Greek Revival mansion built 1840 for a railroad executive who lost his fortune and died penniless — now reportedly home to lingering presences glimpsed by office staff.
63 College Street, Burlington, VT 05401
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Exterior viewing from public sidewalk is free. Building interior is private office space; no public tours offered by the owner. Featured on Queen City Ghostwalk's downtown Burlington tours (ticket required).
Access
Wheelchair OK
Sidewalk-level viewing from College Street; downtown Burlington terrain is generally flat near the waterfront block.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1840 · Greek Revival Architecture · Vermont Railroad Era · Ammi B. Young Designed · NRHP-listed 1972 · 1979 Fire / Pomerleau Restoration
Timothy Follett (1793–1857) was a prominent Burlington real-estate developer who became an executive of the Rutland Railroad as Vermont's rail network expanded in the 1840s. In 1840 he commissioned a new home on College Street from Ammi B. Young, the architect best known for designing the Vermont State House. The resulting Greek Revival mansion — an imposing temple-front block with a colonnaded portico — is one of the state's finest examples of the style.
Follett's prosperity did not last. In the 1850s, financial trouble at the Rutland Railroad wiped out much of his fortune, and the family lost the house. Follett died in 1857. After passing through several hands the property settled into institutional uses from 1885 onward, hosting groups including the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter.
The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 30, 1972. In 1979 it was gutted by fire and faced demolition, but Burlington developer Antonio Pomerleau purchased the shell and commissioned a careful restoration by the Preservation Partnership of Natick, Massachusetts. The restored interior was reconfigured as corporate offices for Pomerleau's real-estate agency.
Today the building continues to house Pomerleau Real Estate; the public sees only the College Street facade overlooking Burlington's waterfront block. It remains a fixture on local heritage walking tours and on Queen City Ghostwalk's downtown route.
Sources
The Follett House appears across multiple independent accounts of haunted Burlington. The most detailed published reporting comes from Thea Lewis's Queen City Ghostwalk material and the regional feature Happy Vermont (2018); the US Ghost Adventures Burlington tour and the long-running Theresa's Haunted History of the Tri-State blog (2012) cover the same site with overlapping but distinct details. Reported phenomena across these sources include lights that flicker after hours, mysterious shapes passing the second-floor windows, figures seen on the front lawn that vanish on closer look, and — per US Ghost Adventures and a separate Vermont Spirits Detective Agency investigation cited by Theresa's blog — objects disappearing from workers' desks and turning up months later in odd locations.
A frequently retold incident describes a young girl who attended a holiday party at the building during its VFW years and wandered up to the cupola, where she reportedly encountered a woman in 19th-century clothing who told her 'you don't belong here, go find your mother.' No adult in period dress was at the event. Lewis ties the broader activity to the family tragedy that played out inside these walls — Timothy Follett's loss of his fortune in the 1850s and his death not long after — and names his wife Loraine as one candidate for the resident female presence, though that specific attribution is not independently corroborated in primary historical sources.
Because the building is private office space, paranormal claims are not subject to systematic investigation reports. The verifiable record is a chain of consistent visitor and employee reports collected across multiple independent tour operators and folklore writers over roughly two decades, layered onto a documented family-fortune-collapse history that makes the location an obvious candidate for ghost storytelling.
Notable Entities
View the 1840 Greek Revival facade from the sidewalk at the southwest corner of College and South Champlain streets. The building is private office space (Pomerleau Real Estate); interior access is not available to the public.
Author and tour operator Thea Lewis includes the Follett House on her seasonal Queen City Ghostwalk itinerary, with stories drawn from her published Burlington ghost-lore writing. Tour stops at the exterior; participants do not enter the building.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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