The Red Brook Inn sat on Route 184, the Gold Star Highway, in the Burnett’s Corner Historic District between Old Mystic and Groton. It was not one house. It was two colonial buildings run together as a bed-and-breakfast: the Crary Homestead and Haley’s Tavern. Ghost lists treat it as a single 1770 inn with a woman in a shawl. The record is a little more specific, and the haunting is guest lore.
Haley’s Tavern was built about 1768 in Center Groton. The Haley family already had ties to Burnett’s Corner. A daughter, Sally, married Richard Burnett, the man the village is named for. When highway work threatened the tavern, it was taken down and rebuilt in 1986 at 2750 Route 184, next to a water tower of about 1800 that was moved with it. The Crary Homestead, a two-story center-chimney colonial at 2800 Route 184, stayed on its own ground. Together they were the Red Brook Inn: antiques, canopy beds, working fireplaces, and a handful of parlors used for small meetings. A meeting-venue listing from the inn’s open years put the building date at 1740, counted 11 rooms, and gave a phone number on Route 184 at Welles Road. Haunt write-ups use 1770 and the Crary name for the whole place. The two dates belong to two houses.
The inn is reported closed. The address still attached to it is 2750 Gold Star Highway, Old Mystic, CT 06372.
The ghost stories come from guest and staff reports, repeated on haunt sites with no named witness and no date. The main figure is called Nancy Crary, or Nancy Cracy in some retellings: a gray-haired woman in a shawl, seen in the North Room on the second floor and at the top of the stairs. The set piece is a fire. Guests are said to have lit a fireplace, left the flue shut, and fallen asleep as the room filled with smoke. They woke to the woman in the shawl. One quoted guest described a white, transparent woman on the stairs by the North Room. That is the whole case. There is no newspaper account of the fire or of Nancy.
The second story is a grudge. A previous owner is said to have had an affair with his wife’s best friend. The wife banned the friend from the house. Twelve years after the wife died, he married the friend. At a birthday party for the new wife, a smell like rotting meat followed her from room to room and broke up the party. Cold spots and voices are the rest of the file. None of it is tied to a named owner, a year, or a death record.
The history worth keeping is the moved tavern, the Crary house beside it, and a short run as an inn in a historic district. The woman in the shawl is the story guests added after the fireside rooms were already old.
Relevant links
- Burnett’s Corner Historic District — Haley’s Tavern moved in 1986, the Crary Homestead, and the inn
- Haunted Places: Red Brook Inn — the Nancy Crary telling and the address
- Connecticut Real Haunt listing — the same guest reports, and the note that the inn has closed