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Third floor · Queen + daybed

The Nursery

Yes, this is the one. People call it the most haunted room in the house; we call it the room with the best wallpaper. Most guests sleep straight through. A few hear marbles. Everyone writes in the log.

Book this room About the log

The Nursery: a queen bed and a daybed under wallpaper printed with small sailing ships, a glass-fronted shelf of old toys

Little Tom

From 1872 to 1888 the Crane house was a boarding house, one of dozens in Salem at the time. The ships that had made the house were gone; the mills and tanneries were hiring, and the landlady, a widow named Mrs. Honora Keane, let rooms by the week to sailors between voyages, mill hands and, on the third floor under the eaves, families. Her rent book (found in 1991 on top of a cupboard that had been nailed shut in the front parlor) has a single entry for 1879 to 1881 that reads, in full, "M. Farrell & boy Tom, mill, 3rd fl. back." The third-floor back room is this one.

That is all we know about the boy, and there is nothing in the record to suggest anything sad happened to him here; the Farrells simply moved on, as boarders did. The story that he rolled marbles down the third-floor hall when he was supposed to be asleep, came down through the boarding-house years and the funeral parlor years and was already old when the Fairweathers bought the house. It might have stayed a story if, in early 1997, a carpenter finishing this floor had not pried off the baseboard on the inside wall and found, in the space behind it, nine clay marbles, two glass ones with colored swirls, a jackstone and a bone button. They had rolled, it seems, through a gap in the floorboard a little wider than a marble and stayed there for more than a century. They are in a case in the Library now, where you can see them on your way to the Thursday history talk.

Guests have reported the sound of marbles rolling along the floor of this room and the hall outside it since before the inn opened. It is usually described as soft, unhurried and somewhere around two in the morning. Nobody has ever described it as unfriendly.

The Nursery log

When the Fairweathers opened the inn in 1997 they left a blank book on the desk in this room with a note asking guests to write down anything they noticed. They meant it half as a joke. Twenty-nine years later we are on volume eleven, and the first ten are on a shelf in the Library for anyone to read.

The entries are wonderful and mostly ordinary: who came for what anniversary, which breakfast was best, how the rain sounded on the roof. Some describe marbles. Some describe a child's laugh in the hall, or a blanket tugged at the corner, or nothing at all, with real indignation. One man in 2009 wrote two pages arguing that it was the radiator, and then, at the bottom, in different ink: "Not the radiator."

Please write in the log, whatever happened or didn't. Please don't take it home, tear pages out or write anything in it you wouldn't want the next guest, who may be fourteen, to read. Samuel reads every entry and sometimes quotes them at the ghost walk, without names.

The marbles found behind the baseboard in 1997, in their case in the Library.

What's in the room

The Nursery is a corner room at the back of the third floor, with two windows over the garden and one toward the carriage house. The queen bed has an iron frame painted white, with a quilt in faded reds and blues. Under the side window is a daybed, a proper twin mattress with bolsters, that takes a third guest or makes the best reading spot in the house. The wallpaper is a reproduction of an 1870s print of small sailing ships, chosen because a scrap of the original was found behind the same baseboard as the marbles.

A glass-fronted shelf holds a small collection of nineteenth-century toys: a tin whistle, a wooden top, a jointed doll, a set of alphabet blocks, a toy schooner. They stay behind the glass. The desk by the door holds a jar of pencils and a lamp; the log lives on the nightstand. The bathroom has a tub with a shower over it, a pedestal sink and a small window over the garden; it is cozy rather than large.

Room facts

Floor
Third floor, back corner of the 1748 house
Beds
Queen, plus a twin daybed
Sleeps
Up to 3 (everyone 10 or older)
Bath
Private, tub with shower
View
The garden and the carriage house
Stairs
Two flights by the main stair
Also
The Nursery log, toy shelf, night light, Wi-Fi, air conditioning, robes, tea tray

Rates

SeasonDatesFrom, per night
WinterJanuary – March$219
SpringApril – May$249
Summer & early fallJune – September$279
OctoberAll month$329
Late fall & holidaysNovember – December$259

Rates are for up to three guests. They vary by season and day of the week; taxes not included. Breakfast is included for everyone in the room.

Good to know

  • This is our most-requested room, and for October it is often booked a year or more ahead. Midweek in winter it is much easier to get, and much quieter, in every sense.
  • The floor slopes about two inches from the windows toward the hall. Put a marble down and it will roll to the door. Some guests try this. We would rather you didn't bring marbles; it confuses the log.
  • The third-floor hall is shared with the Widow's Walk Suite. Please keep voices low after 10 pm; ghost hunters have been known to set up in the hall at two in the morning, and we ask them, kindly, to go back to bed.
  • No recording equipment that needs to be left running outside your room, no "spirit boxes" in the hall, and no candles. Inside the room, do what you like within reason.
  • The room is cozy for three. With a third guest, luggage goes under the daybed.
  • If you get to two in the morning and decide you'd rather not be here, call the front desk. If another room is free we'll move you, with no fuss and no fee. It has happened four times in twelve years.

Heard nothing. Slept like a stone. Woke up and the pencil was on the floor and the log was open to a page from 2004 that said "did anyone else hear marbles." So, thanks for that.

— From the Nursery log, volume 10, October 2023