The Colonial Inn sits at 48 Monument Square in Concord, Massachusetts — half a mile from the North Bridge where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired on April 19, 1775. It has been standing since 1716, making it one of the oldest continuously operating inns in the United States.
But the Colonial Inn isn’t famous just because it’s old. It’s famous because some of the people who lived and died here appear to have never left. Room 24 — once a surgical theater where wounded militiamen bled out on a doctor’s table — has been generating documented reports of ghostly encounters for more than half a century. And the rest of the inn isn’t far behind.
What makes the Colonial Inn’s haunting unusual isn’t the ghost stories themselves — it’s that the documented history of the building gives those stories a specific, verifiable context. We know who owned the house. We know what happened in Room 24. We know who died there, and roughly when. And we have the name of the first person to put her encounter in writing: Judith Fellenz, a newlywed from Highland Falls, New York, who saw something in that room in June of 1966 and was brave enough to say so.
The Minot Family and the House That Became a Hospital
The Colonial Inn wasn’t built as an inn. It was built as a private home.
The property traces its origins to the earliest days of English settlement in Concord. In the 1630s, Puritan minister Peter Bulkeley helped found the town and owned several properties around its center. After Bulkeley’s widow sold some of these parcels in 1660, they eventually passed to a settler named Timothy Wheeler. When Wheeler’s daughter Rebecca married James Minot — a doctor, minister, and justice of the peace — the couple inherited land from the Bulkeley estate. Sometime before 1716, they built the home that would become the oldest section of the Colonial Inn. If you look at the front of the building today, it’s the portion on the right, the east side.
James Minot willed the house to his son, James Minot II, who served as a lieutenant colonel in the French and Indian War and helped devise strategies to fight the French. After James II’s death, his son Ephraim inherited the house and later sold it to his first cousin: Dr. Timothy Minot Jr., a physician who already lived and practiced nearby in Concord Center.
It was Dr. Minot who owned the home on the morning of April 19, 1775 — the day everything changed.
During Dr. Minot’s ownership, a second building had been constructed to the left of the original house. This structure — now the middle portion of the inn — served as a storehouse for military provisions that colonial rebels had moved to Concord to hide from the British. When word reached Concord that the Regulars were marching from Boston to seize those supplies, Dr. Minot evacuated his family from town. In a sworn deposition recorded after the battle, Minot stated that he was returning toward his own home when he arrived at the North Bridge just in time to witness the British firing on the colonists — and the colonists firing back.
The fighting was brief but bloody. When it was over, wounded American militiamen were carried back into town. Dr. Minot turned his home into a makeshift field hospital.
He used what is now the Liberty Room as the main triage area. His bedroom on the second floor — now known as Room 24 — became the operating room. And Room 27, on the first floor, became the morgue.
Eighteenth-century battlefield medicine was brutal and often futile. Many of the men who were carried into Room 24 never walked out. Their bodies were moved one floor down, to Room 27. And the people who lived in this house went on living here, sleeping above the room where the dead were laid out.
After the Revolution: Thoreau, Boarders, and a Building With Memory
The story of the house didn’t end with the war. If anything, the layers of human habitation only deepened.
In 1789, Dr. Minot sold the original east house to his son-in-law, Ammi White — a cabinetmaker who had his own dark connection to the battle at the North Bridge. During the fighting, Ammi White used a hatchet to kill a wounded British soldier. Accounts differ on whether this was an act of mercy or brutality, and historians have debated it ever since. Either way, Ammi White lived for a decade in a house where soldiers had already died.
In 1799, Ammi White sold the east house to John Thoreau, a Boston merchant who had been shipwrecked on American shores and later made his fortune as a privateer raiding British vessels during the Revolution. John died just two years later, but the house remained in the Thoreau family for forty years. His daughters ran it as a boarding house, and it was here — from 1835 to 1837 — that John’s grandson, the writer Henry David Thoreau, lived while attending Harvard. Eight years before he moved to Walden Pond, Thoreau’s primary residence was a house where soldiers had been operated on, died, and been stored in a makeshift morgue.
The Thoreau family’s long association with the building gave it its first public identity. When a later owner turned it into a boarding house, they named it the Thoreau House, trading on the family’s growing literary reputation.
