Location: The Weeping Beech Inn is part of the unincorporated community of Pottersville, Connecticut, a forgotten Dutch village which fell into decline after the Revolutionary War and is now a historic community in the Pequonnock Valley. Tracking down the inn's location is tricky. The address is on Rural Route 10 off Highway 108 near Trap Falls Reservoir not far from Huntingdon between Highways 25 and 8, both of which run north from Highway 15 near Bridgeport.

Description Of Place: The Weeping Beech Inn is a three-story Dutch Colonial farmhouse off the bank of Sutter's Creek which runs along Rural Route 10. A wooden footbridge connects the parking area with the inn which has six guest rooms with private baths, sitting rooms and claw-footed bathtubs. James and Becky Clark has restored all the original oak woodwork, paneling in the dining room and the grand staircase. There are three fireplaces, eight bathrooms, six bedrooms, a large dining room, two sitting rooms and a basement apartment for the Clarks. In his book, "Ten More Haunted Hotels," Mike Enslin adds: "The location is a living time warp full of antiques and old furniture found sold a floor above yard sale and thrift shop standards. The owners are cheerily pleasant much like most bed and breakfast owners eager to stay in business, and the atmosphere reminds me of visiting grandma's house without the parents and the old motel at the base of the hill. The rooms are simple and quaint with hard wood floors with large colorful rugs and a fireplace that possibly hasn't been used since Roosevelt was in office. The closet has a faint smell of mothballs, the window is resistant to opening more than ten inches and the walls are covered in a slightly faded hand-painted wall paper. Perfect place for a good night sleep and a nice morning breakfast... if you don't mind dreams of being bludgeoned in your sleep by a caretaker in a lady's dress...."

Ghostly Manifestations: Through the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, travelers by stagecoach often stopped and stayed the night on long trips at small locations known as Wayside Inns, but in the modern world, the Wayside Inn has been replaced by the bed and breakfast franchise, many of them built out of former Wayside Inn locations. It is to no surprise that many of them are now credited to be haunted by their former owners, most frequent departed guests and memories of tragic events. The owner of the Weeping Beech Inn, Becky Clark, has long believed that the ghost of a former housekeeper named Sylvia Marsh now haunts the inn. This "legendary ghost" has been written up in countless numbers of newspapers and magazines and at least five television news stories have been done on her. The attic where she lived is the most active spot, and she has been reportedly even captured in a photograph standing before a window.

"The story of Sylvia is a rather sad story." Becky has told the story so many times that has practically developed it into a rehearsed speech. "She and her husband, Arnold, owned and operated an inn here before the Civil War and had several children, but one by one, each of her children contacted tuberculosis here and died. Sylvia tried nursing each and every one of her tiny frail sons and daughters to health, devoting all her time to feed them , take care of them and stay by their side as they suffered through this disease, but despite all her efforts, she watched as each of her children succumbed to this faceless killer. Can you imagine how hopeless she must have felt to endure this not once but five times? Trying to correct what she thought she did wrong before until finally losing all hope to live without them. Can anyone imagine what was going through her mind as she ascended those steps one last time and then jumped off with her neck tied to the third floor railing?"

While converting the house, Becky and her husband lived upstairs on the third floor which they were told was the old servant's quarters. They now live downstairs in the renovated basement off the kitchen under cozy modern arrangements, and rent out the top floor, but Becky still hears footsteps through the house late at night when most of the guests are usually asleep.

"Many guests report that they're awakened in the night between 12:00 AM and 12:30 AM. They're awakened when what sounds like a person comes into the room and touches them on the cheek, but when they come to full wakefulness, there's no one there."

"We also hear a woman's voice talking to someone upstairs sometimes." Becky adds. "On a number of occasions we've had guests who have heard something or were frightened by something and have gotten up and left. Many people stay expecting to experience something, but what they experience is always much more than what they expected."

While the owners of the inn are quite aware of Sylvia's presence, they are not always open to discuss her before guests. Most of Sylvia's activity occurs around Room 7, the Attic Room, where she slept. Local contractor Howard Parsons was conducting a tour of the place one night for guests when he came upon Room 7 and knocked at the door as per routine. When he did, a voice called out from the room, "I'm in here." Since the room was supposed to be empty, Howard called down for Jim to come to check the room and verify it was empty.

"I've done repairs and alterations for the Clarks for years." Howard comments. "I've felt as I've been watched, I've noticed furniture moved back after I've put it out of my way and I've felt a few chills of something here, but this is the first time I've actually had direct communication."

When Jim came up, he knocked at the door again to no response, unlocked the door and entered the vacant room. It was empty and no one had gone past Howard while he was at the door. The guests with him were now very reticent to be staying in the inn even with the owners on the property.

