Madame Sherri’s Castle Ruins are a crumbling stone staircase and foundation tucked into the woods of Chesterfield, New Hampshire, all that’s left of an eccentric costume designer’s 1930s party mansion. The site sits inside the 513-acre Madame Sherri Forest, reachable via an easy walk from the Gulf Road trailhead, and it’s become one of the Monadnock Region’s most photographed, most talked-about oddities.
You don’t expect to find castle ruins in New Hampshire. That’s kind of the point. There’s no medieval history here, no royal lineage, nothing you’d find in a European guidebook. What you get instead is a story about a Parisian-born Broadway costume designer who moved to the woods and built herself a stone party palace, mostly, it seems, out of spite and glamour and money that wouldn’t last.
Who Was Madame Sherri?
She was born Antoinette Bramare, and her story reads like something a novelist would reject as too much. Madame Sherri, born Antoinette Bramare, married actor and dancer Andre Riela in 1911, and the couple moved to New York and changed their name to Sherri. Once in New York, she found her calling. She made a name for herself designing elaborate costumes for Broadway productions, most notably the Ziegfeld Follies.
Money was good, and so were her connections. A lot of her lifestyle was made possible by generous gifts from her former assistant Charles LeMaire, who later became an Academy Award-winning costume designer. After a party at a friend’s Chesterfield home, she apparently fell for the area, because she began regularly attending parties there and, in 1929, moved to New Hampshire herself after purchasing nearly 600 acres of farmland and forest in West Chesterfield.
What she built next had no real plan behind it. According to local lore, no blueprints were used — she just walked around poking stakes in the ground, and local craftsmen found her incredibly difficult, since she’d show up scantily clad and frequently change the plans. The result, completed around 1930, was a French-inspired chateau summer house featuring extensive stonework, including a Roman arch stairway, an ornate interior, and designed landscape gardens.
The Parties, the Packard, and the Fall
For a while, this was the wildest address in the Monadnock Region. She and her husband lavishly entertained their New York City friends at parties during the Roaring 1920s, and Madame Sherri became famous, or infamous, for her wild parties. Around town, she was impossible to miss. Her chauffeur-driven Packard, her fur coat (and reportedly nothing else), and her fast crowd of friends made the townsfolk talk whenever she appeared.
It couldn’t last. Fortunes turned, friends drifted, and the castle stopped being a stage for glamour. Eventually Madame Sherri’s fortunes declined and her castle fell into ruin and suffered from vandalism; after a long separation, she returned to the house in 1959 to find the interior badly vandalized. She never went back. The house itself didn’t survive much longer: Madame Sherri died in 1965 at age 84, but for years prior the castle had fallen to neglect and vandalism, and on October 18, 1962, it was destroyed by fire.
Her final years were rough. Mrs. Charles LeMaire foreclosed on the property in July 1963, and a destitute Madame Sherri eventually ended up on public assistance in a nursing home outside Brattleboro, Vermont. When told the property had sold, her only response was “Tell me something to make me happy,” and she died shortly afterward.
What’s Actually Left to See
Here’s the part that surprises first-time visitors: this isn’t some hidden ruin you need a permit or a machete to reach. It’s mere steps from a parking lot and on publicly accessible property, even though photos of it make it look like a lost wonder buried deep in private woods. From the parking lot, the foundation, chimneys, and part of the grand stone staircase of the former “castle” are just 100 feet up a short side trail.
What survives is genuinely striking. What remains today is the stonework from the staircase, the foundation, columns, and a fireplace. The staircase itself is the star: a crumbling stone staircase that twists and rises across three ascending arches against a sylvan backdrop, dead-ending at empty air. That dead-end look is exactly why people call it the “stairway to nowhere,” or, more poetically, the “Stairway to Heaven.”
One important note if you’re planning a visit: the ruins are more fragile than they look. In July 2021, after days of heavy rain following Hurricane Elsa, visitors discovered that part of the ruins had collapsed as the mortar between the stones disintegrated. The Forest Society, which owns and manages the land, is blunt about it: the top portion of the stone staircase collapsed in July 2021 and the area has been roped off due to safety concerns, so please do not climb or walk on the ruins. A staff member put the reasoning simply: “It’s a cool and much beloved site in New Hampshire, but it is a 90-year-old stone ruin — this was always a possibility that we knew might happen.”
So look, photograph, wander — just stay off the stones. They’ve earned a little respect after ninety years of holding themselves up in the New Hampshire weather.
Ghost Stories in the Woods
No abandoned castle in the woods would be complete without a haunting or two, and this one delivers. Many people tell stories about the woods surrounding Madame Sherri’s castle being haunted. Some visitors take it further, claiming the site carries an air of mystery, with some visitors claiming the spirit of Madame Sherri still lingers. Whether or not you buy into that, it’s easy to see why the legend sticks. Standing at the base of a stone staircase that leads to open sky, in a forest that used to host Ziegfeld Follies costumers and bootleggers, does something to your imagination.
Where Is Madame Sherri Forest and How Do You Get There?
The forest sits on the eastern slope of Wantastiquet Mountain, also called Rattlesnake Mountain, in the town of Chesterfield, near the Vermont border. Madame Sherri Forest is located on Gulf Road: coming from the east on Route 9, take Route 63 south through Chesterfield Village past the town hall, then at about 1.6 miles from Route 9 take a right on Stage Road and shortly after bear left onto Castle Road.
Once you’re parked, the ruins are barely a detour. If you want more of a walk, keep going: the Anne Stokes Loop Trail leads to scenic Indian Pond, and other trails ascend Wantastiquet Mountain with excellent views. The full loop is roughly two miles and connects to the larger Wantastiquet–Monadnock Greenway network, so you can easily turn a quick photo stop into a half-day hike.
Why It’s Worth the Detour
New Hampshire doesn’t have castles. It has granite, forests, and a state motto about dying free, not exactly fairy-tale material. That’s what makes Madame Sherri’s ruins so disarming — they don’t belong here, and yet they clearly do, moss-covered and half-collapsed and still drawing hikers off Route 9 seventy years after the fire took the rest of the house. If you’re driving between Keene and Brattleboro and have twenty minutes to spare, it’s one of the strangest, most unexpectedly moving stops in the whole Monadnock Region.
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