Meet the giggling ghost of Mystic, Conn.

History and haunting stories by the seaside

By Diane Bair and Pamela Wright Globe Correspondent, Updated October 23, 2025, 12:55 p.m.

MYSTIC, Conn. — Ah, Mystic! So cute, so quaint, so . . . haunted? It would seem so. “Mystic wasn’t always quaint and picturesque. There’s some pretty dark history here,” says Courtney McInvale, founder of Seaside Shadows Haunted History Tours, and the author of four books that focus on America’s ghosts, including “Haunted Mystic.” The next time you visit Mystic Seaport Museum, order an entremet at Sift Bake Shop, or stop by the pizza place made famous by a Julia Roberts movie, consider the spirits who may walk alongside you. Even though it was named for the Mystic River, the village of Mystic definitely has its mystical side.

McInvale’s tours, offered year-round, feature downtown Mystic sites; she also offers a colonial burial ground tour. “We travel through time on our tours,” she says, with guides leading the group using antique oil lanterns. Tours are recommended for ages 10 and up, she says, “not because we go for the jump scare and the drama of many ghost tours — we don’t need to make it more Halloween-y. The truth is scary enough!” That said, October is a solid month for ghost tours, which are wildly popular with the bachelorette set; in December, she offers “Ghosts of Christmas Past” tours, and in February, “My Bloody Valentine” is the theme.

We recently caught up with McInvale, a Connecticut native, to discuss why some people believe Mystic is cursed, her favorite ghosts, and why we should feel good about the ghosts in our midst. Mystic is fire McInvale doesn’t like to use the word “cursed,” but devastating fires are a common occurrence in Mystic — even the Old Mystic Fire Department building burned down in 2012. “I call it residual energy. When something traumatic happens in a place, that place holds the energy.”

In her research, she discovered that many of those fires happened in the spring, which is also when the Pequot Massacre occurred here in 1637. British soldiers and Narragansett and Mohegan warriors set fire to a Pequot village and burned it to the ground, causing the death of 700 Pequots. (The Mashantucket Pequot Museum near Foxwoods Resort Casino shows a film about this.) “The earth remembers. It’s a repeating cycle,” McInvale says, citing major Mystic fires like the Great Fire of 1960. “That one took down a lot of Mystic on both sides of the river,” she says. “There are plenty of people around who still remember it.” 

The giggling ghost

Not all stories are as sad. McInvale’s favorite ghost is the giggling ghost of Mystic, a little girl whose spirit lives on in the Captain Daniel Packer Inne, a c.1754 building that is still open to guests. Ghosts of Captain Parker’s family are said to haunt the place, including his grandniece, Ada, who lived there in the 1800s. Ada died of scarlet fever at age 7 in her second-floor bedroom, but she never really left, says McInvale, who says she’s seen Ada herself. “When I came here and met the owner, I asked, ‘Do you have a daughter?’ because I saw a little girl,” she says. Guests have reported seeing Ada waving to people, seating guests in the inn’s restaurant, playing hide-and-seek, and yes, giggling all the while. There’s been lots of documentation of this; guests send pictures they’ve taken of Ada, and paranormal investigators have encountered her presence. “She’s a fan favorite,”  McInvale says. In fact, the inn’s restaurant sells a cocktail named after her, “Ada’s Choice.” 

Who’s that lady? A downtown shop called Port of Call is also very haunted, says the ghost tour entrepreneur. Formerly called the Emporium, the store is filled to the rafters with tales of ghostly goings-on. One example: the Lady in Waiting, a ghost who smells of roses and looks out the window as though awaiting her lover. There has been some real evidence of her presence, McInvale says. As the story goes, in 1960, one of the shop’s owners was painting a floor upstairs and heard the click of high heels downstairs. He went downstairs to tell the woman that the shop was closed, and heard footsteps. But the high-heel-wearer was nowhere to be seen. When he returned to the room he was painting, there was peeling paint in the shape of footprints on the freshly-painted floor. “Believing that those were the footprints of a real ghost, they didn’t paint over them — they left the ghost prints on the floor until 1978, when the building was destroyed in — what else — a fire,” McInvale says. Since the building had been a Civil War office before it was a shop, some claim the ghost is a Civil War widow. “I haven’t seen her, but I’ve felt her presence,” McInvale says. The building may have also once held a brothel, so that might be another twist. Men tend to see her more than women do. “Downtown has some spooky stories,” she notes, something to keep in mind as you wander around Mystic. As you’d expect, old burial grounds are rich with ghostly tales. McInvale once saw a Revolutionary War soldier on one of her graveyard tours, an American she believes to be Private Thomas Williams, one of the men betrayed by Benedict Arnold in the Fort Griswold massacre who died on the field. “I wondered if he was on my tour to see if I was telling the story properly,” she says. “When we bring paranormal gadgets there, we always get lots of activity.”

I ain’t afraid of no ghost! But that’s no reason to feel a chill up your spine, even if you walk through a cemetery. “Don’t think of ghosts as demons and be scared,” McInvale says. “History and the spirits are all around us. Think of these people, honor their history, and feel their energy.” The ghost tour owner admits she’s “that crazy person” who goes into a graveyard or a battlefield and says, “Hey everybody, how are you today?” As an avid historian who is currently researching Civil War history in the South, McInvale feels a connection to people who are no longer among the living. “Most of those people, back in the day, knew they would die early. I think they weren’t afraid of dying but were afraid of being forgotten. It’s important that we don’t forget them.” Since launching these tours in 2013, McInvale is more in touch with her spiritual side. “I feel so much more connected to history, to the past and the future,” she says. What the ghosts have taught her: “Nothing is black and white, or final, but we’re all connected. Everything is connected.” On these tours, “we discuss the past and honor it, and we like to think we conjure up their energy and encourage it to come by and pay a visit.”

If you go . . .Seaside Shadows Haunted History Tours are offered year-round in Mystic. They also run ghost tours in Westerly, R.I. Owned by Courtney McInvale and her husband, the company employs seven tour guides and runs Downtown Mystic Ghost Tours twice a day; and Moonlight Graveyard tours three times a week, along with pub crawls and private tours. From $30 per person; www.seasideshadows.com.