The building at 216 Delaware Street has carried several names. For about a decade it was the David Finney Inn, an upscale bed-and-breakfast. Before that it was Booth House Tavern. The lot is older than either name. The ghost story attached to it is short, and it borrows the house across the street.
A 2021 account of the property’s chain of title starts in 1683, when Renere Vandercoolen built an inn on the site. In 1688 the building, garden, and orchard passed to Anthony Green, and in 1713 to Sylvester Garland. New Castle was a port and, for a long stretch, the seat of Delaware’s government. In 1757 attorney David Finney bought the property and is said to have joined the two sides of the building into one house. In 1794 the Booth family bought it. The location suited judges: the courthouse, now part of First State National Historical Park, is across the street. The house later served as a boarding house and tavern. By 1946 Booth House Tavern shared the building with the Hotel Louise and the New Castle Pharmacy. By 1978 the tavern was serving steaks and barbecued chicken, with live music on weekends.
The David Finney Inn name dates from 1985, not from the eighteenth century. Several owners ran it. A kitchen fire in 1994 did serious damage. The building came back. Later operators revived the Booth House Tavern name on the ground floor, with a café and upstairs rooms rented to guests. Haunt listings that call it a seventeenth-century inn are compressing the 1683 inn on the lot into the house Finney altered in 1757.
Across the street, the Amstel House is the other half of the story. Physician John Finney, David’s father and an uncle of Declaration signer Thomas McKean, bought that property in 1738 and built the house that stands there. After his death in 1774 it passed to his daughter Anna Dorothea. She rented it to Nicholas Van Dyke, later governor. George Washington attended the 1784 wedding of Van Dyke’s daughter Ann to Kensey Johns in the house. The Amstel House is a museum. It is not the inn.
The haunting claim is that a tunnel once linked the two buildings and that a Finney family ghost uses both, mostly the third floors, opening and closing windows and doors and moving objects. No investigation report, named witness, or survey of a tunnel has been published with the claim. The activity list is the standard one for old inns. The family connection across the street is real. The tunnel and the ghost are the part that has not been shown.
A usable exterior photo of the inn did not turn up in this search. The Amstel House museum site and the Delaware Live piece on the tavern both carry building photos.
Relevant links
- Booth House Tavern returns, Delaware Live — 1683 inn, Finney in 1757, the Booths, the 1985 inn name, the 1994 fire
- Amstel House, New Castle Historical Society — John Finney, 1738, Washington’s 1784 visit
- Haunted Places: David Finney Inn — the third-floor claims and the tunnel story
- Haunted Rooms America — the same claims, plus the later restaurant and upstairs rentals