HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
1716 Sudbury inn behind Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn, where guests in Room 9 report the ghost of Jerusha Howe.
72 Wayside Inn Road, Sudbury, MA 01776
Research updated September 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$
Grounds and museum buildings are free to visit dawn to dusk; restaurant meals are paid, and the inn's 10 overnight rooms run $220-$250 per night double occupancy including breakfast (rates subject to change).
Access
Accessibility not stated
Restored 18th-century post-and-beam building with narrow stairways in the guest-room wing; grounds are mostly level gravel paths. Call ahead for accessibility needs.
Equipment
Photos OK
One of the oldest continuously operating inns in the United States · Setting of Longfellow's 1863 Tales of a Wayside Inn · National Register of Historic Places (Wayside Inn Historic District, 1973) · Former Henry Ford property and trade-school site (1923-1945)
David Howe obtained a license to keep a "house of entertainment" in his family's Sudbury farmhouse in 1716, on the Boston Post Road between Boston and Worcester. His son Ezekiel Howe, who later commanded Sudbury's minutemen at the Battle of Concord, ran the inn through the Revolutionary era; town and probate records show Ezekiel purchased two enslaved people who lived at the inn, a man recorded as Portsmouth (1773) and a girl (1779), whose individual histories are not otherwise documented.
Five generations of Howes kept the inn until Lyman Howe, the last family innkeeper, died unmarried in 1861. The building closed to the public for 36 years. Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited in 1862 as a guest of family friends and described it in a letter as "a rambling, tumble-down building, two hundred years old." He used the closed inn as the frame for his 1863 collection Tales of a Wayside Inn, which includes "Paul Revere's Ride," and the book's popularity eventually attached his name to the building.
Edward Lemon bought the property in 1897 and reopened it as a working inn. Homer Rogers took over renovations from 1893 onward. Henry Ford purchased the inn in 1923 and acquired roughly 300 surrounding acres, adding a chapel, a schoolhouse moved from Sterling, and a working grist mill, and running a trade school on the grounds from 1928 to 1947 before selling the property in 1945. A fire on December 22-23, 1955, destroyed the interior and Ford's antique collection; the inn was rebuilt using salvaged beams and reopened on June 7, 1958. It has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Wayside Inn Historic District since 1973 and is now operated as a restaurant and inn by the nonprofit Wayside Inn Foundation.
Sources
Jerusha Howe grew up at the inn and, according to an 1868 Harper's New Monthly Magazine profile, was known locally for her musical talent and refined manner. Family accounts describe her falling for a visiting Englishman who returned home to arrange their wedding and was never heard from again, whether lost at sea or otherwise; Jerusha never married and died in 1842. Later retellings, including regional ghost-tour and paranormal-blog accounts, place her death at age 44 and her spirit in Room 9, the small upstairs room she reportedly used, with Room 10 next door sometimes included in the reports.
Guests and staff over the decades have described a presence in Room 9: a sensation of a touch or breath on the face, air moving near the back stairway with a trace of citrus scent, and, in some accounts, faint piano music with no one at the keyboard. None of these reports come from controlled investigation; they are guest and staff anecdotes collected by regional ghost-tour writers and repeated in paranormal media.
The inn's reputation as a haunted destination reached a wider audience in February 2011, when the Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures devoted its Season 5 premiere, a Valentine's Day special, to an overnight investigation of Room 9 and the Jerusha Howe story.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Walk the Wayside Inn's 100-plus acres, which include the inn itself, the Redstone Schoolhouse, the Martha-Mary Chapel, and a working grist mill built during Henry Ford's ownership. The grounds and exterior views are free and open to the public from dawn to dusk.
Book a night in Room 9 or Room 10, the two 18th-century rooms tied to the Jerusha Howe legend, in the inn's working guest wing. Reservations are taken by phone and these two rooms are reported to book up quickly.
See current room rates and availability at Longfellow's Wayside Inn.
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