History

Our Story

The Gray Ghost Inn has entered a new chapter in its history with new owners Cary and Eamon Duane who bought the Inn in August 2023. They join a line of Innkeepers stretching back to the 1950s when the Inn was built by an enterprising town employee who saw the ski boom coming with the opening of Mount Snow.  Since then, the Inn has gone through a variety of names and remodels as well as a few colorful owners.

Read on for the complete history of the Gray Ghost Inn, as compiled by former Innkeeper Carina Hellstrom.

Gray Ghost Inn Under Rainbow

Gray Ghost Inn

A young man from Pennsylvania by the name of Danny Stevens bought the Snow Bird Lodge in 1983 and started to clean it up. He named his new lodge the Gray Ghost Inn after his favorite fishing camp in Maine.

The Gray Ghost got a facelift, a new sign, and a deck out back and was open for business again. Danny was a short lived innkeeper however; he sold the inn to the Collingwood’s on October 31, 1984. The Collingwood’s made many improvements over the sixteen years they owned the business. The Collingwood’s grew the business as well as the inn’s reputation.

In January of 2000, Carina and Magnus Thorsson bought the inn, adding to and updating the property. In 2003, they added a new section to the building, bringing a facelift as well as the addition of a spacious lobby, a screened-in porch and an outdoor pool. In 2010, Carina Hellstrom continued running the Inn by herself with her 3 daughters and several black labs. 23 years later, it was time to pass the baton…

In August 2023, the Duane Family purchased the Inn and moved in. Cary and Eamon, along with their two young children, moved back to the mountains after spending many years in Boston. They will continue the family-run legacy and will operate the cozy and charming country inn for years to come.

Before it was called the Gray Ghost, the inn was known by other names. Former co-owner Magnus Thorsson collected the following stories from the Inn’s colorful pre-history.

Snow and Sun Lodge

Historic Gray Ghost InnIn the mid 1950’s, the ski-boom came blazing through Vermont. Among the most exciting new developments in recreational sports was the Mount Snow ski area. Mount Snow would become one of the most accessible, fun, and enterprising ski areas of this century.

The influx of skiing visitors to Vermont raised the demand for local lodging.  John Yunos, master plumber and tax assessor for the town of Dover, was one of the first to respond to this need.  He began construction of a simple two story lodge with a cavernous basement.  The inn, then called Snow and Sun Lodge, was opened only a year after Mount Snow resort had opened.  The twenty room lodge was, according to the author Haden-Guest, “…unpretty, and being built of cinderblocks with an asphalt roof.”

Norway Lodge

The inn was purchased in 1970 by a former horse trainer whose career had come to a sudden halt due to accusations of embezzlement. The horse trainer’s name was Buddy Jacobson. Buddy began to work on the lodge which now had approximately thirty rooms. Buddy did most of the work himself and was instrumental in the installation of the numeric-door locks. Down on the docks he made a “deal” and got a quantity of wormy chestnut, which now lines many of the rooms, used, as he said “to impart a rustic look.”

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The newly named Norway Lodge was run more with a focus on profiteering than customer service. Buddy’s policy was to not give refunds no matter how awful his service or the guest experience had been. At the time, he would have bands play where the TV is now in the lounge and serve up to 200 people cheap spaghetti dinners often sitting on the floor with a plate in their laps. Buddy soon earned a reputation for being a shady innkeeper and got booted from the local lodging association after checking a group of nuns into one side of a hallway opposite a group of drunk and rowdy firefighters.

Later, while awaiting sentencing for the Manhattan murder of his girlfriend's lover, Buddy escaped from the Brooklyn House of Detention with the help of the innkeeper of the Norway Lodge. (According to one local, Buddy came to Dover and hid in what is now room 301. ) Buddy was seized nearly six weeks later after a transcontinental manhunt and was sentenced to one to seven years of additional time for his escape.

Norway Lodge Postcard

Snowbird Lodge

The Norway Lodge became neglected and went back to Yunos who had sold it to Buddy originally. The inn was sold again in 1980 to a couple from New Jersey who renamed the infamous inn the Snowbird Lodge. Despite their best efforts, they could not, at their own admission, make a go of it as, “it did not snow for three years straight.”