Clara Brown and Room 9 at Wilmington’s White House Inn

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

On a hill above Wilmington, in the southern corner of Vermont, the White House Inn looks out over the Deerfield Valley from behind a row of white columns. It was never meant to be a hotel. It was built in 1915 as a summer house for a lumber magnate, and the family who commissioned it is the same family guests now talk about when the conversation turns, as it often does here, to who else might still be in the building.

Martin and Clara Brown Build on the Hill

The house was raised in 1915 as a warm weather retreat for Martin Brown, who made his money in lumber, and his wife Clara. It was a private residence first and a grand one, sited deliberately for the view, and much of what the Browns paid for is still in place: the original architectural detail survives to a degree that is unusual for a building that has spent decades in commercial use.

The transition from family estate to inn is what gives the place its particular character. Rooms that were bedrooms are still bedrooms. There are sixteen of them now, several with working fireplaces, some with private balconies or terraces facing the Vermont hills. The New York Times has named the inn among the world’s ten most romantic destinations, a line the property has understandably kept in circulation ever since.

Room 9 and the Woman Who Chose It

Nearly every ghost story attached to the White House Inn comes back to Clara Brown. She is said to have taken Room 9 as her own after her husband’s death, and Room 9 is where the reported activity concentrates. There is no verified record of anything supernatural occurring there. What exists is a long, consistent accumulation of guest and staff accounts, which is a different thing and worth stating plainly.

Those accounts describe cold spots that move rather than sit in one corner, doors that open on their own without a draft to explain them, and music from the 1930s drifting through the house with no identifiable source. The music detail is the one that recurs most often in the retellings, and it is the one that does the most work: it dates the presence, in the minds of those who report it, to the years when the Browns still lived here rather than to any later chapter of the building’s life.

None of this is evidence. It is testimony, offered by people who were paying to sleep in a hundred year old house on a dark hillside and who were, in many cases, already aware of the story before they checked in. Read it with that in mind. It remains, however, remarkably stable from one telling to the next, which is not true of every inn that advertises a ghost.

The Attic, the Basement Vault, and the Hidden Stair

Two parts of the building do more for its reputation than any single report. The attic is expansive, the kind of unfinished upper floor a summer mansion accumulates rather than plans. The basement is stranger: it holds an iron vault that locks, and a hidden staircase.

Both are architectural facts, not paranormal ones. A wealthy family in 1915 had ordinary reasons for a secure vault and for a service stair kept out of sight of guests. But a locking iron door in a cellar is a gift to a ghost story, and the inn’s atmosphere leans on these spaces whether or not anything has ever been reported inside them. If you want to understand why this particular building attracts the legends it does, stand at the top of that staircase for a moment.

Staying at the White House Inn in Wilmington

This is a working inn, which makes it one of the easier haunted locations in New England to experience properly: you book a room, you sleep there, you make up your own mind. Guests who want the story should ask about Room 9 specifically and should expect it to be in demand.

The setting supports a longer stay than a single night. Bird watching, swimming and golf fill the warm months; cross country skiing takes over in winter, with the trails running from the property into the surrounding woods. Wilmington and the wider Deerfield Valley offer rivers, cafes and restaurants within easy reach, and southern Vermont is at its busiest during foliage season, so book well ahead if you are aiming for autumn.

Guests are asked to treat the building as what it is: someone’s former home, still occupied, still in use, and still, by many accounts, not entirely empty.

See The White House Inn for Yourself

Sources

• The Historic Waybury Inn
• National Park Service
• Wikipedia: Waybury Inn

Address: 178 Route 9 East

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