Haunted Places in Portsmouth, NH

The history

Portsmouth's haunted ground is a seaport's ground — one of New England's oldest port towns, on the Piscataqua River at the Maine border. Wikipedia records Portsmouth as a historic seaport city in Rockingham County, with a population of 21,956 at the 2020 census. Strawbery Banke Museum's own history supplies the founding layer: for over 12,000 years the Abenaki visited the Seacoast seasonally for hunting, fishing, and food preparation, and in 1623 English colonists established a settlement along the Piscataqua River and the sheltered cove that is now Portsmouth Harbor, naming it "Strawbery Banke," likely for the abundant wild strawberries growing along the river banks. The neighborhood that grew there — Puddle Dock, at the city's South End — is the museum's ten acres today.

Two of the tour's stops carry their own Wikipedia-documented houses and graves. Point of Graves Burial Ground, Wikipedia records, is a small historic cemetery in Portsmouth dating to the 17th century, the final resting place for many of the city's prominent residents including the Wentworth, Vaughan, Rogers, and Lear families, and among the oldest cemeteries in New Hampshire — its land was donated by Captain John Pickering II, whose family plot may be among its burials. Across downtown, the John Paul Jones House, Wikipedia records, is the historic house at 43 Middle Street where Revolutionary naval hero John Paul Jones resided from 1781 to 1782 while it was operated as a boarding house; the Georgian house was built in 1758 for Captain Gregory Purcell, a ship captain and merchant, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1972.

The third anchor house is the Moffatt-Ladd House. Wikipedia records it as a 1763 Georgian house museum and National Historic Landmark, the home of William Whipple — a Founding Father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. The museum's own history adds that the house was first occupied in 1764 by Samuel Moffatt and his bride Sarah Catherine, that its frame was raised by craftsman Michael Whidden III and his joiners, and that it was the first house of its height in Portsmouth. The fires that scarred the port belong to the tour operator's telling of the records: it cites the Great Seaport Fires of 1802, 1806, and 1814, which it says repeatedly burned downtown Portsmouth and left hundreds homeless in winter cold.

The legend

This section is folklore — reported by the tour operator, and never asserted as fact here.

The operator's Portsmouth repertoire is colonial and maritime. At Point of Graves Burial Ground, established in the late 1600s in its telling, visitors are said to report sudden and overwhelming sorrow as well as frightening physical sensations among the headstones. At the Portsmouth Music Hall, built in 1878 after a fire destroyed the prior structure in the operator's account, witness accounts detail a quiet specter named Willy who wanders the surrounding walkways after the final curtain; the operator's wider writing ties Willy to an 18th-century jail it says once stood beneath the Music Hall. At the Sheafe Street Inn, which the operator describes as a 19th-century boarding house for weary seafarers, it tells of missing kitchen tools in the downstairs bakery and spectral footfalls linked to a fatal brawl on the staircase inside. At the John Paul Jones House, it tells of naval feuds and romantic rivalries still echoing through the night air.

The darkest tale is an execution. The operator frames its route around the 1768 hanging of Ruth Blay, a schoolteacher in its telling, whose execution it calls wrongful, with lingering spectral rumors surrounding Sheriff Packer's former estate. Shipwrecks, scandals, and disgraced war heroes fill out the operator's own summary of its route; all of it is folklore in its telling, and stays labelled that way here.

Haunted today

Hountix lists 3 places in Portsmouth, NH. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.

• Hotel Portsmouth (former Sise Inn) — haunted place, 40 Court St, Portsmouth, NH
• Isles of Shoals — haunted place, Islands about 10 miles off Portsmouth, NH
• The Chase House — haunted place, 698 Middle Rd, Portsmouth, NH

Sources

• Portsmouth Ghosts (US Ghost Adventures) — https://usghostadventures.com/portsmouth-ghost-tour/
• Moffatt-Ladd House & Garden — http://www.moffattladd.org/
• Moffatt-Ladd House & Garden, About — https://www.moffattladd.org/about
• Strawbery Banke Museum — http://www.strawberybanke.org/
• Strawbery Banke Museum, History — https://www.strawberybanke.org/history
• Wikipedia anchor: Portsmouth, New Hampshire — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth,_New_Hampshire
• Wikipedia anchor: Point of Graves Burial Ground — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_of_Graves_Burial_Ground
• Wikipedia anchor: Moffatt-Ladd House — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moffatt-Ladd_House
• Wikipedia anchor: Strawbery Banke — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawbery_Banke
• Wikipedia anchor: John Paul Jones House — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Jones_House