The Balsams

Dixville itself began as an 1805 legislative grant of more than 29,000 acres to Colonel Timothy Dix Jr., a Revolutionary War patriot killed in the War of 1812. Parsons' inn honored the name. In 1895 Philadelphia inventor and industrialist Henry S. Hale — a regular guest — bought the property, renamed it The Balsams, and spent the next quarter-century expanding: dams, lakes, a canal system, the Donald Ross-designed Panorama golf course in 1912, and finally the towering Hampshire House wing in 1918, which doubled capacity to 400.

Hale's pre-war investments soured and the hotel sold at auction in 1922; rubber heir and inventor Neil Tillotson bought it in 1954. The Ballot Room has hosted Dixville Notch's first-in-the-nation midnight voting since 1960 — every registered voter of the tiny community, counted while the rest of America sleeps. The property went on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002, closed in December 2011 after a $2.3 million sale, and has spent the years since in redevelopment limbo under plans associated with Les Otten.

The reported roster reads like a register that never turned a page. A beautiful woman sits in a chair just beyond a landing. A translucent naked man was reported standing at the foot of a bed in Room 120. A trio of elderly ladies is heard laughing. Room 215 — built over the old stable where, the story goes, a worker was accidentally hanged — generates repeat complaints, as does Room 303, where a guest reportedly demanded to be moved after seeing a woman's ghost once too often.

Staff accounts follow the same pattern. A bellwoman and waitress who worked five seasons at the resort reported smelling cigar smoke in the game room, turning to address the smoker — smoking was only allowed in the sun room — and recognizing, as he vanished, the man in the room's portrait: Henry Hale himself. Housekeepers filed impressions left on freshly made beds, as though someone had just sat down. Barba's policy, per Citro, was not to discourage the staff from talking about any of it.

The hotel stands empty in the notch, one of the largest closed resorts in New England, still serving as a polling place while redevelopment plans grind toward a promised reopening. The record is a 25-room inn that grew into a landmark, hosted world figures for a century and a half, and shut its doors in 2011. The file's suggestion, documented by the hotel's own president for half a century, is that some guests from the intervening years never checked out.