{"id":486,"slug":"1754-house-woodbury-connecticut","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Connecticut's oldest inn began as a private house. The Reverend Anthony Stoddard built the structure in the 1730s, and in 1754 the Curtiss family opened its doors to travelers as the Curtiss House — a roadside inn on Woodbury's Main Street that kept the name through most of the next two and a half centuries, passing through owners, a period as the Evergreen Inn, and a 2014 episode of Gordon Ramsay's Hotel Hell. The Bates-Walsh family bought it in 2020 and relaunched it under its opening year: the 1754 House. It is listed on the National Register."]},{"heading":"What guests report","paragraphs":["State tourism files the place for voices, footsteps, and the alleged spirits of former guests; the fuller retellings attach names and rooms. In Room 1 — once an innkeeper's quarters — guests describe a man in old-fashioned clothes who stomps in, sits, pulls off his boots, and fades into the wall; local telling ties him to Lucius Foot, an 1850s innkeeper said to have been found frozen in a shed behind St. Paul's after a winning night at cards, an episode the record does not preserve. On the second floor a presence called Sally is blamed for covers stripped in Room 16 and a renovation-era chair found turned to the wall; in the basement, staff have reported a former dishwasher named Joe on the stairs, eating mashed potatoes.","Every item in that catalog is reported, none proven. The file's value is the pairing it preserves: one of New England's genuinely old public houses, and a complete working cast of the kind of ghosts old inns reliably accumulate — a gambler out of luck, a restless chambermaid, and a dishwasher still on break."]}],"name":"1754 House","aliases":["Curtis House Inn"],"type":"INN","type_label":"Inn","cats":["HAUNTING"],"groups":["hauntings","lodging"],"desc":"Inn research record.","full_desc":"1754 House is an inn in Woodbury, Connecticut. Inn research record. The archive files it under haunting reports. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend — all telling, no verified spine yet, and the file says so plainly. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. The dossier keeps the place and the story in the same record — which is what the archive is for.","address":null,"city":"Woodbury","county":null,"state":"Connecticut","postal":null,"region":"Northeast","lat":41.54387,"lon":-73.204857,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"UNKNOWN","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Discovery/enrichment pass; geographic coordinates and current visitor conditions remain to be independently verified. Evidence confidence refers to attribution, not paranormal reality.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"LOW","score":43.1,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0,"source_quality":0.6,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":368,"type":"MULTIPLE_PHENOMENA","description":"Tourism records stories of voices, footsteps and former guests’ alleged spirits. The Woodbury hotel's reports are the kind old lodgings accumulate — footsteps after hours, presences in rooms, the house working the night shift. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. The report is preserved in sources like 'Haunted Hotels'. Nothing here would make headlines alone; together the reports make a pattern.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.65,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Haunted Hotels","url":"https://ctvisit.com/articles/haunted-hotels","publisher":"Connecticut Office of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Tourism records stories of voices, footsteps and former guests’ alleged spirits. A hotel in Woodbury, Connecticut with more than a century of check-ins gives the reports plenty of rooms to work with. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. The account appears in 'Haunted Hotels'. The story outranks the documentation, which is how you know it's folklore.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"Haunted Hotels","url":"https://ctvisit.com/articles/haunted-hotels","publisher":"Connecticut Office of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Haunted Hotels","url":"https://ctvisit.com/articles/haunted-hotels","publisher":"Connecticut Office of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":1,"entities":0,"sources":1}}