House for Sale | The Haunted Hartness House Inn in Springfield, VT

Hartness House as it stands today, as a 40-room inn and restaurant.

Credit: courtesy of Tyler Goodrich

Hartness House as it stands today, as a 40-room inn and restaurant.
Credit: courtesy of Tyler Goodrich

The Hartness House Inn is definitely haunted.

For years there have been rumors of strange sightings in the tunnel and underground rooms secreted away beneath the front lawn. Even more persistent are the claims that the charming corner room where Charles Lindbergh once stayed is haunted by a young boy named Charlie.

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The presence to which I can attest, however, is of a different sort. Though he died in 1933, James Hartness—the inventor, industrial tycoon, and one-time Vermont governor for whom Hartness House was built in 1904—is still imprinted on the property, having imbued it with reminders of his quirky personality and diverse passions.

Original owners James Hartness and his wife, Lena; on the inn’s front lawn, a testament to Hartness’s role as tinkerer, businessman, and Vermont governor.
Credit: courtesy of Tyler Goodrich

Perched on a hillside above downtown Springfield, Vermont, Hartness House, which became an inn in 1954, has been shuttered since late 2020. The grounds have grown shaggy, but the stone construction of the building’s first floor gives the property a comfortable gravitas, something that is only amplified as I step into the stately front hall. Like the man for which it is named, however, the house’s dignified exterior overlays a fascinating character. Or so I’m thinking when my hosts, real estate agent Gary Gosselin and the inn’s former daily operations manager, Nina Bisciotti, lead me down into the cellar and through a locked door into the aforementioned tunnel, where I imagine the horror movie that could be filmed here.

Hartness was just 27 when he had this house built. He and his wife, Lena, had two young daughters. Hartness had come to Springfield five years earlier to serve as superintendent of a struggling machine tooling enterprise, the Jones and Lamson Machine Company, where he developed a reputation as a creative problem solver. He would ultimately patent a total of 119 inventions, including the one in 1921 that changed his life, the flat turret lathe. The new machine proved so popular that for 13 years it became Jones and Lamson’s sole product. Having negotiated a commission on every lathe sold, Hartness amassed a fortune.

Thanks in part to Hartness’s enterprise, the corridor of the Connecticut River Valley between Springfield and Hartford, Connecticut, came to be known as Precision Valley, where master toolers created machines that powered American industry. During World War II, when Hitler was working on a plan to cripple American aviation, he listed 21 bombing targets; Springfield was included, along with three other Precision Valley locations.

After James and Lena died, the Hartness family sold the house to three of the town’s machine shops, which used it to house their guests. The ballroom was added in 1954 and a restaurant in 1968. The utilitarian addition of a wing behind the mansion in 1971 brought the number of guest rooms to 40. Today, the ballroom comfortably accommodates 75 people, while the restaurant, twice renovated in recent years, seats 55.