The house's story
Two hundred and seventy-eight years on Mercy Lane
A captain built it, his son made it grand, his son's widow kept a light in it, and a long line of apothecaries, landladies, undertakers, tenants and restorers kept it standing. This is their story, as well as we can tell it.
Before you ask
Almost every guest who stands in our front hall asks the same question, usually in a lowered voice: did anything happen here in 1692? The answer is no. The house was built in 1748, fifty-six years after the witch trials, by people whose grandparents had lived through them. Nobody was accused here, tried here or held here, and we don't pretend otherwise.
We mention it because the question is a fair one in this city, and because the true story deserves to be told plainly. In 1692 and 1693 more than 150 people were accused of witchcraft in Salem Village and the towns around it, and twenty were executed. It was an injustice, and Salem remembers it as one. If you'd like to understand it, we'd send you to the memorials and museums downtown before we'd send you to any ghost tour, including our own. The Crane & Lantern House has its own history, and it is a different one: ships and pepper, medicine and boarders, mourning and repair. It begins on the waterfront.
1748: Captain Josiah Crane builds a house
In 1748 Salem was a busy colonial port of a few thousand people, and its fortunes ran in a loop across the Atlantic. Schooners went south loaded with salt cod, lumber, barrel staves and provisions for the sugar islands of the West Indies; they came home with molasses, sugar, rum and sometimes a cargo of salt for the next season's fish. It was not glamorous work. It was steady, and for a careful captain it was enough to build a house.
Josiah Crane was twenty-six that year. He was born in 1722 to a family of coopers who had been in Salem for three generations, went to sea at fourteen, and by his early twenties was master of a seventy-ton schooner in the West Indies trade. The house account book that survives in our Ledger Room begins in his hand in March 1748 with a list of timber, "brick for the chimnies," glass "from Boston, 12 lights the sash," and a payment to a housewright whose name, frustratingly, is blotted.
What he built was a center-chimney Georgian house, fashionable for a young merchant of the time: five windows across the front, a paneled door with a transom, a stair rising in front of the great chimney, and four fireplaces on each floor served by that one stack. The front rooms had raised-field paneling painted a deep blue-green; we found the original color under eleven later coats during the restoration, and it is back on the walls of the Captain's Quarters today. The floors were wide pine, some boards close to twenty inches across. The windows were twelve-over-twelve, with thick muntins and folding interior shutters, and the kitchen at the back had a cooking hearth wide enough to stand in, with an iron crane to swing the pots. We have always assumed the family enjoyed that joke. We certainly do.
Josiah married Mercy Pickworth in 1751. (The lane was renamed for her in the 1790s; before that it was simply Crane's Lane, which Josiah apparently found too much.) They had five children, three of whom lived to adulthood. He kept sailing through the 1750s and 1760s and later bought shares in other men's voyages, the usual path from captain to merchant. During the Revolution, like many Salem men, he invested in privateers, armed private vessels licensed to take British shipping. The account book records a share in a brig that "took a prize of rum & dry goods" in 1777 and another that never came home. Josiah died in 1789, at sixty-seven, in the front room that is now the Captain's Quarters.
1794: Nathaniel Crane, the East Indies, and the walk on the roof
Josiah's younger son, Nathaniel, was born in the house in 1758. He went to sea at fifteen, served as a boy on one of his father's privateers during the war, and came of age just as everything changed for Salem. Independence freed American ships from the old British trading rules, and Salem's merchants turned east, sending ships around the Cape of Good Hope to India, China, the Isle of France and the islands of the East Indies. Salem boys went out as clerks and came back as captains in their twenties. Within a decade the town was one of the largest and richest in the new country, and its wharves were piled with tea, silks, nankeens, porcelain, coffee and spices.
Nathaniel made his first voyage east as first mate in 1786 and his first as master in 1789. By 1793 he had made three profitable trips to India and one to Canton, and he came home with enough money to do what Salem captains of the era did: improve the family house in the new style. In 1794 he added the Federal rear wing, with taller ceilings, plastered walls, slender carved mantels with garlands and urns, and six-over-six windows with thinner muntins that let in far more light. He replaced the front door surround with an elliptical fanlight. And he built a railed walk on the roof.
Roof walks like ours were common on Federal houses along the coast. They gave a way to reach the chimneys in case of fire, and a fine view of the harbor. The name "widow's walk" came later, along with the romantic story that sea captains' wives paced them watching for sails. Historians are skeptical that many of them did. Whatever they were really for, Abigail Crane used ours to watch the sea.
