The dining room at the Wayside Restaurant sits a few steps from the Ammonoosuc River, in a building that has been in the hospitality business, in one form or another, for more than a century. On the evening of October 30, 2026, it will be doing something a little different: serving a four-course curated menu while storytellers tell local ghost stories between courses.
The event is listed on the Wayside's own calendar as the Halloween Dinner With Local Ghost Stories, and on the White Mountains regional tourism calendar as the Spooky Scary Halloween Dinner. The inn asks that guests reserve in advance; the dining room is open to the public, and reservations are taken by phone at (603) 869-3364. The inn has not published an end time for the evening.
It is one of several Halloween-adjacent events the Wayside runs in the run-up to Stick Season. There is a Halloween Brunch on October 25, with spooky specials on the a la carte menu and costumes welcome, and a Fall Wine Dinner on October 24 hosted, as it has been for years, by Mark Grabert, with proceeds going to Second Chance Rescue. The ghost-story dinner is the one that leans hardest on the place itself.
That is because the Wayside has an unusually long and well-documented past for a small White Mountains inn. According to the inn's own history, the house was built in 1825 by John Pierce Jr., whose uncle was Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth president of the United States. It began as a four-room homestead on Crawford Notch Road, in the part of Bethlehem township now known as Pierce Bridge. Pierce's wife Sarah enlarged it in 1901 to twelve rooms across three and a half stories, and planted trees that still stand on the property. Pierce died in 1907, leaving the place to his wife and children.
In 1910 the property was sold to Arthur E. Bowles, who ran it as a hotel for railroad workers; the Bethlehem Junction Station stood directly across the street. Joseph G. Williamson bought the estate in 1917 and kept the railroad trade going until the station was abandoned in 1922, then added a fourteen-room wing in 1927 and ran it as a full-service hotel. A series of owners followed: S. Robert and Mabel Jellison with Amy Fitzgerald from 1944 to 1947; Frank W. Gilber of Dorset, Vermont, who after 1947 added a riding ring, a nine-hole par-three golf course, a swimming hole, lawn billiards, a skating rink and a one-mile sleigh-ride track, with the golf course laid out with help from Jellison and modeled on the courses at the Carolina Hotel in Pinehurst, North Carolina; Kate and Bela Sveda, who bought it in 1968 and enlarged the dining room, added the lounge and built the annex; and Victor and Kathy Hofmann, who arrived in 1985 and whose family renovated the guest rooms in 1998, before which the rooms had no private baths.
The current innkeeper bought the inn in August 2017, at twenty-nine, after business school at Temple University and seven years with Marriott and then American Cruise Lines. The inn's own account of that first year includes a storm that knocked out power for four days and pushed the Ammonoosuc twelve feet up, right to the doorstep, followed by a week of subzero temperatures and a cascade of frozen pipes. Then came 2020. The innkeeper's stated inspiration, incidentally, was the television show Gilmore Girls, whose innkeeper lead character made the career look appealing.
So a building that started as a four-room farmhouse, spent the railroad boom as a workers' hotel, and later acquired a golf course and a sleigh-ride track is a reasonable place to tell ghost stories. The storytellers are coming from Littleton, about ten miles up the road.
A note on the name: the presenter is identified in the event listings as the Littleton Historical Society, but the organization that actually runs Littleton, New Hampshire's historical museum is the Littleton Area Historical Museum. Its volunteers maintain artifacts and documents going back to the town's early settlers. There is also a Littleton Historical Society, but that one is in Littleton, Massachusetts, and has no connection to the White Mountains. Visitors planning to attend should read the listing's "Littleton Historical Society" as the local New Hampshire group.
That museum has a track record with this kind of programming. Its twentieth annual Cemetery Walk is scheduled for October 11, 2026, at Glenwood Cemetery on West Main Street in Littleton, with tours starting at 3:00, 3:15 and 3:30 p.m., during which visitors meet costumed interpreters playing historic Littleton figures. Earlier in the year the museum ran a slideshow, "Littleton on the Move," covering Bette Davis, the 1924 fire, the 1927 flood and the town's movers and shakers, using colorized and in some cases animated historical photographs. Storytelling about the dead, in other words, is what this group does.
What the ghost stories will actually cover has not been published. The region has no shortage of material. Bethlehem itself was a grand resort town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when hotels lined the ridge above the village and the population swelled each summer with visitors from the cities; most of those grand hotels are gone, and the ones that remain have accumulated the usual freight of stories. Littleton, too, has a long memory, and the museum's collections go back to the settlers.
The practical details are simple. The dinner is Friday, October 30, 2026, at the Wayside Restaurant, 3738 Main Street in Bethlehem, New Hampshire. It is a four-course curated menu with stories between courses, and reservations are required. Guests who want to make a night of it can look at the inn's packages, and anyone with questions about the menu, dietary needs or the timing of the evening should call the inn directly, since the published listings do not say when the evening ends.
It is a small thing, a dinner in a riverbank dining room at the end of October, with the leaves mostly down and Stick Season coming on. But it is the kind of evening that only works in a place with this much history behind it, told by people who spend their Wednesdays and Saturdays keeping that history in order.