Meanwhile, the central and western portions of the property passed through a series of owners — including Deacon John White, a strict Sabbatarian who kept a watchful eye on anyone traveling unnecessarily on Sundays, and Daniel Shattuck, a banker, state legislator, and militia colonel who eventually acquired all three buildings under single ownership by 1839.
In 1889, John Maynard Keyes purchased the property and opened it as a hotel. He acquired the final third of the property in 1897 and connected all three buildings into a single structure. The establishment was formally named Concord’s Colonial Inn in 1900, with sixteen guest rooms.
The Prescott Wing was added in 1960, expanding the inn to 48 rooms. It has been in continuous operation ever since.
Room 24: The Operating Room
Room 24 is the most requested room at the Colonial Inn, and not because it has a particularly good view.
This second-floor room was Dr. Timothy Minot’s operating room on April 19, 1775. Wounded American militiamen were carried upstairs, laid on whatever surface was available, and subjected to the crude surgical practices of the era — probing for musket balls, amputating shattered limbs, cauterizing wounds with heated iron. Many of them died on that table. Their bodies were taken downstairs to Room 27.
The first documented report of paranormal activity in Room 24 came in the summer of 1966. M.P. and Judith Fellenz of Highland Falls, New York, checked into the inn on their honeymoon and were assigned Room 24. The next morning, Mrs. Fellenz looked pale. She said nothing to the staff. Two weeks later, innkeeper Loring Grimes received a letter.
Mrs. Fellenz wrote that she had woken in the middle of the night to a sense that an unknown presence was in the room. When she opened her eyes, she saw a grayish, shadowy mass in the shape of a standing figure about four feet from the left side of her bed. The figure remained still for a moment, then slowly drifted to the foot of the bed and paused in front of the fireplace. After a few seconds, it dissolved. She wrote that she was so frightened she could not scream and lay frozen for the rest of the night, unable to sleep, trying to find a rational explanation.
Grimes wrote back with characteristic New England dry humor. He suggested the apparition might have been Dr. Minot, merely making his rounds — or perhaps Ralph Waldo Emerson, trying to work up the courage to give a newlywed advice on marriage.
Judith Fellenz’s letter is now part of the inn’s official record. The hotel hands out an information sheet about its hauntings to guests at check-in.
Since 1966, reports from Room 24 have accumulated steadily. Guests describe flickering lights, televisions and lamps turning on by themselves in the middle of the night, and a persistent feeling of being watched. One guest reported that someone touched his shoulder, followed by a disembodied voice saying, “Don’t worry, your shoulder will be alright” — a phrase that would have been perfectly at home in an eighteenth-century surgical ward.
A paranormal investigation group that held a vigil in Room 24 reported capturing video footage of a misty, kneeling figure beside the bed. Whether it was someone praying for a wounded loved one or something else entirely depends on what you’re willing to believe.
Room 27: The Morgue
Room 27 sits on the first floor, directly below the old operating room. This was the morgue — the room where Dr. Minot’s patients were taken when there was nothing left to be done for them.
Guests who have stayed in Room 27 report hearing desperate, disembodied voices. Sobbing has been heard through the walls. Some describe faint whispers — the kind of sound you might associate with someone consoling a grieving person. Others report a pervasive heaviness to the room, a feeling of sorrow that doesn’t seem to have an obvious source.
Room 27 doesn’t get the same celebrity as Room 24, but among guests who know the history, it’s considered just as unsettling — and arguably more so. The operating room is where people suffered. The morgue is where hope ended.
The Liberty Room: A Hospital Dining Room
The Liberty Room is now a restaurant. In April 1775, it was Dr. Minot’s main triage area — the room where wounded soldiers were first brought in, assessed, and either treated on the spot or sent upstairs to Room 24.
Both guests and staff have reported seeing people dressed in colonial-era clothing sitting in the Liberty Room when no historical reenactment was taking place. When witnesses mention the costumed figures to the staff, they’re told that no actors are employed at the inn.
One of the more striking accounts comes from Cristina Mosquera, who has worked at the inn for more than a decade and manages the banquet department. Mosquera has described seeing the full apparition of a woman in a blue dress in the Liberty Room. Whether this woman was a caretaker, a relative of one of the wounded, or someone else entirely remains unknown.
