GILMANTON – An historic 1756 colonial-style home once owned by author Grace Metalious has developed a reputation as a place frequented by ghosts or spirits.

But that didn't keep its current owners, Marshall and Sunny Bishop, from buying it three years ago anyway.

"I've always been pretty skeptical and never thought much of ghost stories," said Marshall, a former Marine combat photographer.

But now he says he's open to the possibility that they are indeed sharing the house with some other kind of entity.

"The second night we were here I came down the stairs in the middle of the night. I could feel something next to me, not touching me but making the kind of movement you sense when somebody walks beside you. It's happened several times since then. You feel a breeze when there's no window open and it's like someone moving right next to you," he said.

Marshall Bishop stands on the stairway of the former Grace Metalious home in Gilmanton, where he says he first experienced the presence of a spirit in the home during the middle of the night. (ROGER AMSDEN)

Another night he was restless and couldn't sleep, so he decided to go into the guest bedroom on at the top of the stairs on the left so that Sunny, who works as a stewardess, would be able to get some rest without being disturbed.

He said he got under the covers and suddenly felt something sitting down on the bed next to him.

"I could feel the weight shift," he said. It caused him to blurt out "I don't mind if you're in here. Just don't get under the covers with me."

He says that with a laugh, but said he is convinced that something was really there.

"It only happens in that room. And I swear several times I've heard a voice as I pass the door saying 'don't look.' Of course, maybe I'm getting old and my hearing is fouled up, but that's what it sounds like," he said.

Sunny Bishop, who because of her job spends less time in the house than her husband, said she hasn't experienced anything quite like he has, but has several times had the feeling of motion associated with someone walking by her in that same area of the house.

The bedroom at the top of the stairs is where former owner Allan Hugelman says he encountered an apparition of Grace Metalious at least five times between 1984 and 1990.

Metalious, whose book "Peyton Place," the tale of small town scandal, became a best-seller in the 1950s, bought the Meadow Pond Road home in 1956 and lived there until her death in 1964.

In a 1990 interview with Pat Hammond of the New Hampshire Sunday News, Hugelman said he was a skeptic who didn't think ghosts existed until shortly after he bought the house in 1984 and heard a woman's voice softly calling his name as he sat reading in the living room late at night.

On another occasion he said Metalious visited him in the bedroom at the top of the stairs and was wearing his daughter's wedding gown.

He told the Sunday News that there were other spirits in the house besides Metalious and that he had at least 25 experiences with them.

Hugelman was so convinced that something out of the ordinary was happening that he invited a paranormal psychologist to hold a class there in the 1990s according to Jeanne Gallant, who lives on nearby Stockwell Hill Road and used to visit with Metalious in the 1960s.

"He was a real skeptic when he first moved here. I told him that the house was haunted and he looked at me like I had just fallen off the turnip truck. But a month or so after he had moved in he came rushing into my driveway and told me had seen a ghost," Gallant said.

She said that she frequently looked after the house for several of the subsequent owners in the 1970s and used her key to let in a woman who cleaned the house.

"I'd stay with her while she cleaned the house. And I could feel something strange there. So one day I asked her if she had noticed unusual things going on. She told me that every time she went to get the vacuum cleaner out of the closet that the light was on, even though she knew she had turned it off when she put it away," said Gallant.

"She also told me her dogs behaved strangely and didn't like going to the house. It was then that we came to the realization that the house was haunted," she said.

Gallant said that the psychic returned to the house two years ago for a barn warming held by the Bishops, who had built a barn for the alpacas they raise. She said that her impression was that there are three spirits at the house.

Gallant says that she doesn't think there is a Metalious ghost at the house and that the spirit is actually that of Mary Mudgett, whose body was found next to the stream which runs near the property around 1880.

Mudgett's family owned the house at the time and she was the cousin of Herman Webster Mudgett, a native of Gilmanton and a serial killer who murdered at least 27 people, many at the torture castle he built in Chicago in 1893.

Gallant says that she believes another of the ghosts is that of Hugelman.

"When the barn warming was being held I felt someone hit me in the back. I turned around and no one was there. Well it turns out the barn was built where Allan's ashes were buried... It was him letting me know that he was still around,'' said Gallant.

The Bishops have since named the barn in honor of Hugelman and posted a marker honoring him.

Marshall Bishop said that it seems that the spirits that inhabit the home "are happy with us. I guess that's because we talk to them all the time."