For three days at the end of October, the coachmen at Bretton Woods Stables trade their usual scenic loops for something with a little more mischief in it. The Halloween Wagon Rides run Friday, October 30 through Sunday, November 1, 2026, carrying families through the grounds of the Omni Mount Washington Resort with spooky sights and seasonal surprises staged along the route. The wagons hold up to 14 people, so a single ride can swallow several families at once, and the view out the back takes in Mount Washington and the Presidential Range.
The rides are short, scheduled affairs rather than an all-day open house. The resort's own Halloweekend schedule lists wagon rides at 3 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., with rides running Friday through Sunday. Reservations are required and should be booked in advance through the stables at 603-278-3388; the resort asks guests to sign a waiver before climbing aboard, and recommends long pants and closed-toe shoes. The stables sit at 310 Mount Washington Road in Bretton Woods, at the side entrance of the hotel on the bottom floor, which is also where the resort's regular horse-drawn carriages pick up.
That carriage operation is the year-round parent of the Halloween rides. Bretton Woods Stables runs half-hour private carriage rides through the resort grounds, $105 for up to five resort guests and $115 for the general public, with a coachman narrating the way past the hotel's historic architecture. In deep winter, when conditions warrant, the carriage may be swapped for a sleigh. The Halloween version is a seasonal overlay on that same ritual — the rhythm of hooves, the mountain air, and a route dressed up for the holiday.
What the wagon rolls past is, by any measure, an unlikely setting for a family hayride. The Mount Washington Hotel was the project of Joseph Stickney, a railroad and coal magnate. Construction ran from 1900 to 1902, and the hotel opened in 1902. Architect Charles Alling Gifford designed it in a Renaissance Revival style. It was fitted out with electric lights, a swimming pool, private baths in every room, and its own auto road at a moment when automobiles were still a rarity in the mountains.
Stickney barely got to enjoy it. He died in 1903, only months after the hotel's opening, leaving the entire business to his wife, Carolyn Foster Stickney. She proved an able steward, keeping the Mount Washington at the top of the summer-resort trade; she later married a French nobleman, Prince Aymon de Faucigny-Lucinge, and was known thereafter as Princess Carolyn. Management eventually passed to others in the 1930s, but she remained a presence in the hotel's story — and, according to local legend, perhaps more than that. The hotel has a long-standing reputation as a haunted place, with guests and staff reporting the figure of a woman in a formal gown, widely identified as Carolyn, in the corridors and in the room associated with her. In 2008 the television series Ghost Hunters brought a paranormal team to the hotel for an episode titled "Ghostly Conversations," the first such investigation of the resort. Whether or not the wagon rides' "spooky sights" lean on that reputation, the hotel hardly needs decorations to feel atmospheric in late October.
The building's more consequential history is diplomatic. In July 1944, the Mount Washington hosted the Bretton Woods Conference — formally the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference — gathering 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations. Over roughly three weeks, the delegates hammered out the architecture of the postwar financial order, agreeing to establish the International Monetary Fund and what became the World Bank, and fixing the gold standard that governed exchange rates until the early 1970s. The hotel was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986, and it is a member of Historic Hotels of America.
The Halloween rides are one small piece of a fuller weekend. The resort's Halloweekend programming for October 30 and 31 includes a craft room in the Dartmouth Room from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., a pumpkin carving contest on the Lower South Veranda with voting at the concierge desk and winners announced Saturday evening, monster cookie decorating, a scavenger hunt with prizes, tarot card readings at the spa, and an adults-only party at The Cave. A Halloween movie night marathon runs from 7 p.m. to midnight, getting progressively spookier as the evening wears on. The resort notes that all activities are subject to change.
For the wagon rides specifically, the practical advice is simple: call ahead, dress for a mountain autumn that can turn cold fast, and plan to arrive with time to spare before a 3 p.m. or 3:30 p.m. departure. Rates for the Halloween rides are not published on the resort's event listing, so confirm the cost when you book. What is certain is the setting — a Gilded Age hotel that has hosted a princess, a wartime economic summit, and now, for one weekend, a wagon full of families looking for ghosts.