The Lighthouse Inn may have one of the region's most famous ghosts.

The inn's quite prominent ghost is apparently a bride, fully suited in white gown, who fell down the winding center staircase, broke her neck and died at the feet of her groom. The story is that it happened in 1930, three years after the 1902 mansion was turned into an inn.

There have been lots of reports of sightings of the Lighthouse Inn bride, beautiful and in her full bridal regalia, hovering in dark corners or appearing in window reflections.

The bride ghost was featured in a 2007 story in The New York Times and was once the focus of an entire segment of a television series about ghost hunters.

Many of the news stories about the Lighthouse Inn spooks over the years also included the hauntings of two children, killed in the Hurricane of 1938, who are said to still inhabit the halls and bedrooms of the inn.

I made a pre-Halloween pass by the inn recently, after looking into some of the region's more prominent ghost stories.

Even with leaves swirling along the nearby street gutters and carved pumpkins on stoops around the neighborhood, the inn looked surprisingly not spooky. Mostly it looks simply abandoned, slipping ever more perilously into disrepair.

The security guard put in place after the city took the property in a tax sale in the summer of 2013 is gone now. The place looks especially forlorn and neglected.

I put a question about what's new with the inn to the office of New London Mayor Daryl Finizio and was referred to the city's economic development coordinator, Ned Hammond.

Hammond told me he has been showing the inn, and some developers have expressed an interest. Some of them are interested in developments that would include some new housing and require zoning approvals, he added.

But I gather not much has happened with the inn since July, when the City Council, after rejecting a low auction bid of $100,000 for the building, below the minimum of $500,000, held a public hearing to solicit ideas about what to do with it.

The council listened and made appropriate noises about how something needs to be done soon. But that was July and nothing has happened.

Hammond said he plans to brief the council again and suggested a new request for proposals may be developed over the winter. He said the city wouldn't be able to sell - not even to an eager, cash-rich buyer - without first putting out a new request for proposals.

Certainly some of the responsibility for the lack of progress in developing the inn lies with the City Council. But most of the blame falls on the mayor.

When city voters agreed to change the charter to have a full-time, politically powerful mayor, it was situations like this that many envisioned.

I think voters expect a strong mayor to act like the chief executive of a company and get out in front of the problem of a big commercial property that has slipped off the tax rolls and is beginning to appear as a blight in one of the city's nicer neighborhoods.

Develop a plan and present it to the council, which would surely welcome some inn-selling leadership. Put it on the market, list it with a commercial broker and see that the world knows it's for sale. Market it.

It should also fall to the mayor to negotiate with the neighbors and the city Planning and Zoning Commission some tweaks to the zoning for the property.

The property includes not only the inn building but another 3 acres or so of land that developers, Hammond says, have shown an interest in developing. One thought is cluster development, maybe condominium apartments or a little pocket neighborhood.

If work begins soon on modifying the zoning, the property would immediately be more attractive to developers and more valuable.

The mayor wants the city to take title to more of the property in Fort Trumbull. The Lighthouse Inn presents a perfect opportunity to prove the city is able to market and develop the property it owns.

Selling the inn presents a lot of challenges. It is not convenient to highways or transportation. The beach association that it used to belong to has dissolved the inn's beach rights for nonpayment of dues.

And, day by day, it sinks a little closer toward a conclusion that it can no longer be salvaged. Time is of the essence, and a strong chief executive should recognize that.

One good thing about marketing the inn is that it may be that it's not haunted at all.

A city historian eventually set the New York Times straight in its 2007 story on the ghost bride.

It's not true. There was no bride, said Sally Ryan, who grew up two blocks from the inn. There were no kids who died in the hurricane, either.

So there you go, mayor. Sounds like a good pitch: Nice inn, fabulous water views, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, originally landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, priced right and very likely not haunted.

Sell it.

This is the opinion of David Collins

d.collins@theday.com

Twitter: @DavidCollinsct