BOARDMAN HOUSE INN
Inn — East Haddam, Connecticut
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/boardman-house-inn-east-haddam-connecticut/

Inn research record.

An inn in East Haddam, Connecticut, Boardman House Inn is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Inn research record. It sits in the archive under haunting reports. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip. Names, dates and reports are filed together here, so the record stays honest about which is which.

The fortune behind the house was spoons. Luther Boardman patented a better mold for stamping britannia — a pewter-grade metal — set up works in East Haddam in 1842, and took his son Norman into L. Boardman and Son in 1864. The business peaked in the decade the mansion went up: circa 1860, a Second Empire pile with a Mansard roof, a three-story tower, and heavy Italianate brackets on Norwich Road. By 1880 cheap tinned-iron spoons had taken the market; the factory burned in 1907. The house — recorded on the National Register as the Luther Boardman House, though the inn and most accounts credit Norman, who died in 1905 — outlasted the firm and is a contributing property in the East Haddam Historic District, a short walk from the Goodspeed Opera House.

THE LIBRARY REPORT
The haunting claim is one of the tidier ones in the file: guests at the inn report a man in period clothing seated in the library, smoking a cigar — a striking detail, since smoking has been banned in the house for years and some guests report only the smell, heavy cigar smoke in a room where nothing burns. Local telling names him Norman Boardman; the record, which cannot even fully settle whether father or son built the house, does not confirm the identification.
Filed as folklore, the report is at least coherent: one room, one figure, one habit — the founder, or someone like him, still reading where he left off.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Local folklore] apparition: Local rumor describes a period-dressed man smoking a cigar in the library. The hotel keeps the account on its own record — the sort of haunting a building earns one guest at a time. It survives as local folklore, which is to say it survives because people keep telling it. The account appears in 'Haunted Hotels'. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting.
  source: Haunted Hotels (https://ctvisit.com/articles/haunted-hotels)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Haunted Hotels — Connecticut Office of Tourism
  https://ctvisit.com/articles/haunted-hotels

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HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not.
Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/