Maine Historical Society Tour Guide James Horrigan, right, leads a tour through the Wadsworth-Longfellow House guided by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Haunted Houses.” Sophie Burchell / The Forecaster

“All houses wherein men have lived and died / Are haunted houses. Through the open doors / The harmless phantoms on their errands glide, / With feet that make no sound upon the floors.”

The first stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Haunted Houses” greets the tour that enters the historic Wadsworth-Longfellow House the evenings leading up to Halloween. The special “Longfellow’s Haunted House” tours are only offered to the public seven nights a year and is in its 10th year of performances. One of the Maine Historical Society’s most popular events, every tour this year was sold out.

“The line, I call it the ‘immortal opening line,’ which I think is a good pun. … And so, I just have always loved the poem,” said James Horrigan, a guide of the Wadsworth-Longfellow House of 18 years who wrote and performs the Longfellow’s Haunted House tours.

Horrigan researched the content of the tours in 2012 and began offering the tours the next year. It is the 10th year of the tours, as they were paused for a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While there is no direct evidence linking Longfellow’s “Haunted Houses” to his childhood home in Portland, there is no evidence indicating otherwise. Horrigan believes Longfellow was inspired by the brick house built on Congress Street in 1786.

Horrigan leads the tour through the rooms of the house, reading stanzas of “Haunted Houses” while drawing connections across the Wadsworth-Longfellow’s family history and noting where and how seven people died over the years in the house.

“I realized at one point that I could read a different verse of the poem in each one of the rooms. It made sense,” said Horrigan.

“It started off with me telling people thousands of factoids, and then I realized I should streamline it. I should make it about Wadsworths and Longfellows and just that. I mean, it takes long enough just to go through the 10 Wadsworths,” he said.

Horrigan said that some people expect a traditionally scary haunted house when signing up for these tours. While there are no fake spiderwebs hung, zombies jumping out, nor corn syrup blood dripping down the walls, the tour has an eerie atmosphere as Horrigan recounts the tragedies of the Wadsworths and Longfellows as they succumbed to tuberculosis, alcoholism and heartbreak.

In the dining room, Horrigan recites the poem’s third stanza, painting an image of the Wadsworth-Longfellows gathered around the table:

“There are more guests at table than the hosts / Invited; the illuminated hall / Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts / As silent as the pictures on the wall.”

While the tour gets its name from Longfellow’s poem, Horrigan says he and other guides hold some belief that the house is truly haunted, particularly by Anne Longfellow Pierce. Pierce was Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow’s sister, a young widow who lived in the house until her death in 1901 and donated the house to the Maine Historical Society.

“You can take this any way you wish, but there are those of us who work here who don’t have a problem accepting that there are footsteps at night,” said Horrigan.

Curator of Education and Public Programs at Maine Historical Society Kathleen Neumann said that this year, tours for Longfellow’s Haunted House sold out before she put up the posters advertising them. While tours of the iconic building are available year-round, this nighttime tour provides a unique way to view the historic site.

“It’s one more way for folks to experience and see the house, to learn about Henry, his family, to learn about his poetry. You’re just looking at all of those things through a lens that we don’t normally get to look at or to go into much detail about,” said Neumann.

“In this case, we’re talking about the poem ‘Haunted Houses,’ and how that poem was probably inspired by his childhood home and the losses he had experienced there, and all the memories that he had there, too, and how even after the people he loved were gone their memories and their lives still lived on in his childhood home,” she said.

Horrigan reads the final stanza of the poem next to the bed where Stephen Longfellow, Henry’s father, died:

“So from the world of spirits there descends / A bridge of light, connecting it with this, / O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends, / Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.”

Neumann said that the lives and deaths described in the Longfellow’s haunted house tours connect to why people toured historic sites more broadly.

“I think that it speaks to why we cherish old houses. Why we’re curious about them, why we want to see them preserved, why people want to visit them. It’s … kind of reaching back and looking at these people who are long gone, but what were their lives like?” she said.