The c. 1787 Winooski River farmhouse of Green Mountain Boys founder Ethan Allen — the only surviving residence of Vermont's most famous founder, now a seasonal house museum with persistent reports of footsteps and fleeting shadows.
1 Ethan Allen Homestead, Burlington, VT 05408
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Modest admission for guided tours of the house museum during the May–October season; museum grounds are part of an adjacent public park and are free to walk.
Access
Limited Access
Historic 1+1/2-story farmhouse with stairs and uneven floors; surrounding park has level walking paths along the Winooski River.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1787 · Ethan Allen Residence · Green Mountain Boys / Vermont Founding · Revolutionary War Era · Only Surviving Allen Residence in Vermont · NRHP-listed 1986
Ethan Allen led the Green Mountain Boys during the Revolutionary War, most famously capturing Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775. Beyond the battlefield he was instrumental in Vermont's complex political path — first as an independent republic disputing land claims from New York, ultimately as the fourteenth state in 1791. After years of large-scale land speculation with his brothers and other partners, Allen settled in his final years on a 1,400-acre farm in the Winooski River valley.
The surviving farmhouse on that parcel was built about 1787. It is a modest 1+1/2-story post-and-beam structure with a gable roof, clapboarded exterior, and a Georgian center-chimney plan featuring a three-bay facade and a center entrance under a transom window. Allen lived here until his death on February 12, 1789.
The building was nearly lost to development before being added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. In the late 1980s a nonprofit organization developed a portion of the original farm into a public park and a museum facility around the surviving house. Today the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum is open seasonally — annually from May through October — and offers guided tours of the farmhouse along with interpretation of Allen's life and Vermont's revolutionary-era history. The surrounding grounds, along the Winooski River, function as a public park year-round.
Sources
Ghost lore at the Ethan Allen Homestead is unusually quiet given the prominence of the historical figure attached to it. The Famplified regional roundup of Vermont's most haunted places, and Queen City Ghostwalk's Facebook posts on the property, describe a consistent but low-key pattern: visitors and tour guests hear unexplained footsteps inside the farmhouse during slow afternoons and report seeing brief shadows on the grounds in late light. No specific apparition is identified by name.
Queen City Ghostwalk includes the Homestead on regular itineraries, framing it as one of Vermont's most-mentioned haunted sites but stopping well short of attributing the activity to Allen himself. The activity reported here is more in line with the residual-loop or shadow-figure archetype than with any intelligent apparition.
The museum itself does not market itself primarily as a haunted attraction — its mission is Revolutionary War and Vermont founding-era interpretation — but it does not dismiss the visitor reports.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Tour the modest 1+1/2-story post-and-beam farmhouse Ethan Allen built circa 1787 on a 1,400-acre Winooski River parcel where he settled with his family in his final years. Allen died here in 1789; the building is his only surviving residence in Vermont.
Walk the trails of the surrounding park along the Winooski River floodplain. The Queen City Ghostwalk and other regional ghost tours regularly cite the grounds as a site of reported footsteps and shadow figures.
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