Est. 1916 · National Register of Historic Places (1990) · Historic Hotels of America member · One of five surviving grand-scale NH resort hotels from the era
Cyrus and Marcia Pinkham Gale began taking in guests at their farmhouse on Eagle Mountain Farm in 1849, on land that traced to Marcia's ancestor Captain Joseph Pinkham. As Jackson grew into a White Mountains resort town through the second half of the 19th century, the Gales expanded their operation into Eagle Hall and Eagle Mountain House, which by around 1890 could lodge 125 guests. By the 1880s Jackson counted five large hotels; Eagle Mountain House was among them.
Fire destroyed both Eagle Hall and Eagle Mountain House in May 1915. The Gales' son, Arthur Pinkham Gale, designed a replacement in the Colonial Revival style, built by Intervale contractor Roswell Ward, and it opened on July 4, 1916, with 75 guest rooms and a veranda that wrapped three sides of the building -- now a 280-foot single-story porch along the front. Arthur installed what is described as New Hampshire's first resort fire-suppression system. The hotel added a passenger elevator in 1926, still in operation, and roughly doubled in size with a 1928-29 addition that brought steam heat. In 1931 Arthur converted the former pasture in front of the hotel into a nine-hole golf course, which remains a par-32 course along the Wildcat River today.
The Gale family owned Eagle Mountain House until 1973. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 6, 1990, joined Historic Hotels of America in 1996, and is counted among the five surviving grand-scale resort hotels of its era still standing in New Hampshire.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Mountain_House
- https://www.historichotels.org/us/hotels-resorts/eagle-mountain-house
- https://eaglemt.com/our-story/
- https://www.thedistractedwanderer.com/2020/11/eagle-mountain-house-golf-club-one-of.html
- https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/stays/new-hampshire/haunted-hotels-jackson-nh
- https://frightfind.com/eagle-mountain-house-and-golf-club/
- https://www.creators.com/read/travel-and-adventure/09/14/historic-hotels-in-new-hampshires-white-mountains
- https://hauntedasylum.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-haunting-of-eagle-mountain.html
Woman in a red dressApparition of a young boyCovers pulled over a sleeping guest's face
OnlyInYourState's roundup of Jackson's haunted hotels describes a "Lady in Red" and the apparition of a young boy who "appear from time to time throughout the property," a pairing repeated in other regional write-ups of the hotel. Reader comments on that coverage add specifics: one guest, posting in 2020, asked about the boy's reported age after seeing him on video during a July 4th visit; another, in 2023, described waking to find the covers pulled over his face and, the next morning at breakfast, feeling a tap on the shoulder, adding that hotel staff told him "there are always activities at the table" he'd been seated at.
FrightFind's own entry for the hotel is thinner than some other coverage suggests -- as of this writing the page states the listing is "in need of information" and carries a single visitor account, from a reviewer named Jade McNally, describing an unexplained experience her brother had at the property, without further detail. No named paranormal-investigation team's findings for Eagle Mountain House were confirmed on any source we could verify; a claim that a paranormal group inspected the hotel's second floor circulates in secondhand write-ups, but the trail runs cold at exactly this thin, undated visitor account.
Notable Entities
The Lady in RedThe boy