Mount Washington Hotel

Joseph Stickney made a fortune in coal and railroads, and at the turn of the 20th century he poured part of it into the grandest hotel in the White Mountains. Designed by architect Charles Alling Gifford in the Renaissance Revival style and set beneath Mount Washington, the hotel opened on July 28, 1902, on a scale meant to rival the great resorts of Europe. Stickney had little time to enjoy it: he died in New York on December 21, 1903 – of “apoplexy”, a stroke, according to the New York Times, though the hotel’s histories often say a heart attack.

His widow, Carolyn Foster Stickney, took charge. She enlarged the hotel, adding the chapel and the Sun Dining Room, and kept returning each summer. In 1913 she married a French aristocrat, Prince Aymon de Faucigny-Lucinge, and was known from then on as “the Princess.” She died in 1936. The hotel’s other great moment came in July 1944, when 730 delegates from 44 Allied nations gathered there for the Bretton Woods Conference, which created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The hotel became a National Historic Landmark in 1986 and is now run by Omni Hotels & Resorts.

The hotel’s ghost is Carolyn herself. Staff and guests say the Princess still watches over the place from her old suite, Room 314, which overlooked the front entrance so she could see who was arriving. The suite contains an oak four-poster bed said to be hers. Guests in that room describe knocks on the door, lights turning on and off, a floral perfume at night and, occasionally, a woman sitting on the bed brushing her hair; staff speak of a woman in period dress gliding along third-floor corridors.

The hotel tells the story itself, and it has drawn television ghost hunters: the Ghost Hunters team investigated Room 314 in its fourth season, and a 2015 staff photograph that seems to show a woman in Victorian dress at a window has circulated widely online. In 2018 Historic Hotels of America put the hotel on its list of most haunted historic hotels.

A woman in Victorian or Edwardian dress in Room 314 and the third-floor halls, a figure brushing her hair on the canopy bed, knocking, lights switching on and off and the scent of flowers – reported by guests and housekeeping staff.

Room 314, the Princess’s former suite above the main entrance, and the third-floor corridors; also the dining room and the window seen in the 2015 staff photo. Reports are mostly at night.

The hotel features in Ghost Hunters and in Historic Hotels of America’s haunted-hotel lists, and its staff tell the Princess’s story on historical tours. Her canopy bed is still in Room 314, and the 1944 conference is part of the history the hotel tells its guests.