Princess Carolyn and Room 314 at the Mount Washington Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 11, 2026 · How we verify

Set against the Presidential Range in Bretton Woods, the Mount Washington Hotel is the kind of building that looks staged even when you are standing in front of it: a white Spanish Renaissance Revival palace dropped into the middle of the New Hampshire wilderness, with the highest peak in the Northeast rising behind it. It has been a symbol of luxury for well over a century, it hosted a conference that reshaped the global economy, and it carries a ghost story that the resort itself has never bothered to deny. The ghost has a name, a title, and a room number.

Joseph Stickney Built It and Barely Got to Use It

The hotel was built between 1900 and 1902 by the industrialist Joseph Stickney, who had the money to indulge an enormous idea in a remote place. It opened in July 1902. Stickney died the following year, in 1903, which means the man who commissioned the grandest hotel in the White Mountains enjoyed roughly a single season of it.

His widow, Carolyn Foster Stickney, took over the property. She continued to live at the hotel and later remarried a European prince, which earned her the name that still follows her through the corridors: Princess Carolyn. That sequence, a builder who died almost immediately and a widow who stayed on for decades, is the entire engine of the hotel’s folklore. Nearly every story told here circles back to her.

The 1944 Conference That Made Bretton Woods a Word

The hotel’s place in the historical record is not in dispute. In 1944 it hosted the Bretton Woods Conference, the meeting that produced the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The name of a small New Hampshire resort township became shorthand for the postwar financial order, and the hotel has traded on that association ever since. It is now a National Historic Landmark and a year-round destination.

It is worth keeping the two halves separate. The conference is documented history. Princess Carolyn walking the halls is reported experience, told by guests and staff and repeated by the hotel, and nothing more than that.

Room 314, the Princess Room

If the hauntings here have a center of gravity, it is Room 314, once Carolyn Stickney’s own quarters. The suite still contains her original four-poster bed, which does a great deal of work in the storytelling: guests are not sleeping near a ghost story, they are sleeping in the furniture at the heart of it.

What people staying in the room describe:

• The apparition of a woman sitting on the bed, brushing her hair.
• Knocking and other unexplained noises.
• Sudden cold spots and drafts.
• Lights flickering and objects moving without an obvious cause.
• The smell of floral perfume hanging in the air.

None of this has been demonstrated under controlled conditions. A century-old timber and masonry building in a mountain climate produces drafts, settling noises and temperature swings as a matter of routine, and a room sold partly on its reputation primes the people who book it. That does not make the accounts dishonest. It does mean they should be read as what guests experienced rather than as evidence of anything.

Princess Carolyn Elsewhere in the Building

Carolyn’s reported appearances are not confined to her old suite. Witnesses describe a woman in an elegant gown descending the staircases, a figure glimpsed in mirrors, and movement along the corridors late at night. Others report nothing visual at all: faint footsteps in an empty hall, or the same floral perfume drifting past with no one nearby.

The interpretation attached to these sightings is always the same. Carolyn loved the hotel, lived in it long after her husband’s death, and is said to have stayed. That is an affectionate explanation rather than an investigated one, but it is the one the staff and the guidebooks have settled on.

Bathtubs, Lights and the Rest of the Reports

Away from Room 314, the accounts become more scattered and less personal. Bathtubs are said to fill themselves. Lights turn on and off without anyone at the switch. Cold drafts cut through hallways that should be warm, and guests describe the sensation of being watched in empty parts of the building. Taken together, these reports are the reason the Mount Washington Hotel appears so regularly on lists of the most haunted places in New Hampshire.

They are also the most easily explained category of activity in any large old hotel: plumbing, wiring, and a vast floorplan where sound travels strangely. Judge them accordingly.

Staying at the Omni Mount Washington Resort

This is one of the easiest haunted locations in the country to visit, because it is a working luxury resort open year-round. The Omni Mount Washington offers full accommodations along with a spa, a golf course and skiing, and most people who stay here come for the mountains rather than the ghost. The hotel does not hide its reputation, and a steady stream of guests book in specifically hoping for an encounter.

If Room 314 is the reason you are going, ask about it when you book rather than wandering the floors looking for it. The halls and guest rooms are private space for paying guests, and the usual rule applies anywhere you go chasing a story: do not trespass, do not disturb other people, and treat the building and its staff with respect.

Sources

• Lost Amusement Parks
• Canyon Land: An abandoned amusement park at Little River in Alabama
• Lake City Amusement Park (Guntersville, Alabama, United States)
• Space City USA artifacts found in deteriorating Georgia barn
• Urban Explorer Finds Abandoned Dinosaurs in Arkansas
• Wikipedia: List of defunct amusement parks in the United States

Address: 310 Mount Washington Hotel Road

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