Yankee Pedlar Inn

The story

The Yankee Pedlar Inn stands on a street corner in Torrington, Connecticut. Its story begins in November 1890, when Frank Conley, an immigrant from Ireland, paid $8,000 for a lot roughly 100 by 214 feet. With his New England-born wife Alice, he spent about $40,000 building a hotel in the colonial New England style, and the Conley Inn opened in July 1891. The roles were divided: Alice managed the house while Frank ran the business side.

Wikipedia says the family ran the hotel through much of the first half of the twentieth century; the local folklore site Damned Connecticut says the Conleys died in 1910 and their niece sold it two years later. Later owners enlarged and renovated the building. A restaurant and bar called the Yankee Pedlar was added in 1940, and on March 1, 1956, the hotel and restaurant were joined under the single name Yankee Pedlar Inn. In its later years the inn had 52 rooms and a pub known as Bogey's.

That chapter ended on December 1, 2015, when the inn closed for what was supposed to be a renovation of seven to nine months. Funding ran short and work stalled. The owner announced in 2017 that the hotel would reopen in spring 2018 under a national chain brand, but it never did. Instead the interior was gutted, the City of Torrington went to court to try to recover the property, and the two sides reached an agreement requiring renovation work to restart in February 2024. What has happened since is not documented in the available sources.

The legend

The central figure of the Yankee Pedlar's ghost lore is Alice Conley, the hotel's first manager. Tradition places her death in Room 353 and has her still looking in on guests as she walks the corridors. Visitors have described apparitions and strange smells in that room. The detail should be treated as legend: we found no source that documents where Alice died, and room numbers in the 300s may belong to later expansions or renumbering rather than to the 1891 hotel.

Damned Connecticut, a local folklore website, adds more, though several of its claims are not confirmed elsewhere. A rocking chair in the lobby associated with Alice was said to rock on its own, and a sign once asked guests not to sit in it. A gray-haired man in a black suit, seen using the old telephone in the pub, has been identified as Frank Conley. Room 295 is linked to a female figure, odd smells, and guests who felt something climb into bed beside them. More general reports include lights and doors working by themselves, people feeling pushed or tugged, and troubling dreams. The same site concedes that the inn's history contains no recorded disaster or violent death.

The inn's wider fame came through film. Director Ti West, who describes himself as a skeptic, stayed at the hotel around 2008 while making The House of the Devil, and staff told his crew the building was haunted. West later recounted that a television in his room switched itself on and off, doors shut on their own, and bulbs in his room burned out again and again; he added that everyone on the production had strangely intense dreams, and that he had by chance picked the hotel's "most haunted" room for a scene. According to one account, actress Sara Paxton felt a presence in her room. Those experiences inspired The Innkeepers, which West shot partly inside the inn. It premiered at South by Southwest on March 12, 2011, and opened in US theaters on February 3, 2012. The film's ghost, Madeline O'Malley, was invented for the screen and has no place in the hotel's older stories.

No first dated ghost report has been found; the reputation was already established locally by the late 2000s. Regional groups, including the Northwest Connecticut Paranormal Society, which reported photographing orbs, and C-PEAR, investigated the inn, but their records are no longer online. National newspapers covered the inn when the film came out.

What remains today

The building still stands, but it is not the inn guests remember. It has been closed since late 2015, and its interior was gutted after the sale. Whether the renovation agreed with the city in 2024 has moved forward is not known from current sources, so any description of the rooms, the lobby chair or the pub belongs to the past.

Visiting

The Yankee Pedlar Inn is closed and is not open to the public. It is private property whose redevelopment status after 2024 could not be confirmed, with no tours and no overnight stays, so do not try to enter. Look at it only from public space.

For a legal way to experience its legend, watch The Innkeepers, which was filmed inside the hotel, or look for updates from the City of Torrington on the building's future before planning a trip.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Yankee Pedlar Inn — Wikimedia Commons
2. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Torrington, CT 1956 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1956 · Public domain (USGS)
3. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Winsted, CT 1892 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1892 · Public domain (USGS)
4. "The Innkeepers (film)" — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
5. "The Yankee Pedlar Inn, Torrington" — Damned Connecticut (local folklore site)
6. Ti West on the real haunting behind *The Innkeepers* (Riley Presnell, 28 Aug 2023, summarizing an IndieWire interview) — Collider — Collider
7. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.