Green Mountain Inn

The Green Mountain Inn stands on Main Street in Stowe, built in 1833 by Peter C. Lovejoy. He traded the building to Stillman Churchill for a 350-acre farm; Churchill added two brick wings, a dance hall and a two-storey porch, and called it Mansfield House. After a foreclosure it became the Brick Hotel, and in 1893 Mark C. Lovejoy renamed it the Green Mountain Inn. In 1897 the neighbouring Depot Building was built for the Mount Mansfield Electric Railroad. Visitors have included President Chester A. Arthur, who took part in a theatrical performance at the inn, and, in the twentieth century, Gerald Ford. Marvin Gameroff bought the inn in 1982 and oversaw a large restoration in 1983, marking its 150th anniversary. The main inn is a contributing property in the Stowe Village Historic District, listed in 1978.

The inn’s resident ghost is “Boots” Berry, and the inn itself tells his story. According to the inn’s history, Boots was born in 1840 in Room 302 of the third-floor servants’ quarters, the son of a chambermaid and one of the inn’s horsemen. He grew up to be a skilled horseman and was hailed as a hero for stopping runaway horses that bolted down Main Street with a stagecoach. Drink was his downfall: he was fired and wandered the country, picking up his nickname from a cellmate in a New Orleans jail who taught him to tap dance. In 1902, the legend continues, he returned to Stowe, rescued a girl stranded on the inn’s roof in a snowstorm and lowered her to safety, but slipped and fell from the roof above Room 302.

Guests say they hear the tapping on that roof, especially on snowy nights. A Boston Globe travel piece in 2013 noted that some guests swear they hear him, and the legend has appeared in guidebooks, roadside-attraction articles and a ghost podcast that visited the inn. The accounts are consistent but anonymous. Nobody has named a guest or staff member who has made a report for the record, and the tales do not say when the sounds were first heard.

The Boots story reads like a nineteenth-century morality tale: rise, fall, redemption and tragic death, all in a single life. Historians looking for a horseman named Berry, born at the inn in 1840 and killed in a roof fall in 1902, would have to find vital records, a newspaper account or an inquest, and none of the sources consulted for this entry cites such documents. That does not prove that no such person lived; it means that the legend stands alone, a good example of how a historic inn finds its own ghost.

Guests describe tapping or tap dancing on the roof above Room 302 and the third floor, usually during winter storms. No apparition is described in the sources found.

Room 302 and the third-floor servants’ quarters; the roof above, in snowy weather.

Boots is a cornerstone of Vermont ghost lore and appears in Thea Lewis’s Haunted Inns and Ghostly Getaways of Vermont, travel journalism and a New England Legends podcast episode, “The Tap Dancing Ghost of Green Mountain Inn.”