Guest stories · November 18, 2024
A night in the Nursery
Every so often a guest writes us a letter that's too good to keep in Samuel's folder. This one came from Joanna, a librarian from western Pennsylvania who stayed in the Nursery for two nights in late October. We share it here, lightly edited, with her permission.
I should start by saying that I don't believe in ghosts. I want that on the record, because by the end of this you may think otherwise, and I'd like you to know that I came to the house with my skepticism packed as carefully as my good sweater.
I booked the Nursery for the same reason, I suspect, that most people do: the website called it the most haunted room in the house, and I wanted to see what a room did to earn that. I am a reference librarian. I spend my days telling people that the thing they read online is probably not true, and I thought it would be good for me, for once, to be the person standing in front of the unlikely thing, waiting to be convinced.
It was the last week of October, which I would not recommend for anyone who dislikes crowds. Salem in late October is a city in costume, wall to wall. I came up from Boston on the train with a woman dressed as a moth and a family of four dressed as the planets, and walking the nine minutes from the station to Mercy Lane felt like swimming upstream through a parade. Then I turned the corner, the noise dropped away, and there was the house: white clapboard, a picket fence, a lantern already lit in the top window though it was barely four o'clock. I stood on the sidewalk for longer than I'd like to admit.
The room
Samuel checked me in. He is exactly as he's described in every review: tall, unhurried, and in possession of more facts about the house than seems strictly possible. When he saw the room on my reservation he looked up and asked, very kindly, whether I'd like the story now or in the morning. I said now. He told me about the boarding-house years, about Mrs. Keane and her rent book, about the single line, "M. Farrell & boy Tom, mill, 3rd fl. back," and about the marbles the carpenters found behind the baseboard in 1997. He told me that there is no record of anything bad happening to Tom, and that he likes to think Tom grew up and lived a long life somewhere far from the mill. Then he handed me a key on a brass tag and said, "Most people sleep beautifully up there."
The Nursery is at the back of the third floor, up a stair that narrows as it goes, the way stairs in old houses do. It's a lovely room: low ceilings that slope down to the eaves, a queen bed with a white quilt, a daybed tucked under the window, wide floorboards painted a soft gray and worn pale where two hundred years of feet have crossed them. There's a small rocking horse in the corner, which I thought was a bit much until I learned it came from the apartments era and nobody has had the heart to move it. On the windowsill were three marbles. I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that guests had left them.
And on the nightstand was the log.
The log
The current volume is a clothbound notebook, the eleventh since 1997, and it is the most interesting thing I read all year, and I read for a living. I sat on the bed with my coat still on and read it for an hour. Most entries are what you'd expect: thank-yous, notes about breakfast (many, many notes about the johnnycakes), honeymooners, a man who proposed on the widow's walk and wanted it recorded somewhere. "Slept like a stone." "No marbles. Lovely room." "Nothing happened. Mildly disappointed. Will return."
But every few pages there is something else, and what struck me as a librarian was how consistent those entries are. Different handwriting, different years, different people who had no way of reading each other's accounts before they wrote their own, at least not until they opened the book. A rolling sound. Left to right, starting near the window. Out the door and down the hall. Between two and three in the morning. "Like one marble, rolling slowly, then faster." One woman drew a little map with an arrow. A man wrote, in very precise handwriting, that he had placed his phone on the floor to record and had captured "eleven seconds of something, and then the battery died, which it had never done before." I'm sure there is an ordinary explanation for that last one. I just don't know what it is.
I went down to dinner at The Ledger, had the cod with the benne-seed crust and a glass of something white that the server recommended, and told myself I was being ridiculous.
Two in the morning
I went to bed around eleven, after a nightcap in the Parlor (the Little Tom, which is non-alcoholic, cherry and lime, and which I ordered out of a kind of politeness). The house goes very quiet at night. Quiet hours start at ten, the city's roar doesn't reach Mercy Lane, and the only sounds were the radiator ticking as it cooled and the wind moving around the chimney. I read for a while and turned out the light.
I woke up at 2:17. I know because I looked at my phone, and I know why I looked at my phone: I had heard something, and I was already listening for it again before I was properly awake.
It came about a minute later. I've tried to describe it to friends since and the best I can do is this: it was the sound of a small, hard, round object rolling across a wooden floor. It started near the window, to my left, on the far side of the daybed. It rolled, unhurried, across the room toward the door. I heard it tap, very softly, against something, the baseboard perhaps. Then it went under the door and out into the hall, and I heard it pick up speed along the hall floor, which slopes a little toward the stair, until it stopped. It didn't fall down the stairs. It just stopped.
I lay very still. I would like to tell you that I leapt up with a flashlight and conducted a thorough investigation. What I actually did was lie there for about ten minutes with my heart going, thinking about radiators and settling floors and the thermal properties of two-hundred-year-old pine. Then I got up, turned on every light in the room, and looked.
The three marbles were still on the windowsill. There was nothing on the floor. I opened the door to the hall. The hall was dim and empty, with a nightlight at the top of the stair, and there was nothing on the floor there either. I stood in the doorway in my socks and, for reasons I can't fully defend, said "Goodnight, Tom," out loud, quite quietly. Then I went back to bed and, to my own surprise, slept until eight.
In the morning
At breakfast in the Lantern Room I had the johnnycakes, which are everything the log promised, and told Samuel. He listened to the whole thing without interrupting, nodded, and asked which direction the sound went. I told him: window to door, then down the hall toward the stair. He nodded again. He didn't say anything clever or spooky. He said, "That's the usual way," and refilled my coffee.
The second night, nothing happened at all. I lay awake until nearly three, half hoping, and heard only the radiator. In the morning I wrote my entry in the log. I'm not going to tell you what I wrote. You'll have to book the room.
I've had a few weeks now to think about it, and I still don't believe in ghosts, exactly. I believe that old houses make noises, that floors slope and settle, that I had read an hour's worth of very suggestive entries before bed, and that the mind is very good at filling in a story. All of that is true. It is also true that I heard what I heard, and that it went the way everybody else said it went, and that it did not frighten me so much as make me feel, oddly, that I'd been allowed in on something. A boy lived in that room once, with his father, a long time ago, and he had marbles, and he must have rolled them down that hall a thousand times, and the house remembers. That is the version I've settled on. As a librarian, I'd call it unverified. As a guest, I'd call it lovely.
Before I left I took a blue glass marble out of my coat pocket, one I'd bought at a shop downtown the first afternoon without quite admitting to myself why, and set it on the windowsill with the others.
— Joanna, the Nursery, October 2024
Thank you, Joanna. Your marble is still on the sill. If you'd like to stay in the Nursery, it books up fast in the fall; see the room page or read more about the house's ghosts. Children 10 and up are welcome in the main house.