Investigating the Bulls Head Inn: 200 Years of History and Unexplained Activity in Cobleskill, NY
“When a building has served as a courthouse, a Masonic Temple, a tavern, and an inn for over two centuries, you're not chasing rumors — you're standing inside history that doesn't always stay quiet.”
— Jason Hawes
Some locations earn their reputation through legend and folklore. Others earn it the hard way — through what happens when you actually show up and start investigating. The Bulls Head Inn in Cobleskill, New York falls into that second category, and after spending a night inside its walls, I can tell you this place is not easy to dismiss.
I've been doing this long enough to walk into a location with a healthy dose of skepticism no matter what the history books say. But when a building has been standing since 1802 and has functioned as an inn, a tavern, a courthouse, a town hall, a Masonic Temple, and a private residence — all under one roof — you're not dealing with a thin history. You're dealing with over two centuries of human experience layered into the floors, the walls, and the air itself. Before we ever set up a single piece of equipment at the Bulls Head Inn, I wanted to understand what we were actually walking into.
The sheer variety of roles this building has played is what makes it so compelling from an investigative standpoint. Think about the kinds of events that would have unfolded in a place like this. Legal proceedings in the courthouse. Secretive gatherings in the Masonic Temple. Travelers passing through from across the region, some of them never making it back home. When you layer that much human activity into one structure over that many generations, it creates what I'd call residual weight — not a supernatural term, just a practical acknowledgment that places absorb their history. My job is always to figure out whether what people experience there has a rational explanation or whether something genuinely resists one.
We approached the Bulls Head Inn the same way we approach every location: rule out the explainable first. Old buildings are noisy. They settle, they creak, they funnel drafts through gaps that have widened over centuries. Pipes knock. Animals find their way into walls. Electrical systems in historic structures can behave in ways that feel strange if you don't know what you're looking at. I never want to hand someone a paranormal explanation when a building inspector's report would do the job just as well. So we mapped the structure, identified environmental factors, and set up our equipment with all of that in mind. Anything we documented had to survive that baseline scrutiny before I'd give it a second look.
What I can tell you is that the Bulls Head Inn gave us moments that made us stop and pay attention — the kind of moments where you look at the person next to you and neither of you has an immediate answer. Whether that rises to the level of confirmed paranormal activity is a harder question, and it's one I take seriously. I don't believe in throwing the word 'haunted' around loosely. What I believe in is honest documentation, rigorous review, and letting the evidence speak without dressing it up. The full investigation is in the video, and I'd rather you watch it and reach your own conclusion than take my word for it. That's always been the point of this work. We're not here to tell you what to believe — we're here to show you what we found and let you decide.
After everything we documented inside the Bulls Head Inn, I'm not ready to call this case closed. There were elements of this investigation that I couldn't easily explain away, and in my experience, that's worth paying attention to. Whether you're a believer, a skeptic, or somewhere in between, this is exactly the kind of location that makes paranormal investigation worth doing.