Room, which tradition holds was her bedroom. Some who report her say she resembles a portrait of Phoebe in the house, although a storyteller on the New England Legends podcast cautioned that the painting is not a close likeness. Reported effects are mild: a presence in the room, a woman’s form at the top of the stairs, and the feeling of being observed. Next door, the Captain Fairfield Inn, home of Captain James Fairfield, who married Phoebe’s sister Lois, has had reports of the spirits of the two captains since a heavy renovation in 1991.

An interior-decorating magazine has named the mansion the most haunted home in Maine, a ranking that a local radio writer, while agreeing the house is probably haunted, questioned. The house features in Kennebunkport ghost walks and in inn marketing; historians treat it as a fine example of Federal shipbuilders’ architecture with a family story that grew into a ghost story. As always, the appearance of a grieving widow in a house where she raised her family tells us more about how people remember than about the afterlife.

Visitors report a woman in 1800s dress on the staircase and in the hallways, a presence in the Lincoln Room, feelings of being watched and, in neighboring inns, sightings of two captains.

The elliptical staircase, the hallways and the Lincoln Room on the upper floor; the neighboring Captain Fairfield Inn has parallel reports.

The mansion appears in the New England Legends podcast, in Kennebunkport ghost walks, and in inn and travel guides.