About us
The people who keep the lantern lit
A restorer, a cook, an innkeeper who knows every story, a chef who changed the breakfast menu in her first week, a planner who has never lost a wedding to the rain, and a cat with three legs and strong opinions.
About the house
The Crane & Lantern House was built in 1748 by Captain Josiah Crane, a Salem merchant in the West Indies trade, as a center-chimney Georgian house with wide pine floors and paneled rooms. In 1794 his son Captain Nathaniel Crane, rich from the East Indies voyages, added the Federal wing and the railed walk on the roof. In the two hundred years since, it has been a captain's home, an apothecary, a boarding house, a funeral parlor, a row of tired apartments and very nearly a parking lot. It has been an inn since 1997, and ours since 2014.
Maren & Theo Alcott, owners
Maren spent fifteen years restoring old houses on the coast of Maine, mostly eighteenth-century capes and Federal farmhouses with names like "the Widow Pratt place." Theo spent the same fifteen years cooking in Providence, the last six of them as chef of a small neighborhood restaurant that the city's food writers kept trying to make famous. They met when Maren hired Theo's sister to repair a staircase and Theo turned up with lunch.
They were not looking for an inn. They came to Salem in the spring of 2014 for a weekend, stayed in the Captain's Quarters, and learned over breakfast that the Fairweathers were thinking about selling. "We had the kind of conversation in the car home that you're not supposed to have," Theo says. "Neither of us said no." They bought the house that autumn.
Maren looks after the building, which means she is usually somewhere on a ladder. She has re-glazed most of the windows herself and keeps a running list of what the house needs that is, at last count, four pages long. Theo runs the kitchens with Chef Dee, does the morning bread, and keeps an eye on the menu at the Undertaker's Parlor, though the names are the work of Calum, our bar manager. They live in the old carriage loft with Ledger, and you'll see one or both of them at breakfast most mornings.
Dolores "Dee" Okafor, head chef
Dee grew up in Dorchester, cooked her way through North Shore and Providence kitchens for a dozen years, and joined us in 2019 as head chef of The Ledger and the Lantern Room. Her cooking is New England seafood at heart, with flavors from her grandmother's Nigerian kitchen woven through it: a benne-seed crust on the cod, suya spice on the grilled swordfish, a vegetarian jollof risotto that has converted several committed carnivores. "Both kitchens run on corn, beans, smoked fish and patience," she says. "They get along fine."
Her brown-butter johnnycakes went on the breakfast menu the first month she was here and have never come off. She's also responsible for the smoked bluefish pâté at the bar, the Indian pudding in winter, and the "Last Rites" chocolate pot de crème, which she named herself, over Theo's objections. She shared the johnnycake recipe in our journal, here, and she would like you to know that the brown butter is not optional.
Samuel Teague, head innkeeper
Samuel started at the front desk in 2009, under the Fairweathers, on what he thought was a summer job between teaching contracts. He is still here. He has read every page of the Crane account book, Abigail's letters, Dr. Pell's daybook and Mrs. Keane's rent book, more than once, and he keeps the folder of every ghost story a guest has ever told us. He will give you directions to the waterfront, the best bench on the Common, and the year the chapel wing was built (1893) without looking up from the reservations screen.
He gives the free history talk in the Library every Thursday at 7 pm and leads most nights of the Lantern Ghost Walk. He insists on history first and stories second, and he has never once jumped out at anybody. Asked whether he believes in the ghosts, he says: "I believe the guests."
Wren Halloway, events director
Wren has planned more than two hundred weddings at the house since she joined us in 2017, from two-person elopements on the widow's walk at sunset to full buyouts with a tent on the lawn and every room booked for the weekend. She knows the exact minute the light goes gold over the harbor in each month of the year, how long it takes a string quartet to get up the garret stairs (don't), and the city's 10 pm outdoor noise curfew to the second.
Before coming to Salem, Wren ran events for a botanical garden, which explains the flowers. Her rain plan has never failed. Couples often ask her for a "ghost photo" on the main stair; she knows exactly where to stand, and she won't tell you whether the faint figure on the landing is a trick of the light. Write to her at events@cranelantern.example.
Benny Ruiz, pickleball coach
Benny played college tennis, taught it for years on the North Shore, and switched to pickleball "about the time everyone's knees did." He runs the Saturday clinics on our courts from 9 to 10:30 am ($30) and the Thursday "Pickle & Pint" round robin at 5:30 in summer. He is very patient with beginners and slightly less patient with anyone who volleys from the kitchen. He will also tell you, unprompted, that the courts sit exactly where Dr. Pell grew his feverfew.
Madame Corvina, tarot reader (Sundays)
Madame Corvina is the stage name of Lucia Ferrante, who taught eighth-grade English in a North Shore middle school for thirty-one years and retired, as she puts it, "to read something other than book reports." She has read tarot since she was a teenager, when her grandmother gave her a worn deck, and she reads at the Library fireplace every Sunday from 2 to 5 pm. A twenty-minute reading is $40, with a pot of tea and one of Abigail's lavender scones.
Her readings are for reflection and enjoyment, and she's firm about it: she won't predict your health, your money or your court case. She will, however, ask you very good questions, and she can tell at a glance whether you finished the reading for class.
Ledger, house cat
Ledger arrived in the autumn of 2014, a few weeks after the Alcotts did, as a thin gray stray with an injured back leg who had been living under the carriage house. The vet saved the cat but not the leg. He was named for the account book in the Ledger Room, which he liked to sleep on, and which we now keep locked in the desk cupboard.
Ledger is friendly, curious and fast on three legs. He greets most guests in the front hall, sits in the window of the Lantern Room at breakfast (he is not permitted to eat there, and knows it), and has a reserved chair in the Library. He will not, under any circumstances, go above the second-floor landing. He is not allowed in guest rooms, though he has been known to argue the point. Guests with cat allergies should let us know at booking; he lives in the carriage loft and the main floor, never the bedrooms.
And everyone else
The house runs on about thirty people across the year and nearly fifty in October: the breakfast crew who start the johnnycake batter at 6, the housekeepers who leave Tom's marbles on the Nursery windowsill, the line cooks, servers and bartenders at The Ledger and the Parlor, the guides on the Lantern Ghost Walk, and the gardener who keeps Dr. Pell's herbs alive. We pay above the local average, close the restaurant two days a week most of the year, and feed everyone a staff meal before service. If you'd like to join them, see careers.