The Murder House on Smuttynose Island Is Long Gone

In my 20+ years as a steward of Smuttynose Island, I talked to countless visitors about the infamous homicides of 1873. I explained again and again that the “murder house” at the Isles of Shoals burned over a century ago.

READ ALL ABOUT the 1873 Smuttynose Island murders 

“But isn’t that where the two women were killed?”  people asked, pointing to the rustic Haley Cottage. It’s confusing. The surviving cottage looks similar to early photos of the house that the Hontvet family rented from the Laightons, who ran a popular hotel on Appledore Island nearby. But the scene of the crime was a two-story duplex. The Haley Cottage is a two-room, single-story house with an attic. Volunteer stewards, who monitor the island for the owners, stay at the restored cottage. The murder happened next door, and that building is gone. I told the story so often that I eventually wrote a book about it. 

The Haley Cottage dates to between 1770 and 1800. It was there when Thomas Laighton bought four of the Maine islands in 1839. BY then it was already run down. The nearby duplex is sometimes called the  “Red House,” due to its red-stained exterior, not to the blood that Victorian tourists later came to gawk at while staying at the Oceanic Hotel (newly opened in 1873) across Gosport Harbor on Star Island. While some books claim the murder house burned in 1885, research indicates the fire occurred in 1908.

There were a dozen structures on the island when Louis Wagner killed Annette and Karen Christensen. Only the Haley Cottage and “Gull Cottage” survive. Gull was built in the mid-20th century for Rosamond “Rozzie” Thaxter, poet Celia  Thaxter’s granddaughter. In 1873, there was a sizable dilapidated hotel that stood behind Gull Cottage. Often called the Haley House, it was known in its day as “The Mid-Ocean House of Entertainment.” Only its foundation, thick with poison ivy, remains. All the other buildings–the Colley House, a fish house, a store by the cove–those are gone. 

The tourist’s confusion with locating the scene of the crime is understandable. Hontvet and Haley sound similar. Although the buildings were close, even photographs can be deceiving. Victorian photographers sometimes erased the Haley Cottage from their souvenir pictures using early darkroom techniques. Also, at some point, the Haley Cottage was moved about 30 feet to the peak of the slow rise that makes up the populated heart of Smuttynose Island. A modern sign identifies the rocky foundation of the Hontvet House, but then again, sometimes it isn’t there. The site might be cleanly defined, or it might be hidden in tall grass. 

In an effort to clear the whole thing up in one picture, I asked my friend Bill to stand where the murder house used to be. Here he is positioned within the ring of stones that mark the foundation of the murder house. There may have been a root cellar or crawl space, but no basement under either building.

In one early image, you can see the window where Annette Christensen escaped, only to be struck down by the killer’s ax moments later. Karen Christensen’s body was discovered in the left side of the duplex where Louis Wagner had lodged when he worked for John Hontvet a few months earlier. John’s wife Maren survived the attack and was a key witness at Wagner’s trial. Celia Thaxter wrote a classic essay that appeared in the Atlantic Magazine in 1875, the year Wagner was hanged. Any more questions?

© J.Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.