{"id":484,"slug":"blackberry-river-inn-norfolk-connecticut","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["The Blackberry River Inn is the farmhouse that became a Georgian Revival showpiece — a colonial structure built in 1763 that the New York architect Alfredo Taylor, Norfolk's summer resident and prolific local designer, transformed in the 1920s with his signature semi-elliptical arches until little of the original appearance showed. Seth Moseley ran it as Blackberry River Farm until 1938; the Schwarzhaupts made it an inn the next year.","The inn's resident is the White Lady — a figure reported on the second floor and walking out to the empty house in back, attested by people who lived there in the seventies and by guests since. The building's age and its successive reinventions — colonial house, gentleman's farm, Taylor's Georgian Revival, inn — give the legend a long shelf to sit on.","The file keeps the inn: the 1763 core, the Taylor transformation, the White Lady on the second floor, and the Connecticut country inn that kept its ghost through every renovation.","The Blackberry River Inn is the archive's Norfolk file — the 1763 farmhouse, the Taylor redo, and the White Lady upstairs."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["The Blackberry River Inn is the archive's Norfolk file — the colonial core, the 1920s Georgian Revival remake, and the resident White Lady.","A farmhouse remade keeps its ghost — the file's suggestion being that Blackberry River's hold is the layering: the colonial bones under Taylor's arches, and the lady who survived the renovation."]}],"name":"Blackberry River Inn","aliases":[],"type":"INN","type_label":"Inn","cats":["HAUNTING"],"groups":["hauntings","lodging"],"desc":"Inn research record.","full_desc":"Blackberry River Inn is an inn in Norfolk, Connecticut. Inn research record. The name the accounts keep returning to is Francis. The dossier holds 1 reported claim, 1 legend and 1 named or described presence — all telling, no verified spine yet, and the file says so plainly. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.","address":null,"city":"Norfolk","county":null,"state":"Connecticut","postal":null,"region":"Northeast","lat":41.991706,"lon":-73.194041,"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":"Underground Railroad tunnel interpretation in tourism source not adopted as verified history.","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":366,"type":"APPARITION","description":"Folklore describes a benevolent Lady in White sometimes called Francis. The hotel keeps the account on its own record — the sort of haunting a building earns one guest at a time. The claim is neighborhood knowledge — retold locally, verified nowhere. The account appears in 'Haunted Hotels'. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting.","evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","evidence_label":"Local folklore","entity":"Francis","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":"Folklore describes a benevolent Lady in White sometimes called Francis. A hotel in Norfolk, Connecticut with more than a century of check-ins gives the reports plenty of rooms to work with. Local lore carries the account; no documentation has ever caught up with it. 'Haunted Hotels' carries the account. The story outranks the documentation, which is how you know it's folklore.","earliest":null,"evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","source":{"name":"Haunted Hotels","url":"https://ctvisit.com/articles/haunted-hotels","publisher":"Connecticut Office of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"entities":[{"name":"Francis","claimed_identity":"Francis","verified":null,"summary":"Folklore describes a benevolent Lady in White sometimes called Francis. The hotel keeps the account on its own record — the sort of haunting a building earns one guest at a time. The report is preserved in sources like 'Haunted Hotels'. The name travels further than the proof; the sightings keep renewing the lease.","behavior":"Folklore describes a benevolent Lady in White sometimes called Francis.","area":null,"first_ref":null,"source":{"name":"Haunted Hotels","url":"https://ctvisit.com/articles/haunted-hotels","publisher":"Connecticut Office of Tourism","type":"TOURISM","authority":3}}],"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":{"title":"Blackberry River Inn","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberry_River_Inn","desc":"Historic house in Connecticut, United States","extract":"The Blackberry River Inn is a colonial mansion at 538 Greenwoods Road West in Norfolk, Connecticut. Constructed in 1763, the mansion was listed on the National Register of Historic Places under its historic name in 1984.","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/61/Front_Facade_Blackberry_River_Inn.jpg/330px-Front_Facade_Blackberry_River_Inn.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":108,"lat":42.00638889,"lon":-73.24138889},"counts":{"claims":1,"history":0,"legends":1,"entities":1,"sources":1}}