HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
An 1833 stagecoach inn where a tap-dancing ghost still walks the roof
18 Main Street, Stowe, VT 05672
Research updated October 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Room rates vary seasonally per the inn's own reservation system.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved village sidewalks, interior inn corridors
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1833 · Stowe Village Historic District · National Register of Historic Places (1978) · 19th-Century Stagecoach Inn
Peter C. Lovejoy built the inn in 1833. He later traded the building to Stillman Churchill for a 350-acre farm; Churchill added brick wings, a dance hall, and a two-story front porch and renamed the property Mansfield House. Churchill lost the building to foreclosure, and it passed to mortgage holder W.H.H. Bingham and then to W.P. Bailey, who ran it as the Brick Hotel.
In 1893, Mark C. Lovejoy bought the property and renamed it the Green Mountain Inn, the name it has kept since. A Depot Street building was added in 1897 to serve the Mount Mansfield Electric Railroad, and the inn acquired the neighboring Sanborn House for use as a blacksmith shop and livery. The inn hosted President Chester A. Arthur for a theatrical performance and, decades later, President Gerald Ford during a Look magazine photo feature on Stowe.
The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 15, 1978, as a contributing structure in the Stowe Village Historic District. Canadian entrepreneur Marvin Gameroff bought the inn in 1982, and the Gameroff Trust has operated it since, beginning a restoration of the main inn and Depot Building in 1983 that continues to inform how the property is maintained today.
Sources
According to the inn's own telling, Boots Berry was born in 1840 in Room 302, then part of the third-floor servants' quarters, the son of the inn's horseman and a chambermaid. As a young man he became a local hero after calming a team of runaway stagecoach horses on Main Street, but he was later dismissed from the inn over his drinking. The legend holds he drifted for years and picked up his nickname after a fellow inmate taught him to tap dance during a stint in a New Orleans jail.
Berry eventually returned to Stowe. In 1902, according to the story, he climbed onto the inn's roof during a snowstorm to rescue a girl who had become stranded there, saved her, and then slipped and fell to his death from the same roof above the room where he was born. Guests and staff describe hearing tap-dancing footsteps on the roof during snowstorms in the years since, and Room 302 -- Berry's reputed birthplace -- remains one of the inn's most-requested rooms rather than one guests avoid.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Reserve a room at the 1833 inn on Stowe's Main Street, a contributing building in the Stowe Village Historic District. Room 302, the third-floor servants' quarters where inn legend says Boots Berry was born, is the property's most-requested room.
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