Mount Washington Hotel

History

“Look at me, gentlemen, for I am the poor fool who built all this!” That is the line Curbed, the architecture and real estate site, gave Joseph Stickney in its 2014 history of the Mount Washington Hotel. Stickney, a coal and railroad millionaire, built the hotel from 1900 to 1902 below Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast. Charles Alling Gifford designed it in the Spanish Renaissance style. By the hotel’s own count, more than 250 Italian craftsmen worked on it. When it opened in 1902, it had 352 rooms and was the largest resort in the White Mountains.

Stickney died in December 1903, about a year after the opening. The hotel went to his much younger wife, Carolyn Stickney, and she ran it for the next three decades. In July 1913, she married a French nobleman, Prince Aymon de Faucigny-Lucinge, in a Catholic cathedral in London. The New York Times put her fortune at $10 million. From then on, she was the Princess. She also built a memorial chapel to Joseph at Bretton Woods.

The Times reported that she was still entertaining at Bretton Woods in the summers of 1934 and 1935. She died on November 2, 1936, in Providence, Rhode Island. Her nephew, Foster Reynolds, inherited the hotel.

The hotel closed during World War II and stayed shut for the summer of 1943. In 1944, a group of Boston investors bought it and gave it a complete face-lift for a conference. That July, delegates from 44 nations met there for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, to chart what the National Park Service calls “a blueprint for the world’s monetary system.” The economist John Maynard Keynes headed the British delegation.

Thomas Edison, the silent-film star Mary Pickford, and Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding were among its guests, according to the hotel’s National Register nomination. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and named a National Historic Landmark in 1986. Omni runs it today as the Omni Mount Washington Resort & Spa.

Hauntings & Lore

The hotel’s best-known ghost is the woman who owned it. Historic Hotels of America, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s program for historic hotels, put the Mount Washington on its 2023 list of the 25 most haunted, for a ghost “affectionately known as The Princess.”

The Princess in Room 314

By the hotel’s account, Room 314 was Carolyn Stickney’s bedroom, and her original four-poster bed is still in it. The hotel books it today as the Premier Queen Princess Carolyn Room. The Historic Hotels list says Room 314 is where guests most often report seeing her, sitting on the edge of the bed.

Julie Tremaine stayed in the room for Paste magazine in 2022, under the headline “Searching for Ghosts in New England’s Most Haunted Hotel.” The head of housekeeping, Mark, told her the room’s two TVs turn on with nobody using the remote. Once, he said, a drawer in the nightstand shot open on its own while he was talking to a guest in the room. “It opened itself four times in a row.”

The paranormal TV series Ghost Hunters investigated the hotel in a 2008 episode and came back in 2012 for one called “The Princess and the EVP.” Syfy’s recap says one of the team saw a heat signal appear on the bed in Room 314. When two of the investigators called out to the princess, the recap says, they got “a big bang in reply.”

Ask for Room 314, the Princess Carolyn Room.

Her Table

Historic Hotels of America says Joseph Stickney built Carolyn a private dining room. The hotel runs it today as the Princess Lounge.

In life, Curbed says, she reserved a table for one at the restaurant every evening. In 2013, the Boston Globe reported that the staff still set a table in her memory in the main dining room every night. Her own dining table stands in the Gold Room, where the hotel serves private dinners around it.

A Woman in Victorian Dress

The list has her outside her room, too. Guests report an elegant woman in Victorian dress in the hallways, light taps on doors when no one is outside, and things in guest rooms that vanish and turn up again in the same spot. The 2008 Ghost Hunters episode has the staff reporting cold spots. As Tremaine put it in Paste, “Princess Carolyn is the best-known of the hotel’s ghosts, but she’s far from the only one.”