Est. 1904 · Vermont Gubernatorial History · American Industrial Innovation · Amateur Astronomy Heritage · Shingle Style Architecture
James Hartness was one of the more unusual figures in Vermont's industrial history. An inventor with over 100 patents, he ran the Jones & Lamson Machine Company in Springfield — a precision machine-tool manufacturer that made the town a center of American manufacturing. He served as Governor of Vermont from 1921 to 1923 and was one of the nation's first licensed aircraft pilots.
Construction on the Hartness House began in 1903 and was completed in 1904. The main structure is a high-style Shingle-style house, one of the few of its type in Vermont; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. But it was what Hartness built beneath the front lawn that defined the property's character: a network of underground rooms connected to the house by a 240-foot tunnel, designed as a private workspace where the inventor could think without interruption.
At the far end of the tunnel sits the Hartness-Porter Turret Telescope — an equatorial design Hartness conceived and patented, now part of the Hartness-Porter Museum of Amateur Telescope Making. On July 26, 1927, Charles Lindbergh — an aviator friend of Hartness — stayed at the house during his tour following his transatlantic flight.
After Hartness and his wife Lena died, the family sold the property to three of Springfield's machine shops, which used it as a guest facility. A ballroom was added in 1954 and a restaurant in 1968. The property underwent renovation in the early 2000s and reopened as a boutique inn; the property now includes the historic Hartness House plus a renovated 29-room hotel expansion.
Sources
- https://www.hartnesshouse.com/history
- https://newengland.com/living/homes/the-haunted-hartness-house-inn-house-for-sale-in-springfield-vermont/
- https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/experiences/vermont/haunted-tunnel-vt
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartness_House
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hartness
- https://vnews.com/2017/07/27/springfield-celebrates-lindbergh-visit-s-90th-anniversary-11482322/
- https://ournewenglandlegends.com/podcast-230-the-haunted-hartness-house/
ApparitionsObject movementLights flickeringCold spotsPhantom sounds
The primary paranormal account associated with the Hartness House involves a room at the corner of the main building — the room where Charles Lindbergh stayed during one of his visits to Springfield. Guests who have occupied that room have reported encounters with a young boy named Charlie: a presence that registers as a child, benign but unmistakably present.
The basement, and specifically the housekeeping quarters, generates a different kind of report. Staff arriving in the morning and guests accessing the lower level describe an awareness of being observed — a sensation of presence that those who experience it characterize as neither alarming nor hostile. Something is there to watch, not to act.
The underground tunnel is, predictably, its own category of experience. Electricity in the main house has been reported to cut out for no identifiable technical reason, typically lasting an hour or two before restoring itself. Objects go missing from known locations and surface elsewhere. Whether these phenomena cluster near the tunnel entrance or throughout the building has not been systematically documented in publicly available investigation records.
The tunnel itself — 240 feet of subterranean passage beneath a Victorian lawn, leading to a century-old telescope — is one of those places where the architecture alone produces the sensation of being somewhere outside ordinary experience.
