Haunted Vermont

ARE THE GREEN MOUTAINS HAUNTED?

Ghosts reportedly haunt a 19th-century English castle in Proctor – you can check for yourself on a tour. People have sworn they’ve heard the screams of a jilted lover from Emily’s Bridge in Stowe. Elsewhere in town, boots heard on the roof belonged to a former employee who saved a young girl from falling to her death. Come see for yourself what haunts the Green Mountains. 

In Bennington, Indigenous stories called a swath of land known as the Bennington Triangle “cursed land,” a region where all four winds met. Throughout the Green Mountain National Forest where the Bennington Triangle is located, you’ll see roads from the ghost town of Glastenbury. The town was “unorganized” in 1937 after losing a lot of its population to disease and bad weather. Between 1945 and 1950, five disappearances were registered from the surrounding woods, though folklore holds there were more.

In West Castleton, Irish immigrant slate workers enjoyed crossing Lake Bomoseen to visit a tavern on the opposite shore. One particularly gloomy evening three men did not return and despite a painstaking search, were never found. Residents today claim that during a full moon, a dark, vacant, and ghostly rowboat can be seen drifting silently across the lake. 

At the Old Stagecoach Inn in Waterbury, an innkeeper was baffled when an unfamiliar couple came downstairs saying they had been admitted by an older woman. She sounded exactly like the hotel’s former owner, the long-dead Nettie Spencer. Nettie’s family took ownership of the inn in 1890. She died in her bedroom on the property at 98 (now Room 2.) Some say her spirit never left, showing up as an elderly woman standing near the foot of her bed, smoothing bedsheets, or making floors creak wandering the halls at night.  

Stowe’s Gold Brook Bridge is also known as “Emily’s Bridge” as it is haunted by the ghost of a lovelorn Emily who died on the bridge after being stood up on her wedding day. Visitors to the bridge have reported scratch marks appearing on their cars and strange noises such as footsteps, ropes tightening, and screams. 

Along Route 91 in the Okemo Valley region is the Golden Stage Inn in Cavendish, where the innkeepers have become familiar with a young friendly spirit they’ve named George. He’s said to appear dressed in a traveling cloak and some say bears a remarkable resemblance to Robert Redford. 

Between Windsor and Woodstock, a solitary rider dressed entirely in black is spotted from time to time splashing along the rotted timbers of an old plank road built through Snail Swamp. No one knows who he is or why he patrols Snail Swamp, but he always travels towards Woodstock.

Vermont stories are about more than just ghosts. Stop in Manchester and you might just hear about vampires, too. In the late 1700s, newly married Rachel Harris Burton died of tuberculosis at 20 years old. It wasn’t long before her husband’s second wife, Hulda Powell, got sick, too. People blamed Rachel for Hulda’s illness, ultimately exhuming and burning her body to kill the “vampire.” The ritual didn’t work; Hulda also died of tuberculosis. 

The Wampahoofus might just be the oldest creature you’ve never seen. Described as half-boar, half-deer and supposed to have died out long ago, legends of this mythical creature started before those of the yeti or Bigfoot. You’re unlikely to see one, even if you hike this Mount Mansfield trail 1.8 miles up Butler Lodge Trail – but you never know.