Blaine House Ghosts: Maine’s Governor’s Home in Augusta

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 2, 2026 · How we verify

Set back from the sidewalk at 192 State Street in Augusta, across from the Maine State House, stands a white clapboard mansion that has housed the state’s chief executives for more than a century. The Blaine House ghosts are a fixture of local lore in Maine’s capital, attached to a building whose documented history is unusually well recorded: a sea captain’s home, then the residence of one of the most powerful politicians of the nineteenth century, then public property. What follows keeps those two threads apart, the record on one side and the stories on the other.

The Sea Captain Who Built It in 1833

The house went up in 1833 for James Hall, a retired ship captain whose public life did not end when he came ashore. Hall served as mayor of Augusta and later as Maine’s state treasurer, and the house he built reflected the standing of a man who moved between commerce and government. It was a private family home first and foremost, and it stayed in private hands for the better part of the nineteenth century.

James G. Blaine’s Augusta Years

In 1862 the property passed to the man whose name it still carries. James G. Blaine, who lived in Augusta, was one of the dominant Republican figures of his era: a United States representative from Maine, Speaker of the House, a United States senator, and secretary of state under three presidents. In 1884 he was the Republican candidate for president, losing one of the closest elections of the century. He died in 1893.

That career matters to the building’s reputation because a great deal of it was conducted here. The Augusta house functioned as a political headquarters as much as a home, and the study is the room most often named in the ghost accounts that came later.

How the Blaine House Became the Governor’s Residence

In 1919 Blaine’s daughter gave the house to the state of Maine, with the condition that it serve as the official residence of the governor. It has done so ever since. Successive renovations have kept the building functional as both a family home and a place of official business while preserving its historic character, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

So the Blaine House is three things at once: a working residence, a museum-grade historic property, and a site of state ceremony. Any account of what people hear and see inside it has to reckon with the fact that this is an old, heavily used, constantly staffed building.

What Staff and Visitors Say They Encounter

None of the following is documented fact. These are reported experiences, repeated over the years by staff, residents, and visitors, and they are consistent enough to have become part of the house’s identity in Augusta.

• Blaine himself. The most frequently repeated story is of an apparition taken to be James G. Blaine, described in or near his old study. Others report a voice carrying down the corridors with no one there to account for it.
• A woman in the garden. A female figure is said to appear on the grounds. Local tradition identifies her as Blaine’s wife, Harriet, and connects her presence to grief over children the family lost. That identification is legend, not a matter of record.
• A child on the third floor. A little girl in old-fashioned clothing is reported playing on the upper story, sometimes accompanied by unexplained sounds from rooms that are empty.
• General noise and movement. Footsteps, creaks, and small unattributed sounds are the everyday background of the accounts, the kind of thing any nineteenth-century timber-framed house produces on its own.

Worth stating plainly: there is no verification for any of it, and a house built in 1833 with a long history of renovation, heating systems, and constant foot traffic has a great many mundane ways of making itself heard. What can be said honestly is that the stories are persistent and that they attach to specific rooms rather than drifting.

Visiting the Blaine House in Augusta

This is not an abandoned property or a ticketed attraction. It is the governor’s home, and access is on the state’s terms. Public tours of the Blaine House are offered, and the official Blaine House website is the place to confirm the current tour schedule, security requirements, and any closures for official events before making the trip. Visitors should expect a history tour of a preserved nineteenth-century residence rather than anything paranormal in nature; the ghost stories are told about the house, not marketed by it.

The location makes the visit easy to combine with the rest of Augusta’s government district. The Maine State House sits directly across State Street, and the surrounding neighborhood preserves much of the character it had when Blaine ran national campaigns from inside these walls.

Sources

• Wikipedia: List of people from Maine

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