Abigail Derrin married Nathaniel in 1790. She was twenty-six, the daughter of a ropewalk owner, and by the evidence of her letters, which survive in a bundle we'll come to, she was clever, dryly funny and not much impressed by the Federal wing ("the new rooms are very fine and very cold"). They had one child, a daughter named Hannah, born in 1796.
1801: the pepper voyage
In the late 1790s a few Salem captains discovered that wild pepper could be bought directly from growers on the northwest coast of Sumatra, at prices that made fortunes. The merchants tried to keep the source a secret; within a few years dozens of Salem ships were in the trade, and for a generation a large share of the world's pepper passed through this little harbor. It was also among the most dangerous trades in the world. The coast was uncharted, the monsoons were violent, fever was common, and the trading itself could turn deadly; Salem ships were attacked there from about 1801 on.
Nathaniel sailed for Sumatra in December 1800 as master of the ship Hannah Crane, named for his daughter. A letter he wrote from the Isle of France in May 1801 is the last thing the family received from him. The ship was reported lost with all hands in a storm off the Sumatran coast that autumn, though the news did not reach Salem until December, when another pepper ship came home and its captain walked up Mercy Lane to the door.
We don't know what Abigail did that day. We do know what she did after. From that December, according to her letters and at least two neighbors' diaries, she kept a lantern lit in the top window of the house every night. She said, in a letter to her sister, that it was "for the ships coming in, whichever they are," and that she found she could not sleep with the window dark. She kept it lit for eleven years.
Abigail's house, 1801–1812
Abigail Crane ran the house alone, and ran it well. She took her husband's remaining shares in two vessels and, with a cousin's help, kept them working. When Jefferson's Embargo of 1807 shut down American foreign trade and emptied Salem's wharves, she let two rooms to a widowed schoolmistress and sold a parcel of the garden. Her letters from those years are full of prices, weather and her daughter's lessons, and only now and then of grief. "The lamp is trimmed," she writes at the end of most of them, the way someone else might write "goodnight."
She died in the house in the winter of 1812, in the room we now call the Lady's Chamber, at forty-eight. The country was at war with Britain again and Salem's harbor was full of privateers. Hannah, by then sixteen, went to live with Abigail's sister in Marblehead, and the house was let to tenants.
Guests who stay in the Lady's Chamber or the Widow's Walk Suite sometimes tell us they smell lavender and candle smoke on the stair. Abigail grew lavender along the garden wall and stitched it into sachets, several of which we found in the walls. We tell her story, and the stories guests tell about her, on the ghosts page.
1834–1871: Dr. Pell's apothecary
For two decades after Abigail's death the house was let by the Crane heirs, first to a sailmaker's family and then to a succession of short-term tenants. Salem was changing. The great days of the East Indies trade were fading as ships grew too large for the shallow harbor and the business moved to Boston and New York. In 1834 Hannah Crane, now married and living in Marblehead, sold the house to Dr. Ezra Pell, a physician and apothecary from Beverly, for $2,100.
Dr. Pell turned the front room on the west side of the ground floor into his shop. He lined it with a wall of small wooden drawers, each with a gilt label in abbreviated Latin, and filled the shelves with glass-stoppered bottles and blue-and-white jars. Most of those drawers are still there in the room called The Apothecary, and several still stick in damp weather. He sold what any apothecary of the time sold: dried herbs and roots, tinctures and syrups, castor oil, quinine for fevers, camphor, cough lozenges, soap and tooth powder, and, because it was entirely legal and entirely ordinary, laudanum and paregoric by the bottle. He was known for his peppermint water, a standard remedy for indigestion and colic, and for the peppermint lozenges he gave to children who behaved during a tooth-pulling.
He grew many of his herbs himself in the old kitchen garden behind the house. We replanted part of it in 2017 from a list in his daybook: feverfew, horehound, sage, chamomile, peppermint, spearmint and, along the wall where Abigail's had been, lavender. The pickleball courts now sit on the rest of the garden lot. Dr. Pell would not have approved of the noise.
He practiced on Mercy Lane for thirty-seven years and died in 1871. A peppermint smell is still reported in his old shop. We have checked the drawers. There is no peppermint in them.
1872–1888: a boarding house
By the 1870s Salem had become a mill and factory town. The big cotton mill near the harbor employed hundreds; tanneries and shoe shops employed hundreds more, many of them recent immigrants from Ireland and, later, French Canada. The old merchant houses around the waterfront were divided into rooms and let by the week, and ours was no exception. In 1872 Dr. Pell's estate sold the house to Mrs. Honora Keane, a widow who ran it for sixteen years as a boarding house for sailors between voyages and mill hands, with breakfast and supper at a long table in what is now the Lantern Room.
