Recently, I was at a diner in Deep River, Connecticut, having breakfast, and comparing notes with an old friend about whether we had been visited by a ghost in the middle of the night.

So the night before, we had stayed in this hotel called the Griswold Inn,

which is this old tavern meeting house from the 1700s that is supposedly haunted.

And my friend was saying over her coffee and pancakes that she had definitely felt a presence in the hallway.

And I was saying that something might have tapped on my foot in the middle of the night.

I don't know.

And honestly, the vibes were definitely right for a ghost.

The Griswold was right on the water at a spot where the Connecticut River meets the Long Island Sound.

So we had walked down to the dock and tried to look out onto the horizon, but it was so foggy that we couldn't see anything.

It was like, as soon as you stepped off the dock, it was just a misty, gray, foggy expanse going off to infinity.

Super eerie.

So anyway, back at breakfast.

I'm having my little smoked salmon, scrambled eggs, toast, whatever.

And this older gentleman in a plaid shirt is going around pouring everybody coffee.

His name is Ralph.

So he starts telling us about himself and about the town,

and then he tells us this legend. And as it turns out, there was another much better ghost story

in town. I'm Amanda McGowan, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today we're visiting Deep River, Connecticut, where the story of a botched bank robbery, more than a hundred years ago, has taken on a life of its own as an urban legend in the community.

So today we are venturing away from shore to a point where the horizon line between fact and fiction disappears.

We're going to visit the grave of XYZ after this.

It's a cold December night in 1890 and inside of a drafty stone bank building, the Deep River Savings Bank, a man named Harry Tyler is sitting in silence with a shotgun across his lap.

...