The Equinox Resort

The Equinox grew out of the village of Manchester’s oldest tavern. The Marsh Tavern opened in 1769, and in the early 1800s the Orvis family built a homestead beside it. Franklin Orvis began taking summer boarders around 1849 and turned the place into the Equinox House, which a local newspaper account dates to 1854; at its height it had about 200 rooms and drew wealthy visitors from New York and Boston. Presidents Grant, Benjamin Harrison, Taft and Theodore Roosevelt all stayed or spoke there, and Charles Orvis opened a fly-fishing business beside the hotel that became a national brand.

The best-known ghost story belongs to Mary Todd Lincoln. She stayed at the hotel with her sons Robert and Tad in the summer of 1864 (one local history gives 1863), and booked a stay for the following summer. According to the hotel’s retellings, a special suite was prepared for the President, but Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865 and never came. Ghost writers say that Mary’s spirit still returns to the building, and that a small boy, thought to be Tad, is heard crying and being comforted. The accounts do not come with named witnesses, only with the usual wording that staff and guests have seen shadows, heard knocks and felt cold spots.

A second tale concerns George Orvis, a son of Franklin who managed the hotel. A New England Legends podcast reports that he was found drowned in Equinox Pond near the bathhouse on 9 August 1917, after a dive into shallow water, and that some employees believe he remains. Control of the Orvis company passed to Louise Orvis that year. The hotel then went through decades of decline: bankruptcy in 1938, the closing of the Orvis Inn in 1972 as structurally unsound, foreclosure in 1973 and a decade of vacancy as frost and water damaged the building. A $20 million restoration began in 1984; a propane-truck fire in January 1985 destroyed part of the south wing, but the Equinox reopened on 6 July 1985 and is now a golf resort and spa.

These stories are folklore of the sort common to historic hotels. They grew with the building’s reopening and with regional ghost books, including Thea Lewis’s Haunted Inns and Ghostly Getaways of Vermont, and no document links the accounts to the people they name. They are best taken as the way a resort with a long and well-recorded history remembers its famous guests.

Reports from employees and guests mention shadows, knocks, cold spots, the sound of a boy crying and a woman consoling him, and a female figure compared with Mary Todd Lincoln; some staff also link unexplained presences to George Orvis.

The main hotel and the suite said to have been prepared for the Lincolns, with some stories also naming the pond and old bathhouse grounds.

Told in regional ghost books such as Thea Lewis’s Haunted Inns and Ghostly Getaways of Vermont and in podcasts about New England legends. Nearby Hildene, the home of Robert Todd Lincoln, keeps the Lincoln connection in the public eye.