The Haunted Equinox Resort, Manchester: Mary Todd Lincoln and Room 329

The Equinox is the grand old lady of Manchester Village: a long white hotel with a columned porch facing the village green, Mount Equinox rising behind it and the marble sidewalks of one of Vermont’s prettiest villages out front. Its oldest part began as the Marsh Tavern in 1769, and over two and a half centuries it grew into a resort of about 150 rooms with a spa, a championship golf course, a falconry school and a working tavern that still serves dinner by the original hearth.

It also has more ghost stories than any other hotel in Vermont. Most guests have heard that Mary Todd Lincoln is supposed to walk its halls, but the strangest story is a single night in Room 329 in the 1990s, told by the security guard who was there. Here is what guests and staff report, what the history actually says and how to get the room.

The ghosts of the Equinox

Mary Todd Lincoln

The resort says Mary Todd Lincoln stayed at the Equinox with her two sons in the summer of 1864 and planned to come back in 1865 with the president. A suite was prepared for the family, but Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, and the visit never happened.

The best-known story is that she came back anyway. Guests and staff describe a woman in period dress glimpsed in the long halls, sometimes with a child at her side, who vanishes when anyone walks toward her. In a 2006 column for the Advocate Weekly, writer Joe Durwin noted that at least one witness claimed to hear a mother comforting a whining child in an empty room, and that Mary and her youngest son Tad are the favorite explanation. He also pointed out how convenient that link to the hotel’s history is, which is a fair warning to keep in mind.

The night in Room 329

The most detailed account comes from Robert Cullinan, a security guard who had worked at the hotel since its reopening. As Durwin retold it, Cullinan was called to a disturbance in Room 329 one night in the 1990s and found a family of four close to hysterics. The rocking chairs were rocking in rhythm, the lampshades were spinning and the bed appeared to lurch across the floor one leg at a time.

Cullinan said something he could not see then shoved him hard enough that he nearly fell. The family was moved to another room, and six other employees were said to have seen the events that night. Vermont Magazine repeated the story in 2020, and it is the reason Room 329 is the room people ask for.

Rocking chairs, piled furniture and scattered keys

Away from Room 329, the reports are spread through the building. Vermont author Joe Citro collected many of them in his 2001 book Green Mountain, Dark Tales. Staff have described voices and footsteps in empty rooms, sudden cold spots, and doors to vacant rooms found open with the shades disturbed and the rocking chairs still moving.

In one second floor room, furniture and other items were reportedly found stacked in a pyramid. One guest left his keys on a table and came back to find them taken off the ring and thrown around the room, and complained to the front desk about it.

The tales the resort tells

The Equinox now publishes its own collection of haunted tales. They include a woman in white who wanders the grand staircase at dusk, leaving a trace of perfume and faint piano music; glasses that move by themselves in the Marsh Tavern, where one guest’s photo is said to show a man in a tricorn hat raising a toast; a lantern seen over the pond on misty autumn nights; and a vintage-dressed bellman named George who offers to carry bags and disappears near the service elevator.

These read more like fireside stories than witness accounts, and most do not appear in the older reports, so enjoy them in that spirit.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• Room 329: Scene of the 1990s rocking chairs, spinning lampshades and moving bed. A regular room; request it by phone.
• The upper halls: Where a woman in period dress, sometimes with a child, is said to appear and vanish.
• The grand staircase: Home of the resort’s lady in white, said to walk at dusk.
• The Marsh Tavern: The oldest part of the resort, where Green Mountain Boys once drank and glasses are said to move.

History of The Equinox Golf Resort & Spa

The Equinox began as the Marsh Tavern, which opened in 1769 and which the resort calls Vermont’s first hotel. During the Revolution the local Council of Safety met here, and it was here that Ira Allen proposed seizing the property of Tories to pay for arms for his brother Ethan’s Green Mountain Boys. The tavern itself was seized under that policy after its owner, William Marsh, sided with the British.

Thaddeus Munson bought the confiscated building and reopened it as Thaddeus Munson’s New Inn. Over the following decades it was Widow Black’s Inn, Vanderlip’s Hotel, the Taconic and the Orvis Hotel. In 1839 owner Martin Vanderlip added the fluted columns that still define the front, and in 1853 the 200-room Equinox House was established. The north wing was once the Orvis family homestead, and across the street Charles Orvis founded his fishing tackle company in 1856.

The resort became one of New England’s great summer hotels. Its guest list includes presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, who gave a campaign speech on the front lawn. The Lincoln connection outlived the president: Robert Todd Lincoln, the son who had stayed here with his mother, later built his summer home, Hildene, just south of the village.

The hotel closed in 1972, the same year it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the listing was later widened into the Equinox House Historic District. It reopened in the 1980s after a long restoration, a period that, according to Durwin, included a 1985 propane explosion that badly damaged part of the building. A resort-wide renovation finished in 2018 left about 147 rooms and suites across the historic buildings, a 14,000 square foot spa and an 18-hole golf course.

Some of the oldest fabric survives in plain sight. The wood-burning fireplace in the Library has been in use since 1769, the original key box hangs behind the front desk, and the Chop House fireplace carries the initials of Louise Orvis.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Request Room 329 when you book by phone. It is a normal room, so availability is the only limit.
• Eat in the Marsh Tavern, the oldest part of the resort, and look for the hearth the Green Mountain Boys knew.
• Walk the long upper halls late in the evening, when the reports of a woman and child are most often set.
• Visit Hildene, Robert Todd Lincoln’s home just south of the village, in daylight: staff there tell their own story of a woman and child on the third floor.
• Fall foliage weekends sell out early; midweek in late spring is quieter and cheaper.
• Pair it with a night at the Green Mountain Inn in Stowe on a Vermont ghost road trip.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Green Mountain Inn, Stowe: Boots Berry and Room 302
• Old Stagecoach Inn, Waterbury: Nettie Spencer and Room 2
• Haunted hotels in Vermont: Including the Hartness House and the Golden Stage Inn, both in southern Vermont
• Colonial Inn, Concord, Massachusetts: Another Revolutionary-era inn with a famous haunted room
• Haunted hotels in Vermont

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the hotel’s own website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as guests, staff and local historians tell them. Read how we rate haunted hotels.

• The Equinox: A Living Legend, Still Evolving (history)
• The Equinox: Where History Whispers After Dark (haunted tales)
• Joe Durwin, Haunted History Plays Out at the Equinox (Advocate Weekly, 2006)
• Vermont Magazine: Spooky places to spend the night in Vermont
• Vermonter: The haunted history of the Equinox and Hildene
• Wikipedia: Equinox House Historic District
• Hotel Online: The Equinox restores its 200-year legacy (2018)

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