So, is it haunted?

How we tell these stories

The people below were real, as far as the house's own records go: the account books, letters, daybooks and rent ledgers that have survived in the walls and drawers. What came after them is something else. It is what staff and guests have told us over the years, written down as faithfully as we can, with our skepticism intact and our sense of humor nearby.

We don't use special equipment. We have never had an exorcism, a medium in the attic or a television crew in the cellar, though two of the last have asked. Samuel Teague, our head innkeeper since 2009, keeps a folder of every account a guest has written down or told him, and that folder is the source for most of this page. If something happens during your stay, he would like to hear about it. If nothing happens, he would like to hear about that too.

A word about 1692: the house was built fifty-six years after the witch trials and has no connection to them. Our ghosts are our own, and none of them has anything to do with the people who were wrongly accused and executed that year. Their story belongs to the memorials downtown, not to a ghost page.

The Lady in Gray

Who

Abigail Crane (1764–1812), widow of Captain Nathaniel Crane

Where

The widow's walk, the main stair, the Lady's Chamber

Signs

A figure in gray at the rail or on the landing; lavender; candle smoke where no candle is burning

Best chance

Dusk, clear evenings, autumn

In 1801 Captain Nathaniel Crane was lost with his ship off the coast of Sumatra on a pepper voyage. When the news reached Salem at the end of that year, his wife Abigail began keeping a lantern lit in the top window of the house, and she kept it lit every night for eleven years, until she died in her bedroom in the winter of 1812. That bedroom is the Lady's Chamber. The lantern hangs, electrified now, in the top window of Garret East, and we light it every night at dusk.

The most detailed account we have came from a guest in the Widow's Walk Suite in October 2006, under the Fairweathers. She was a retired nurse from Ohio, traveling alone, and by her own description "not the type." At about a quarter to seven in the evening she climbed the private stair to the roof to watch the sunset and found a woman already standing at the harbor-side rail: slight, in a long gray dress with a shawl, her hair pinned up, holding the rail with both hands. The guest said good evening. The woman didn't turn. The guest assumed she was another guest and stood at the opposite corner for a few minutes, looking at the water, and when she looked back, the walk was empty. The only way down is the stair she was standing beside. "It smelled like my grandmother's linen closet," she wrote. "Lavender, and a candle just blown out." She stayed two more nights and slept, she said, very well.

Since then, the sightings of Abigail have followed the same pattern: brief, at a distance, from behind, always facing the sea. Nobody has ever reported her as frightening. Guests most often describe her as sad, or patient, or "busy, as if she had something to do." On the main stair she's reported as a gray shape on the landing, gone when you reach it. In the Lady's Chamber the most common report is simply the smell of lavender at night with the windows closed. There is lavender in the room. We put it there. Guests insist this is different.

Stay in the Widow's Walk Suite · Stay in the Lady's Chamber

Little Tom and the marbles

Who

"Tom," a boarder's son, listed in the 1879–1881 rent book

Where

The Nursery and the third-floor hall

Signs

Marbles rolling across the floor and down the hall; small footsteps; a light giggle

Best chance

Between midnight and three; the Nursery, of course

From 1872 to 1888 the house was a boarding house, and the third floor was let to families. Mrs. Keane's rent book lists "M. Farrell & boy Tom, mill, 3rd fl. back" from 1879 to 1881. That room is now the Nursery. We know nothing more about Tom, and nothing at all to suggest that anything sad happened to him here; the family simply moved on, as boarders did.

In early 1997, during the last months of the restoration, a carpenter pried off the baseboard on the inside wall of the Nursery and found a small cache behind it: nine clay marbles, two glass ones with colored swirls, a jackstone, and a button. A gap in the floorboard, a little wider than a marble, ran under the baseboard at exactly that spot. The carpenter, Ray Fairweather, told Samuel years later that he laughed out loud, because for six years everyone working on the third floor had complained about hearing marbles roll across it.

The reports have not stopped since the marbles moved downstairs. The classic account is a sound like a single marble rolling slowly across the floor from the window side, bumping off the baseboard and rolling out into the hall, where it seems to pick up speed down the length of the third floor and stop at the top of the stair. Guests have searched. They have never found a marble. A few have left one of their own on the windowsill, in case Tom is short. Housekeeping leaves them there.

