Seven Hearths is a beautiful historic home located on King Street in the historic district of Hillsborough. The house dates from sometime in the earlier half of the Eighteenth Century. The site was originally built as a tavern, William Reed's Ordinary. This tavern distilled and served spirits to the public from Colonial times into the early days of the Republic. The tavern shut down sometime before the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, when the house became a private residence and began being called Seven Hearths.
According to legend, it was also sometime in the Nineteenth Century that the house acquired its first ghost. According to a family tradition, the ghost of a girl named Jane Hayes haunts the property.
The Hayes family lived in the home from the early Nineteenth Century into the middle of the Twentieth. Jane was a beloved daughter who died of consumption in the home in 1854, when she was only sixteen. Ever since then, residents in the house have reported seeing the transparent figure of a girl with long, flowing, blonde hair, wearing a wispy nightgown, wandering from room to room. Passers-by on the street have also reported seeing the figure of a young girl staring out of an upstairs window.
