HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
An 1881 Queen Anne mansion turned inn, where Room 204 has a mind of its own
40 Court St, Portsmouth, NH 03801
Research updated October 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Room rates vary seasonally, typically $200-$400/night; book through the hotel's own site.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved downtown streets, interior hotel corridors and stairs
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1881 · 1881 Queen Anne Mansion · Haymarket Square Historic District · Portsmouth Merchant History
John E. Sise purchased the Court Street lot in 1879 and had the elaborate Stick Style-Queen Anne mansion built by 1881. Sise, an insurance agent with an office in the Peirce Block, served as a proprietor of the Portsmouth Athenaeum from 1865 to 1898 and raised four children there with his wife, Lucy Marsh Sise, whom he had married in 1857.
The eldest child, Mabel Sise, inherited the house and married Alfred Gooding, minister of Portsmouth's South Church, in 1887; Gooding built an addition that roughly doubled the home's size. Ownership left the family by the 1930s, and the building cycled through use as offices, a beauty salon, apartments, and -- by local accounts -- a halfway house in the 1950s, a period some staff and residents later associated with the property's first reported strange occurrences.
In 1986 the building was renovated and opened as the Sise Inn, a 34-room bed-and-breakfast furnished with Victorian antiques in Portsmouth's Haymarket Square historic district. Lark Hotels bought the property in November 2013 and closed it for a six-month renovation, reopening it in 2014 as the 32-room Hotel Portsmouth, which underwent a further redesign in 2024.
Sources
New Hampshire Magazine's roundup of the state's haunted sites singles out The Hotel Portsmouth, reporting that ice from the hallway machine has repeatedly turned up laid in a trail or piled on the floor of Room 204, and that the room's door locks and unlocks itself. Multiple guests and staff members, in accounts going back to the building's years as the Sise Inn, describe a similar cluster of activity: cold spots that appear without a draft, doors that swing open or shut with no one nearby, and a rocking chair that rocks on its own in one of the common areas.
Staff members over the years have reported items moving between visits -- glasses, small furniture, guest belongings -- and an elevator that has occasionally been reported moving between floors with no one aboard. Accounts describe the presence as playful rather than menacing; no consistent identity has been attached to it, and management has generally treated the stories as part of the inn's character rather than promoted them as a selling point.
Book a room in the 1881 Queen Anne mansion John E. Sise built for his family, later run for nearly 30 years as the Sise Inn before a 2013 sale and top-to-bottom renovation into The Hotel Portsmouth. Staff and guests most often report activity around Room 204 on the third floor.
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