Mrs. Keane's rent book survives too, and it is one of our favorite things in the house: weekly rents of $2.50 to $4.00, fines for coming in after ten, a note that "Mr. D. owes for a broken basin and is not sorry." The third floor, under the eaves, was let to families. One entry, for 1879 to 1881, reads only "M. Farrell & boy Tom, mill, 3rd fl. back." That room is now the Nursery.
We know almost nothing else about Tom. The family moved on in 1881, and there is no record that anything happened to him in the house; we like to think he grew up and went to work and lived a long life somewhere. But when the Fairweathers opened the third-floor walls in 1997 they found a small handful of clay and glass marbles tucked behind the baseboard, and guests in the Nursery have been reporting the sound of marbles rolling down the hall at night for as long as anyone has kept track. The marbles are in a case in the Library now. The sounds, apparently, are not.
1889–1946: Hollis & Vane
In the nineteenth century most people in New England were laid out at home, in the family's best front room, the parlor. By the 1880s that was changing. Undertakers increasingly took the work into their own premises, often large old houses with a front room for viewings, a chapel, and a workroom at the back, and the "funeral parlor" was born. The story goes that this is why, a generation later, people started calling the front room at home the "living room" instead.
In 1889 the undertakers Silas Hollis and Edmund Vane bought the house from Mrs. Keane's heirs. They made the east front room their viewing parlor, hung it with velvet drapes, and filled it with palms. In 1893 they built the brick-and-timber chapel wing off the Federal addition, with tall arched windows and a timber roof; the chapel itself is now our Great Hall, and its smaller front room, once the family's waiting room, is The Ledger restaurant. The Hollis family lived upstairs for three generations. A horse-drawn hearse left from the carriage house until 1919, when the firm bought a motor hearse and the horses were retired to a farm in Topsfield.
We are often asked whether it's strange to run a bar in an old viewing parlor. We think of it this way: for fifty-seven years this house was where Salem families came on the hardest days of their lives, and they were treated with care. The Undertaker's Parlor tries to keep up the tradition of a warm room, a quiet word and a good chair. The cocktail names are our joke, not theirs, and we hope Mr. Hollis and Mr. Vane would forgive us.
1946–1990: apartments, and a near miss
The firm closed after the Second World War, and in 1946 the house was sold to a landlord who cut it into seven apartments. Partition walls went up across the paneled rooms. The widow's walk was roofed over. The Great Hall became a storage space for a furniture dealer, then a dance studio, then nothing at all. The house was not loved in those decades, but it was lived in, and that kept it standing. Tenants remember a cold-water flat in the garret, a landlady who kept chickens in the old garden, and a ghost on the stair that "everybody's grandmother saw."
By the late 1980s the house was empty, the roof leaked into the chapel wing, and the lot was worth more than the building. In 1988 a developer applied for a permit to demolish it for a parking lot serving the waterfront. Neighbors, the local historical commission and a small, stubborn group of preservationists objected, and the hearings dragged on for most of a year. In 1990 the developer gave up and sold.
1991–1997: the Fairweathers
The buyers were the Fairweathers, a family of preservation carpenters and old-house enthusiasts who had been among the loudest voices at the demolition hearings. They spent six years taking out the apartment partitions, rebuilding the roof, reopening the widow's walk, stripping eleven coats of paint to find Josiah's blue-green, and cataloguing everything the walls gave up: shoes, bottles, letters, sachets, a mourning card, the marbles. They opened the house as a bed and breakfast in the spring of 1997, with six rooms and a breakfast table in the old front parlor. The whole story, and the full list of what they found, is on the restoration page.
2014 to today
Maren and Theo Alcott bought the house from the Fairweathers in 2014. Maren had spent fifteen years restoring old houses on the coast of Maine and Theo had been cooking in Providence; between them, they said at the time, they knew exactly how much trouble they were buying. They opened The Ledger in the chapel wing in 2015, began hosting weddings in the garden in 2016, and brought Chef Dee Okafor into the kitchen in 2019. They renovated the garret bath in 2021 and built the pickleball courts on the old garden lot in 2024. Samuel Teague, who started at the front desk under the Fairweathers in 2009, still gives the history talk in the Library every Thursday at 7 pm, and he knows considerably more than this page does.
Every night at dusk, someone on the staff climbs to the top of the house and lights an electric lantern in the top window. It is the only house rule that has never once been broken.
Book a room The Thursday history talk
A note on sources: the Crane account book, Abigail's letters, Dr. Pell's daybook and Mrs. Keane's rent book are kept at the house; Samuel is happy to show them to guests by request. Where the record runs out, as it often does, we've tried to say so.