Carolyn Stickney

History

A Country Girl from Waltham

Carolyn Stickney was born Carolyn Salome Foster in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1867. Her father, Reuben Foster, was a produce merchant on Main Street. The 1880 census finds Carolyn, 12, at home with her parents and her older sister, Grace. In 1913, a wire story printed from Indiana to Texas remembered her as “a typical country girl of Waltham.”

According to that story, she was 22 and just out of Lasell Seminary, a school for young women in neighboring Newton, when she met Joseph Stickney in 1890. Stickney was a coal operator from Concord, New Hampshire. They married in Waltham on January 14, 1893, when she was 25 and he was 52. The New York Times later described the bride as “a poor but charming girl” and called the marriage “a notably happy one.”

The Coal Baron’s Widow

Joseph Stickney built the Mount Washington Hotel at Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and it opened in 1902.

On December 21, 1903, he died suddenly of a stroke at their home at 874 Fifth Avenue in New York. The hotel went to Carolyn, who ran it for the rest of her life. At Bretton Woods, she built a memorial church to Joseph, the Church of the Transfiguration.

Soon after his death, she sailed for Europe. She traveled for years and finally took a house in London, but she still came back to the White Mountains for the late summer and fall. On a visit to her Fifth Avenue house in early 1913, the wire story said, she told an old friend from Waltham: “Joe left me every material comfort a woman could desire. But now I am lonesome. If I ever marry again it will be for companionship.”

Princess Aymon de Faucigny-Lucinge

In London, she met Prince Aymon de Faucigny-Lucinge of Paris, a great-great-grandson of King Charles X of France. The prince had “pursued his suit for her hand with ardor,” the Times reported. They married at Westminster Cathedral in London on July 2, 1913, and spent their honeymoon at Knole, the Sackville family’s estate in Kent.

The same report put her fortune at about $10 million and gave her age as 40. By the census, she was about 45. She announced that she would settle her affairs in America and live in Europe for good.

Widowed Again

According to the New-York Tribune, a New York daily, the prince enlisted when World War I began, even though he was well past France’s age limit for service. He served at Verdun and caught the illness there that later killed him. For her own work in hospitals and other charities in France during the war, Carolyn was decorated with the Croix de Guerre with palms, France’s war cross. The prince died at his château in France in 1922. He was 62.

The Last Summer

She kept coming back to Bretton Woods. In the summers of 1934 and 1935, the Princess often entertained there. In 1936, she spent the whole summer at the Mount Washington. That August, she gave a dinner at the hotel for the Bretton Woods Boy Singers before their concert in the ballroom. Two weeks later, she gave another for Bishop John Thompson Dallas of New Hampshire, with her sister and nephew at the table.

Ten weeks after that dinner, on November 2, 1936, Carolyn died in Providence, Rhode Island, where her sister and nephew lived. She was 69. After a funeral at St. Stephen’s Church in Providence, she was buried in Concord, New Hampshire, the city where Joseph was born. She left an estate of $7 million, including money for the memorial church at Bretton Woods. The hotel went to her nephew, Foster Reynolds.

Hauntings & Lore

The hotel’s stories about her start while she was still alive.

The Best-Dressed Woman at Dinner

Craig Clemmer, the hotel’s marketing director, told the Boston Globe in 2017 how the story goes. She would stand behind a thin curtain on a mezzanine and watch the guests come down the main stairway to dinner. “If anyone was dressed better than her, she’d change her outfit before heading to the dining room,” he said.

Her bed traveled with her. According to the Globe, her hand-carved, canopied maple bed was shipped back and forth between Paris and Bretton Woods every year. It stands today in Room 314, which the hotel says was her bedroom.

The Princess in Room 314

Historic Hotels of America, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s program for historic hotels, says her ghost is “affectionately known as The Princess.” Its 2023 list of the 25 most haunted historic hotels says guests most often report seeing her in Room 314, sitting at the edge of the four-poster bed.

The room has more stories. In 2022, the hotel’s head of housekeeping told Paste magazine that a nightstand drawer there opened itself four times in a row. In 2012, the paranormal TV series Ghost Hunters called out to her and, according to the network’s recap, got “a big bang in reply.”

To stay in her room, book the Mount Washington Hotel and ask for Room 314, the Premier Queen Princess Carolyn Room.