{"id":2237,"slug":"mount-washington-hotel-bretton-woods-new-hampshire","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Joseph Stickney built the grandest hotel in the White Mountains in thirteen months and then checked in to watch it work. The coal-and-rail millionaire brought two hundred fifty Italian craftsmen to a ten-thousand-acre wilderness site in 1900; they raised a five-story Spanish Renaissance palace — two million board feet of lumber, eleven miles of plumbing, its own water, power, newspaper, and telephone system — and it opened July 28, 1902. 'Look at me, gentlemen,' Stickney reportedly said, 'for I am the poor fool who built all this.' He died within the year.","Forty-two years later the hotel hosted the most consequential conference most people have never heard of. In July 1944, seven hundred thirty delegates from forty-four Allied nations spent three weeks in the Mount Washington's ballrooms designing the postwar world economy — the Bretton Woods Conference, which created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. John Maynard Keynes argued in the dining room; the gold standard lived and died in the same building where Gilded Age guests had once played billiards. The global financial system was invented in a resort hotel chosen partly because it was too remote for anyone to reach it.","It's one of the last White Mountain grand hotels standing — the others burned or were demolished — and the only one that doubled as a site where the modern world order was drafted between the mountains. The porch still faces Mount Washington; the delegates' signatures are still on the document in the lobby."]},{"heading":"Why this file matters","paragraphs":["The Mount Washington Hotel is the archive's world-order file — a coal baron's folly that hosted the conference that created the IMF and the World Bank, the most important meeting ever held in a resort.","A hotel that outlasted the Gilded Age keeps its veranda — the file's suggestion being that the Bretton Woods delegates chose the mountains because the view made the stakes visible: they were rebuilding the world from a porch."]}],"name":"Mount Washington Hotel","aliases":[],"type":"HOTEL","type_label":"Hotel","cats":["HAUNTED_PLACE","HISTORIC_HOTEL"],"groups":["hauntings","lodging"],"desc":"The 1902 palace beneath the Presidential Range—Carolyn Stickney’s ghost.","full_desc":"A hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, built in 1902, Mount Washington Hotel is filed here for what the record attaches to it. The 1902 palace beneath the Presidential Range—Carolyn Stickney’s ghost. HauntHunt files it with haunted places and historic hotels. Ask the file who haunts it and it answers: Carolyn Stickney. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 1 legend and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. It still takes guests.","address":null,"city":"Bretton Woods","county":null,"state":"New Hampshire","postal":null,"region":"Northeast","lat":44.25722222,"lon":-71.43944444,"coord_kind":"WIKI","status":"ACTIVE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":1902,"year_opened":1902,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":"Hotel","research_notes":"Historic haunted hotel batch; VERIFY task auto-queued.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":59.4,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.3999999999999999,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":1591,"type":"NAMED_GHOST_LEGEND","description":"Carolyn Stickney is reported on the staircase and in her tower room; staff keep her favorite table set. The Bretton Woods hotel's reports are the kind old lodgings accumulate — footsteps after hours, presences in rooms, the house working the night shift. The story is documented as legend — recorded and retold, never verified as fact. The account appears in 'Mount Washington Hotel'. The name travels further than the proof; the sightings keep renewing the lease.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":"Carolyn Stickney","where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Mount Washington Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Washington_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]},{"id":1592,"type":"REPORTED_ANOMALIES","description":"Reported a woman’s figure, footsteps and a presence in the tower. A hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire with more than a century of check-ins gives the reports plenty of rooms to work with. It's anecdotal evidence in the strictest sense — stories, repeated, unresolved. Sources including 'Mount Washington Hotel' keep the claim in circulation. Nothing here would make headlines alone; together the reports make a pattern.","evidence":"ANECDOTAL","evidence_label":"Anecdotal","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Mount Washington Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Washington_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"Opened 1902; hosted the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. Mount Washington Hotel's history is documented rather than told — this entry is part of that spine. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The detail is preserved in 'Mount Washington Hotel'. It anchors the timeline the rest of the file hangs from.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":"1902","date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Mount Washington Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Washington_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Carolyn Stickney is reported on the staircase and in her tower room; staff keep her favorite table set. Mount Washington Hotel, a hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, has kept the story in circulation longer than most of its guest registers. 'Mount Washington Hotel' preserves the telling; the record keeps it filed where it belongs, as lore. The report is preserved in sources like 'Mount Washington Hotel'. It's the version the place will be remembered by, whether or not it's the true one.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"Mount Washington Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Washington_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"entities":[{"name":"Carolyn Stickney","claimed_identity":"Carolyn Stickney","verified":null,"summary":"Carolyn Stickney is reported on the staircase and in her tower room; staff keep her favorite table set. The Bretton Woods hotel's reports are the kind old lodgings accumulate — footsteps after hours, presences in rooms, the house working the night shift. Sources including 'Mount Washington Hotel' keep the claim in circulation. The name travels further than the proof; the sightings keep renewing the lease.","behavior":"Carolyn Stickney is reported on the staircase and in her tower room; staff keep her favorite table set.","area":null,"first_ref":null,"source":{"name":"Mount Washington Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Washington_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Operating or preserved hotel property; public areas vary—check directly for tours or overnight stays.","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":"Mount Washington Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Washington_Hotel","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Mount Washington Hotel","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Washington_Hotel","desc":"Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire","extract":"The Omni Mount Washington Resort is a historic luxury resort hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, near Mount Washington. It was designed by Charles Alling Gifford. In 1944, it hosted the Bretton Woods Conference, which established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It is a member of Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.\nThe area, part of the town of Carroll, New Hampshire, includes the Bretton Woods ski resort nearby. It is located at the northern end of Crawford Notch, 6 miles (10 km) east of the village of Twin Mountain along U.S. Route 302.","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Mount_Washington_Hotel%2C_Bretton_Woods%2C_NH.jpg/960px-Mount_Washington_Hotel%2C_Bretton_Woods%2C_NH.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":104,"lat":44.25722222,"lon":-71.43944444},"counts":{"claims":2,"history":1,"legends":1,"entities":1,"sources":1}}