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October 2025 is nearly full: a few midweek rooms remain. Planning an October visit?

Third floor · King suite

Widow's Walk Suite

A bedroom, a sitting room and fourteen narrow steps to the railed platform on the roof, where Abigail Crane watched for a ship that never came home. The sunsets are excellent. The company is occasional.

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The view from the widow's walk at sunset: slate rooftops and chimneys running down to the harbor, masts in the distance

Nathaniel's wing

By 1794 the Revolution was over, the old British trade rules were gone, and Salem's ships were sailing for places Josiah Crane had only heard about: Canton, Bombay, the Isle of France, the pepper coast of Sumatra. His son Nathaniel came home from those voyages a rich man and did what rich Salem captains did. He built. The rear wing of the house is his, and it could hardly be more different from his father's front rooms. The ceilings rise to nearly eleven feet. The windows are six-over-six, with slender muntins and big panes of glass that announced, to anyone walking past, that this family could afford glass. The plaster cornices are run with tiny beads and swags, and the mantel in the bedroom is carved with an urn and garlands in the manner of the Salem carvers of the day.

On top of it all Nathaniel put a railed platform, reached by a steep stair from what is now the suite's sitting room. Architectural historians will tell you, correctly, that these roof walks were mostly for getting at the chimney in a fire and for watching the harbor for one's own cargo. Nathaniel built ours, the story goes, for his wife Abigail, who liked to see the ships come in. At the end of 1800 he sailed for Sumatra on a pepper voyage, and in 1801 he was lost off that coast. Whatever the walk was really for, Abigail used it to watch the sea, every evening, for eleven years.

About the Lady in Gray

Guests have been describing the same woman for longer than the house has been an inn: a slight figure in a gray dress, standing at the east rail of the walk, facing the harbor, usually at dusk. She is also reported on the main stair, and in the Lady's Chamber below, which was her bedroom. People mention a smell of lavender and of a candle just blown out. Nobody has ever described her as frightening; the word that comes up most is "patient."

We can't promise you'll see her. Samuel Teague, our head innkeeper, has worked here since 2009 and says he has seen her twice, both times on evenings he was not looking. Most guests in this suite see a very good sunset and sleep straight through. A few leave notes in the guest book about the scent of lavender on the stair. Both are welcome.

The house at dusk with one lantern lit in a top window and a faint gray figure on the widow's walk
The house at dusk. We are not saying that is her. We are not saying it isn't.

What's in the suite

The bedroom has a king bed with a pale painted headboard, a pair of upholstered chairs by the carved mantel (the fireplace is decorative; the hearth holds a basket of birch logs and a lot of candles that run on batteries), and two tall windows looking north over the garden and the carriage house roof. Through a wide doorway, the sitting room has a sofa, a writing table, a small bookcase of maritime history, a bar cart with glasses and a bottle of the house's own cordial, and the door to the walk stair, painted the same gray as the trim so that it nearly disappears.

The bathroom is the largest in the main house: a deep soaking tub under the window, a separate glass shower, double sinks and a heated towel rail. There is a second, smaller water closet off the sitting room, which guests on long October weekends tell us they appreciate more than anything else in the suite.

The suite is also included in our Elopement at Dusk package, so now and then a couple married on the walk at sunset spends their wedding night here. If you are staying in the suite on an evening we have an elopement booked, we will tell you in advance and the walk will be theirs for about an hour.

Suite facts

Floor
Third floor of the 1794 Federal wing
Bed
King, plus a separate sitting room
Sleeps
2 adults (the sofa is not a sofa bed)
Bath
Private: soaking tub, separate shower, double sinks; second water closet
Fireplace
Carved Federal mantel, decorative only
View
Garden and carriage house from the bedroom; the harbor and rooftops from the walk
Stairs
Two flights to the suite, then fourteen steep steps to the walk
Also
Wi-Fi, air conditioning, robes, tea tray, bar cart, binoculars, blankets for the walk

Rates

SeasonDatesFrom, per night
WinterJanuary – March$349
SpringApril – May$399
Summer & early fallJune – September$449
OctoberAll month$529
Late fall & holidaysNovember – December$409

Rates vary by season and day of the week. Taxes not included. Breakfast included. Weekend stays 2 nights minimum; any stay touching an October weekend, 3 nights. The suite is usually booked a year ahead for October.

Good to know

  • The walk stair is closer to a ship's ladder than a staircase: fourteen steps, steep, with a rope rail on one side. Please use it facing the steps on the way down, and not after a second Widow's Lantern from the bar.
  • The walk is open to suite guests from sunrise until 10:00 pm, when quiet hours begin. We latch the roof hatch in high wind, lightning or ice, which in practice means it is often closed from December into March. The suite is still lovely then; it just has a very nice door you can't open.
  • No candles, lanterns or anything with a flame on the walk, please. Abigail's lantern was a real one, and this is a wooden house that has survived 278 years by being careful.
  • Children under 10 cannot stay in the main house, and nobody under 16 may go up to the walk.
  • Sound carries up the walk stair from the garden. On summer Saturdays, when there's a wedding in the tent, the music stops at 10:00 pm by city rule.

We went up every evening with a blanket and watched the light go out over the harbor. On the last night the whole stair smelled of lavender, and neither of us had any. I am a pharmacist and I don't believe in anything, and I am still thinking about it.

— A guest, the Widow's Walk Suite, September 2023