Mason House Inn

Bentonsport is a tiny village on the Des Moines River in Van Buren County, a remnant of the 1840s and ’50s when steamboats worked the river and the town had mills, a ferry and hotels. The Mason House Inn is one of the buildings that survived the decline. It was built in 1846 – according to the inn and local tradition, by Mormon craftsmen from Nauvoo, Illinois, who had left that city on their way west – as a hotel for steamboat travellers, and it was first called the Ashland House.

Around a decade later Lewis and Nancy Mason bought the hotel and renamed it the Phoenix, but locals called it “the Mason House” after the family, and the name stuck. Members of the family kept it for nearly a century. In its long life the building is said to have served as a stop on the Underground Railroad and, by the inn’s account, as a hospital on three separate occasions, including for Union soldiers during the Civil War. It now operates as a bed and breakfast, run since 2023 by Chris and Fe Pope, who are raising money for its restoration.

Its ghost stories are told mainly by its owners and guests, and the best-known catalogue of them comes from a single 2009 feature by Scott A. Johnson for the horror site Dread Central, drawing on former owner Joy Hanson, who ran the inn with her husband Chuck from 2001. It lists at least five resident spirits: a young boy in knickers nicknamed “George”; Mary Mason Clark, an elderly woman in a white nightgown, identified by a retired minister who once had an office in her room; Fannie Mason Kurtz, the last of the family to own it, identified by a psychic; a guest remembered as “Mr. Knapp,” said in the inn’s lore to have been killed after climbing into the wrong bed; and a floating, smoky figure Mrs. Hanson called “Mr. Foggybody.” The inn’s current website says only that it has “a large community of spirits” and names none of them. The inn now hosts regular ghost hunts and sleepovers and the village’s “ghost crawl.”

Most of those identities rest on family tradition and psychic impressions rather than records, and some details – such as the story of Mr. Knapp – have not been traced to a documented event. What is documented is the building itself: a pre–Civil War steamboat hotel still taking guests, in a historic district that preserves what a nineteenth-century river town looked like.

Guests describe having their blankets or clothes tugged while they sleep, swirling mists, phantom footsteps, cold spots, knocking on doors, alarm clocks tampered with, doors and windows opening by themselves, and the sound of rocking and boxes dropping from an empty room. Owners have reported glimpses of an old woman in a nightgown and a boy on the landing.

According to the 2009 Dread Central account, Room 5 is the most active room and Room 7 is linked to “Mr. Knapp.” The stair landing is the boy’s haunt, and the third-floor south bedroom is associated with Mary Mason Clark.

The inn is a fixture of Iowa haunted-lodging lists and paranormal podcasts, and hosts public ghost hunts, sleepovers and the Bentonsport Ghost Crawl. Bentonsport itself is a National Historic District on the route of the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail.