By Martha Williams For Dailymail.Com
14:30 21 Oct 2023, updated 16:23 21 Oct 2023
- A 238-year-old ‘haunted’ restaurant saw a ‘ghost’ float by their door
- Library Restaurant in New Hampshire has a long history of hauntings
- Locals were quick to back-up the restaurant’s claims with similar spooky stories
Owners of an 18th century restaurant believe a ‘ghost’ has been caught on camera, with locals flocking to back-up the sighting with their own spooky stories about the establishment.
Library Restaurant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, uploaded a video earlier this week from their CCTV that showed a ‘ghost’ eerily passing by the front of their restaurant.
Staff say the spirit set off the motion detector as it floated by and don’t believe that the imagery could just be lights from a car or a gust of wind.
The restaurant in the Rockingham Hotel has a long history of hauntings that have been documented in detail over the years. It’s described as ‘an elegant, 1785 mansion set as a clubby backdrop for steakhouse fare, wines and a buzzy bar scene.’
The 238-year-old business is known to be a hot-spot for high-profile politicians – including presidents George Washington, Franklin Pierce, James K. Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Chester Arthur, William Taft, and John F. Kennedy.
The restaurant wrote: ‘Our building – the Rockingham – is well known for its ghosts and notably the ones in the Library basement.
‘Last night, for the very first time our motion detector alarms INSIDE the building were set off by this camera motion caught on video in the dead of night outside the window.
‘The motion detectors inside cannot see what the camera outside sees! It is not lights from the car – because you can see how others are picked up and there is no horizontal wind blowing. So what can this be!
‘Make of it what you will but this has never happened before! Spooky coincidence for the time of year?’
The chilling footage has attracted a lot of attention – especially from local customers who shared their own ghost stories about the ‘haunted’ restaurant.
A Facebook user said: ‘The lady in white. Some residents had claimed to see her in the hallways. One wrote a poem about her experience.’
Multiple people said the women’s bathroom at the restaurant is haunted.
One comment said: ‘I have been to the library many times, and I assure you that there is a female ghost in the bathroom area in the lower level’ and another shared the same claim, saying ‘that’s definitely a ghost and I’ve seen plenty of them. I used to live across the street. The women’s restroom at the Library is haunted.’
But there skeptics, with one said trying to bust the claims, writing: ‘So are we gunna talk about the jump cut in the video at the time of the ‘ghost’? Or that the timecode in the upper right hand corner skips from 02:29:30 to 02:31:04? But yea, totally legit, supernatural behavior ‘caught on camera’.’
One person – who appeared to be a regular at the historic joint – speculated: ‘Fog? (Or Dave smoking!)’
Another asked: ‘What am I supposed to be seeing?’
Many viewers were certain the ‘ghost’ was actually fog, wind or steam.
According to HauntedHouses.com the Rockingham Hotel is believed be haunted by the entity of Sarah Shelborne Langdon or the entity of a drowning victim.
Shelborne Langdon was the daughter of a rich merchant who married Woodbury Langdon – who built a three-story-mansion on the spot of the current Rockingham building as a place for his bride and their 10 children to live.
Their family home burned down in the great fire of 1781 and they re-built it to become ‘the most handsome brick home in New England’.
Langdon – who served as New Hampshire’s senator in 1779 for a year – eventually sold his house and it became a Public House – where it sold alcohol, served food and offered public rooms for events and occasions. It then became a hotel in 1833.
Apparently Shelborne Langdon had an affair with the dashing John Paul Jones – and because of small-town gossip she was found guilty of adultery by public opinion.
Because ‘entities’ are allegedly restless when declared guilty – they want to clear their name in the world before they go to ‘the light and peace of the next world’.
For this reason Shelborne Langdon is thought to haunt the Rockingham Hotel by roaming the halls and spending time in Library Restaurant – where women have heard her rustling about in the bathroom stalls.
The ‘ghost’ of the drowning victim carries a ‘strong aroma of the sea’ whenever she appears to haunt the hotel – which was the last place she lived before drowning.
According to guests – she is a friendly and welcoming entity who is known to pop up in residents’ apartments and condos and appear in hallways before disappearing through the nearest wall.
