Madame Sherri Castle ruins

Antoinette Sherri — born Antoinette Bramare in Paris — made her career in New York theatrical costuming with her husband Andre until his collapse and institutionalization ended the run in 1924. She began summering in Chesterfield at the end of the decade, bought the Gulf Road acreage, and built the castle around 1930: a bistro in the cellar, a grand bar, portraits and animal furs, mirrored bathrooms, and a private third floor reachable only by the exterior stone staircase that survives her.

She threw lavish parties for her New York crowd, drove a chauffeured Packard, and wore furs to the general store — the sort of behavior a small town files under permanent memory. Her money ran out. She returned in 1959 to find the abandoned castle thoroughly vandalized and left, heartbroken, for good. The house burned on October 18 or 20, 1962 — the sources disagree by two days — and the property was foreclosed in July 1963. Sherri died in Brattleboro on October 21, 1965, at 84, having left her estate to a local friend.

Local artist Ann Stokes bought the land after Sherri's death and eventually donated the forest — 488 to 513 acres depending on the account — to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, which keeps it open.

The legend attached to the ruin is the gentle kind: Madame Sherri herself seen standing at the top of the staircase — sometimes called the 'stairway to heaven' — in her evening wear, and faint party music or laughter heard drifting through the trees on the right nights. Photographers and ghost hunters make the short walk for the same picture and the same report. It is folklore laid over a foundation that invites it; the stories are filed as the regional retellings they are.

The dates of the destruction wobble in the retelling — the landowner's account and the conservation commission say October 18, 1962; the Chesterfield Historical Society's history puts the fire on October 20; and at least one regional history lets 1963 stand. The dossier notes the disagreement and leaves the exact night open, which is where the record left it.

What the record supports is only that the parties were real, the ruin is real, and the woman was by all accounts the most theatrical thing Chesterfield ever hosted.

The stair, the foundation, the fireplace, and the freestanding chimney survive under sugar maples, a short walk from the Gulf Road trailhead. The forest society has roped the staircase off and posted it — the stonework has deteriorated past the point of safe climbing, which the sign ('DO NOT CLIMB THE STAIRS') states plainly. The ghost, one assumes, is exempt.