Howard's son, Johnathan Parsons, has also been around the inn doing repairs and grounds-keeping as things come up around the place. One night after cutting and clearing brush, he was in the first floor wash room cleaning up to head out, and as he was checking out, he noticed a woman's face staring at him briefly from the mirror. As he recalls:

"I just barely acknowledged it." He adds. "I noticed her, turned off the water then quickly looked back. I didn't feel a cold chill nor did I feel as if I was touched. She was just there long enough for me to get a picture of her in my head of her long dark hair and gingham dress, but when I looked back, she was gone and no one had brushed past me out the door. I think it left me so unnerved that I left without turning off the light."

Guest Russell Lorre also had an experience in the inn while he was staying there with his girlfriend, Melissa Hennessey. He was staying in the Orchid Room under Sylvia's when awoke one night to see a luminescent shape appearing over him at the foot of the bed. As he looked back two more times, it took on the form of a woman staring at him. Although he was a skeptic before, he woke Melissa and quickly checked of the inn.

"Not all guests ask to check out in the early dawn hours..." Becky reveals. "Back in '08, there was a young celebrity staying here with his lady friend for a discreet getaway. His manager had stayed here and had recommended it as a place to avoid tabloid harassment over their romance. We offered them the Gardenia Room (Room 2), but his lady friend was interested in seeing the ghosts and finagled him into paying for the Attic Room which they accepted."

Although Becky isn't sure what happened that weekend, what started out as a romantic getaway turned into a week of strained emotions and silent fighting. Objects vanished on the young couple, the young man struggled to find sleep, growing more frustrated as the week went on, and the long trip to the top floor was wearing on their nerves.

"During their stay, they suddenly asked to be moved to the Gardenia Room for their last two days here. The baby crying in the room under them was keeping them from getting any rest, but most alarming was the fact that they said they could hear the antique spinning wheel going in the dark and that it would stop when they put the light on and it was hard to sleep with the lights on, so we moved them to the Gardenia Room where they finally got some rest and left the following weekend." Becky has been careful all these years to avoid revealing the identities of the entertainer and his actress girlfriend.

"Several people have heard the spinning wheel going by itself, but it always stops when some gets close to it. The other thing... we didn't have any guests with any children here that week."

History: Originally built in 1788, the year of statehood, by Lionel Whitmer, a state surveyor and naturalist about whom nothing else is know, the Whitmer family lived here until the beginning of the 19th century when it became a stagecoach stop and inn. Initially known as the Wayside Inn, it was first known as the Weeping Beech Inn in 1932 with a succession of owners through the years. The Marshes purchased the inn from a retired couple known as the Tates, and after losing his wife to "madness" in 1860, Mr. Marsh remarried a local widow with three kids.

In the 1920s, long after the Marshes had moved out, the edifice was leased to Hackett's Funeral Home and became used as a mortuary. The Hackett's lived upstairs, and the embalming was done in the kitchen with viewings and funerals in the parlor. The Clarks purchased the Stone Lion Inn in 1986 and restored it back into the Weeping Beech Inn, using the beautiful porcelain embalming table as a buffet in the hallway where guests can find refreshments all day long.

"We don't tell guests what the table was used for..." James confides. "But a few of them seem to figure it out without tips."

Identity Of Ghosts: According to legend, the ghost is that of a housekeeper named Sylvia Marsh who hung herself in the house in 1860. Tradition claims she was a maid or housekeeper, but she was actually the wife of Arnold Marsh, who owned and ran the inn from 1854 to 1869. All five of Sylvia's children died before they were a year old from tuberculosis, and the great sorrow drove her to hang herself from the staircase. Dr. Lionel Havestraw, a historical physician from Northwest Maine University debates whether Sylvia accidentally over-medicated her children with cough syrup, which contained opium, a common form of cough syrup for those times. There are historical records that report that a number of Marsh children did indeed die under mysterious circumstances, but there are no mentions of their name or any other information that can tell us anymore about them. However, Sylvia's spirit still reportedly wanders the place in torment; she was first reported in 1873 and photographed in 1986.

Investigations: The best and only known scientific analysis of the Weeping Beech Inn was done by the Connecticut Organization of Paranormal Specialists ("COPS"), a team including Niles Rickert and Cole Hart, police forensic specialists from Bridgeport and Craig Underwood, a retired college physics teacher, who had a paranormal experience when he was eleven years old.

"Our group has known for a long time about the Weeping Beech, and it’s rumors of being haunted by Sylvia Marsh." Rickert and his team has joined the CGS on a few area investigations. "We had decided back in October 2005 to do a full investigation of the location so we got into contact with the owner, Becky Clark, who graciously agreed to let us have free range of the place for a weekend in December to come in and investigate the Inn. We had the chance to talk with Becky for quite a while and, she told us many stories about things that had happened there, including stories about her weekend guests who have been frightened away in the middle of the night. Becky is a wonderful writer and story teller and we thoroughly enjoyed our visit with her.