Stay in the Nursery

The peppermint in the apothecary

Who

Perhaps Dr. Ezra Pell, apothecary on the ground floor from 1834 to 1871

Where

The Apothecary room, especially near the wall of drawers

Signs

A strong smell of peppermint; a drawer found open in the morning; the faint clink of glass

Best chance

Early morning, damp weather

Dr. Pell kept his shop in the west front room for thirty-seven years and was known for his peppermint water and the lozenges he handed to brave children. His wall of labeled drawers is still in the room. Guests in The Apothecary, and staff who clean it, report a sudden smell of fresh peppermint, strong enough that one housekeeper went looking for a broken bottle of mouthwash. It tends to come in the early morning and to last a minute or two. Now and then a guest wakes to find one of the small drawers standing open, usually the one labeled "FOL. MENTH. PIP.," which is peppermint leaf.

We have taken the drawers out, cleaned them, and looked behind them. There is no peppermint anywhere in the room except the peppermints in the lozenge drawer, which we emptied for a whole winter in 2018 to rule them out. It made no difference.

Stay in The Apothecary (our accessible room, with a roll-in shower)

Smaller stories

Not every account fits a name. These are some of the shorter ones guests and staff have shared over the years. We pass them along as they were told to us.

• The chair by the fire. Guests tell us that the wingback chair nearest the hearth in the Undertaker's Parlor is sometimes turned toward the fire in the morning, though the bar staff swear they set it square at closing. The room was the Hollis & Vane viewing parlor for fifty-seven years. If someone is still sitting with a friend, we don't mind.
• The Great Hall hymn. Two separate wedding guests, years apart, reported hearing a few bars of a hymn on a reed organ in the empty Great Hall during the cleanup after a reception. The hall was the chapel from 1893 to 1946. We have no organ.
• The knock in the Captain's Quarters. Guests have reported three slow knocks on the inside of the paneled wall near the fireplace, usually around five in the morning. Captain Josiah Crane died in that room in 1789. He kept sailor's hours.
• The footsteps overhead. Several guests in the Garrets report hearing someone pacing the widow's walk above them late at night. The walk is locked after 10 pm. There is no one up there. There is, as far as we know, no one up there.
• The lantern. Neighbors on Mercy Lane have, on at least three occasions, called the front desk to say the lantern in the top window was lit during a power cut. Our records show the lantern was dark. Our records may be wrong.
• Ledger the cat. Our three-legged cat refuses to go above the second-floor landing. He will, however, sit at the bottom of the main stair and stare up at the landing for minutes at a time, purring.

At the top of the stair I stepped aside for a woman coming down. When I turned around to say excuse me, there was no one on the stair at all. My husband says I'd had two Widow's Lanterns. I'd had one.

— A guest, the Lady's Chamber, November 2019

Smelled peppermint so strongly at six in the morning I thought the kitchen was making something. They weren't.

— A guest, The Apothecary, March 2022

A few house rules for the residents

The ghosts, as far as we can tell, have one thing in common: they are polite. Abigail never comes inside the rooms when guests are in them. Tom has never touched anyone's luggage. Dr. Pell has never once tried to sell anyone laudanum. If you are nervous, ask Samuel at check-in and he'll happily put you in the Ledger Room, which has had exactly one report since 1997, and that was a guest who saw her own reflection in the window.

And if you are the opposite of nervous, please remember that the widow's walk is locked at 10 pm, quiet hours begin at the same time, and none of the residents has ever required a séance, a Ouija board or a guest in the hall with a phone flashlight at 3 am. They've been here longer than we have. We try to keep their hours.

Book the rooms in these stories

Widow's Walk Suite

King bed, sitting room and the private stair to the roof walk. The lantern burns one floor above you.

$349–$529 / night

See the room

The Lady's Chamber

Abigail's bedroom, with a queen canopy bed and lavender at the window.

$269–$399 / night

See the room

The Nursery

Queen bed and daybed under the eaves. The log is waiting for you. Children 10 and up.

$219–$329 / night

See the room

The Apothecary

Queen bed beside Dr. Pell's original drawers. Ground floor, roll-in shower.

$239–$359 / night

See the room

Book now Lantern Ghost Walk, nightly at 8

We can't guarantee an encounter, and we don't offer refunds for a quiet night. In October the haunted rooms book first; a 3-night minimum applies to any stay touching an October weekend.