Ghost caught on camera? Library Restaurant staff in Portsmouth unsure and uneasy

PORTSMOUTH — Spooky season is in full swing, and the owners and staff of the Library Restaurant in the historic Rockingham Hotel believe a security camera may have captured a wandering ghost this week.

A burglar alarm activation came at 2:29 a.m. Tuesday inside the restaurant’s Gold Room bar lounge. Adrienne and Paul Waterman, the married couple who own the restaurant and reside in the building, checked all 14 security cameras they had installed. None detected any motion in the building, and Portsmouth police located nobody within the premises upon arrival at the State Street building.

One outdoor camera hanging above the hotel’s famed lion statues, however, captured a vapory, mist-like presence passing by the device at the exact moment the burglar alarm sounded. Footage shows the presence blows through from right to left and briefly whooshes past again just before city police show up, resembling the “Ghostbusters.”

Can it be explained? Adrienne Waterman, who said she is a ghost skeptic, is having a hard time wrapping her head around it.

“I am an engineer. I deal only in facts. This is inexplicable,” she said.

Ghostly video has Waterman researching building's haunted history

The Watermans bought the restaurant, open since 1975, for $3 million in February, and immediately installed the new security cameras. Not once have they gone off before Tuesday morning, Waterman said.

The Library’s co-owner stayed up for hours after the alarm, trying to piece together bits of information. An app on her phone allows her to see each security camera in the building and whether the cameras caught any motion in the building.

None did aside from the outdoor camera, which would not have set off the burglar alarm activation without a breach of the building.

“I’ve learned that suddenly I’m nervous about ghosts that I never believed existed. I don’t want to be the one turning on the lights anymore,” Waterman quipped.

The Rockingham Hotel is one of the city’s most prominent properties, and has a history of haunted happenings. Waterman learned of the famed hotel’s paranormal past through Roxie Zwicker, owner of New England Curiosities tours, and has heard stories of spirits that linger inside the hotel building.

In 1785, Woodbury Langdon, brother to Gov. John Langdon, built a home for his family on-site. He was married to Sarah Sherburne and had 10 children.

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One spirit believed to roam the Rockingham is Sherburne’s, who was rumored to have had an affair with Revolutionary War naval commander John Paul Jones, according to Waterman's research.

“The local gossip and the witch hunting began about her reputation, then she died,” Waterman said. “Now the rumor is that she floats around (feeling) guilty. She’s still trying to reconcile her guilt.”

A second spirit said to wander the hotel’s upstairs corridor has been dubbed the “White Lady of the Rockingham.” Portsmouth’s first poet laureate, the late Esther Buffler, was said to have encountered the allegedly gray-haired ghost while living in the hotel and wrote a poem in the spirit’s honor.

The claim is the spirit is one of a woman who was a summer guest of the Rockingham and tragically drowned in the area, Waterman said.

Jessica Wade, a server at the restaurant for six years, noted a woman got trapped in the stall of the women’s bathroom during a fire in the late 1800s and perished.

In 1870, Frank Jones, a brewery tycoon, former Portsmouth mayor and congressman, bought the building and expanded it, though most of the building was ruined in an 1884 fire. The next year, Jones had the hotel rebuilt, and since the 1970s it has housed condominiums.

Library staff say unexplained haunted happenings are common

“It’s actually been very surreal because I’m a skeptic. It was kind of weird that the whole thing happened as a coincidence, if you will,” said executive chef Mark Lipoma. “But we don’t really know where that blast of mist came from. I thought it was a vent outside, but it hasn’t been cold enough to really create that type of mist. I’m trying to explain this mist thing, but there’s nothing.”

The Library’s staffers have had their fair share of uneasy encounters, and no one goes alone downstairs beneath the restaurant, where granite and brick secret tunnels are located. Claims have been made that Jones built the tunnels to lead to his Maplewood Farm mansion, his brewery and to the ocean, said Waterman.

“I’ve definitely heard voices coming from the changing room and no one was there,” said bartender Laina Smith.

“I fortunately have not had any tactile experience to share, besides feeling like something was right behind me in the tunnel downstairs,” said server Sahra Mercure. “(I’m) never going in there again.”

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Bartender Lauren Brown said she has heard rustling in the women’s restroom downstairs below the restaurant. Waterman said she has seen glasses and potted plants fall from shelves at random.

“There’s definitely enough weird stuff that goes on here to give pause to any skeptics,” Waterman said.

The co-owner of the restaurant pointed to a corner downstairs where an old phone booth was located in the restaurant until last December. That very spot, Waterman shared, has been labeled as the “epicenter of the ghost energy” in the building.

The Rockingham Hotel is a frequent stop for haunted Portsmouth downtown tours. It’s not uncommon for the Watermans to look out the condominium windows and see lantern-toting ghost hunters below, looking up at the old hotel.

“There’s lots of people who come in here and say there’s high spirit energy in The Library, especially when you go downstairs,” Waterman said.

She and her husband, Paul Waterman, the chief executive officer of British special chemicals company Elementis, have yet to agree on what exactly flew past their restaurant’s outdoor camera early Tuesday morning.

“Paul, despite being a CEO of a chemical company, he was like, ‘It’s definitely a ghost.’ He said to me last night, ‘So what do you believe?’ And I said I don’t know,” Waterman said. “It’s just weird.”

“When I saw this cloud of energy and I felt it set off the alarm, my heart sank,” she said.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Ghost on video at Library Restaurant in Portsmouth NH?