"Since the inn was such a big place, we wanted to make sure that we investigated the location thoroughly. We decided to do a walk through of the place to make sure that we knew all areas of the location in order to set up equipment, and it was still early in the evening hours, around 6:45pm when we entered the third floor. The third floor has an large room with a window and a small fireplace flanked by two storage closets under the roof. We were looking around and I happened to open one of the small closet doors to see if there was anything in it, but I didn’t close it. At this time, everyone else was on the other side of the room trying to debate the photo. I took about 10 steps away from the door and stopped to look around the room, when all a sudden we heard a door slam... LOUDLY! We all stopped talking and exploring the attic and said, “What was that?” I turned to look and saw that the closet door had slammed shut. It wasn't a loud crash; it was more like a sudden snapping noise. Unfortunately we didn’t have the camcorder going, but we did have the audio recorder going and captured it on audio.

"We tried to go back and recreate the door slamming but were not able to. The door had to have been physically pushed shut, but it wouldn’t close again like that on its own.

"Other things that we noted while doing the investigation was that at the various times throughout our visits, we were getting sounds of vague conversations going in rooms that we knew to be empty. We call this "white noise," and its usually caused by electrical objects like fans, but we couldn't figure out the source and none of the overhead fans were running. We do known a number of iron pipes were used at the turn of the century to shore up the walls and floors when it was out-fitted to be a mortuary, but we don't know if there's a connection."

There is one bedroom on the second floor known as the Gardenia Room where guests have seen a presence vanishing from the hallway. In this room, Cole and Emily Rausch, a known recurring member on the team had been trying to do EVPs without success. They had just finished up doing the EVPs of the room and they proceed to leave. Cole had been sitting in a straight-back chair pulled from the wall, and upon leaving, decided to leave it out with the recorder on it for thirty minutes. Before the thirty minutes were over, Niles and Dodge Galecki, another member, were in the parlor when they heard a scratching noise from the room. Heading up, they noticed that the chair had been moved back to the wall despite the door being closed and no one upstairs. To this day, Galecki curses himself for not leaving a camera to record it.

"On the second floor when we were doing sweeps," Richart continues. "We were in the back second floor bedroom which connects to a bathroom and had set down our K-11 meter on a trunk chest at the foot of the bed. It was about 30 seconds after the K-11 was placed on the chest that it started activating. I immediately wanted to see if I could find a source for the EMF activation so I tried to open up the trunk, but could not get it open because it was locked. Later on when reviewing my audio, I heard what sounded like a woman’s voice saying, “It’s locked” around the same time that I was trying to unlock the trunk.

"One of the other strange things that we noticed while we were there was correlating EMF meter activations. We were just getting started, setting our equipment out on the table and we had three of our EMF meters, two K-11's and one gauss meter setting on the table, a bit apart from each other and apart from all other sources that might set them off. We were discussing who was going to start out using which piece of equipment when I said that I would start out carrying the video recorder camcorder, when all meters started to activate simultaneously and blink out of sequence. That usually happens when we get near a fuse box or something with a large electronic output, but we didn't find anything there. Later, we discovered the table had been the old embalming table from when the place was a funeral home, but that didn't quite explain the odd reaction from our equipment.

"After our group had conducted a few investigations after the inn, we were contacted by News Channel 4 in October 2006 and asked to film a story for their annual Halloween airing so we gladly agreed. On camera, we had decided to retrieve a doll from upstairs to use in an experiment to entice Sylvia. We had left it upstairs hoping to get some EVPs from Sylvia, but it didn't work. However, during the photographs we took that night, we caught what looks like a woman standing in the background of what was the kitchen. She's wearing what looks like a period floor-level dress with her arms folded and very disgusted look as if she's upset with us trying to lure her with the doll."

From Steve Barnette of the CGS: "We have also have a very unique time in the Weeping Beech Inn. I was there at the time with a small team, Matt Burton and Ed Brannion, and we were in the parlor taking sweeps of the room. Matt took a seat in one of the parlor chairs in order to log information in on the log sheet, and Ed said he felt as we were being watched. He felt like he needed to take a picture towards Becky who was with us so he did and he caught what looks like a mist going from the floor to the ceiling in the photo. I started taking photos toward Becky as well and came up with some very interesting mist photos too. We continued taking photos for approximately 15 minutes straight. During this time temperature fluctuations were also noted, ranging in differences of five to ten degrees. Several members reported feeling cold spots, and Becky reported feeling cold the whole time and stated that she felt the back of her head and shoulders being touched. We looked for sources that could have caused the mist while there and could not find a cause. We ruled out reflection on several of the photographs and ruled out a “mist condensation” caused by breath or by cold, wet temperatures since the temperature of the room remained in the area of 58 Degrees to 64 Degrees Fahrenheit. One of these photographs revealed what appears to be a transparent face in the front door behind her from where she was sitting. We had these photographs all analyzed by several different photographic experts, and they all agreed the image showed no signs of tampering. The odd part, one of them concluded that since the image in the negative seems to cross over the door that whatever it was had to actually be in the room looking at us that outside looking in."

Source/Comments: 1408 (2010 ) - Location and activity based on the Houghton Mansion in North Adams, Massachusetts, the La Posada in Taos, New Mexico, Forty Acres Plantation near Hadley, Massachusetts and the Stone Lion Inn in Guthrie, Oklahoma.