The Ghosts Beyond the Rooms
The hauntings at the Colonial Inn are not confined to the rooms associated with the Revolutionary War hospital. Activity has been reported throughout the building, across all three of the original structures.
The sitting room has produced sightings of two figures: an older woman and a tall, slim man in a top hat. Multiple sources — including the inn’s own published accounts — speculate that the man may be the ghost of Henry David Thoreau, who lived in this building for two years and whose family owned it for four decades. The woman is sometimes identified as one of Thoreau’s aunts, the “Thoreau Girls” who ran the boarding house.
Near the front desk, guests have reported seeing a young girl wearing a bonnet who appears to be greeting people as they arrive. Staff member Kathy Green has recounted an experience involving her granddaughter, who complained that someone kept touching her while they were in the kitchen area. Green attributed it to a presence the staff has named Tommy. She told her granddaughter to tell Tommy she’d play with him later, and the touching stopped.
The hallways are a recurring setting for encounters. People report the sound of footsteps behind them when no one is there. Several guests have described being brushed by an unseen person, as if someone were walking past them in the opposite direction. Others have seen shadows moving beneath their door, and when they open it, the hallway is empty.
Bartender Subas Khadka, speaking to the Concord Bridge newspaper in 2025, described hearing voices in the basement when he goes downstairs to restart the beer or wine pumps — whispers, the sound of someone calling his name.
Server Kim Scribner described an incident in which a cabinet door flew open on its own and a small paper cup — far too light to have pushed the cabinet open — fell out. She and a coworker watched it happen and could offer no explanation.
A middle-aged woman in older clothing has been seen roaming the halls at various times. Some staff members believe she’s a nurse, and they’ve given her a name: Rosemary. Whether Rosemary is connected to the Revolutionary War hospital or to a later era of the building’s history is unknown.
The Ghost Hunters Investigation
The Colonial Inn’s reputation eventually attracted professional paranormal investigators. In early 2005, two organizations — Ghost Images Paranormal Investigations and Spirit Encounters Research Team — conducted investigations at the inn.
The most widely known investigation, however, was filmed for Syfy’s Ghost Hunters (Season 6, Episode 14). During the TAPS team’s investigation of Room 24, the door to the room abruptly shut on its own while the crew was inside. Video footage reportedly shows the investigators in genuine surprise. They opened the door and asked the presence to close it again. The door shut a second time, apparently on command. The investigators reportedly found no evidence of a draft or faulty hinges that could explain the movement.
Whether you find this compelling evidence of the paranormal or a product of an old building’s quirks and a television show’s editorial decisions is, of course, up to you.
What the History Tells Us — and What It Doesn’t
The Colonial Inn’s haunting is unusual in the world of ghost stories because the historical record is genuinely strong. We know that Dr. Timothy Minot owned this house. We know he turned it into a field hospital. We know that men were operated on in Room 24, that some of them died there, and that their bodies were taken to Room 27. We know that Ammi White — a man who killed a wounded soldier with a hatchet — lived in this house. We know that Henry David Thoreau slept here as a young man, that his aunts ran a boarding house in these rooms, and that three centuries of human life, death, grief, and memory have soaked into these walls.
Does that history explain the encounters people report? That’s a different question — one that the documented record can’t answer. Judith Fellenz was clear in her letter: she considered herself a rational person, and what she saw defied her ability to explain it. The innkeeper’s playful response — Dr. Minot making his rounds — offered a historical framework that was comforting precisely because it was human. If there is something in Room 24, at least it might be a doctor.
The Colonial Inn doesn’t oversell its ghosts. The staff acknowledge the stories, hand out the information sheet, and let guests draw their own conclusions. That restraint may be the most unsettling thing about the place. There’s no pressure to believe. The house simply stands there, 310 years old, with its operating room on the second floor and its morgue on the first, and invites you to spend the night.
Concord’s Colonial Inn is located at 48 Monument Square, Concord, Massachusetts. Room 24 remains available for reservation. The inn has been recognized by Historic Hotels of America as one of the top 25 most haunted historic hotels in the United States.