Ghosts of Salem: Haunts of the Witch City

INTRODUCTION

The dead love Salem. Known for its annual Halloween Haunted Happenings gathering, it’s no surprise that the historic Massachusetts seaport is considered to be one of New England’s most haunted destinations. With city officials emphasizing its not-so-dark past, tourists from all over the world seem to focus on the wicked intrigue surrounding the 1692 witch trials.

As far as the paranormal, the city is considered to be hallowed ground.

Originally called Naumkeag, Salem means peace. However, as its historical legacy dictates, the city was anything but peaceful during the late seventeenth century. In fact, when landowner Giles Corey was pressed to death over a two-day period, he allegedly cursed the sheriff and the city. Over the years, his specter has allegedly been spotted preceding disasters in Salem, including the fire that destroyed most of the downtown area in June 1914. Based on my research, a majority of the hauntings conjured up in Salem over the city’s tumultuous three-hundred-year-old history have ties to disaster, specifically the one-hundred-year-old fire that virtually annihilated the once prosperous North Shore seaport.

Cursed? Salem is full of secrets.

It also suffers from a bit of an identity disorder. After several years giving historical-based ghost tours and researching the finale of my Ghosts of book trilogy, I came to realize that Salem somehow manages to embrace its dark, witch trials past while simultaneously shutting a door on it.

The city’s dualities are at war: Light versus dark. Truth versus fiction. Witches versus zombies. On the one hand, there seems to be a push to pretend that Salem’s maritime past was a golden age, but in actual fact, its history is soaked in blood. There’s also an intense denial associated with the Witch City brand.

All aboard? Ghostly image from 1910 of the Boston and Maine Railroad depot formerly in Salem’s Riley Plaza. Four years later, the Great Fire of 1914 virtually annihilated the North Shore city destroying an estimated 1,376 buildings and possibly leaving what paranormal investigators call an aura of disaster. Courtesy of the Detroit Publishing Co.

Tourists favor it. Locals don’t.

When it comes to the spirit of Salem, non-witch businesses try desperately to showcase the city’s sleepy, New England charm, as if to suggest that yes, Salem is just like any other North Shore village. Historically, it’s a hidden gem. However, if you spend more than a few hours digging beneath its architecturally stunning exterior and touristy maritime haunts, the city is anything but normal.

Salem is a city full of witches and ghosts.

My first experiences in Salem go back a few decades to the early ’90s. Of course, I visited every Halloween during college. I loved the specters and spectacles. I walked around, usually with a group of friends, and returned with a few spooky stories to share with the others at the dormitory. It was the place to go every October.

After returning to Boston in 2007, I started visiting Salem throughout the year. Its spirits called me. And I found myself secretly hopping on the train if I needed to recharge my batteries. There’s an inexplicable energy in the city. Some say it’s hidden beneath the hard, Puritan soil. It’s magical at first. It’s only if you stay too long that the spark short-circuits.

As a recovering X-Files junkie, I’ve always been more of an Agent Scully than David Duchovny’s Mulder. However, after a string of unexplained paranormal encounters over the years, I must admit that I’ve become more of a believer than a skeptic. However, I’ve approached Ghosts of Salem as a journalist and left no gravestone unturned when it came to digging up the historical dirt on each so-called haunting.

I’ve spent years investigating alleged accounts of paranormal activity at sites all over New England. I’ve collected a slew of reports from these supposedly haunted locales, and the mission was to give readers a contemporary take on Salem’s bevy of site-specific legends. Ghosts of Salem is, in essence, a supernatural-themed travel guide written with a historical lens. Based on my research, the city is a hotbed of paranormal activity.

Incidentally, I have first-hand experience with many of the haunts in the book. My first ghost tour experience in Salem was an impromptu trek on Mollie Stewart’s Spellbound tour in 2010. I remember peeking into the windows of the allegedly haunted Joshua Ward House, convinced I saw a spirit looking out of the second-floor window. It turned out to be a bust of George Washington. Soon after writing my first book, Ghosts of Boston, I signed on to give historical-based ghost tours of my own in a city that both excited and terrified me. I let Salem’s spirits guide me. I had several odd experiences outside of Lyceum Hall, which was believed to be Bridget Bishop’s orchard. An apple mysteriously rolled out of nowhere in the alley behind what is now Turner’s Seafood. I looked up. No one was there. I accepted it as a peace offering from Bishop, who later became one of my favorite characters on the tour.

As a journalist, there was always a shocking headline to be found parading down Essex Street. For the summer, I worked with a haunted attraction on Essex Street called Witch Mansion. There, I met a few of the characters featured in this book, including Sarah-Frankie Carter, a fellow tour guide who claimed to have a face-to-face encounter with the ghost of Giles Corey at Howard Street Cemetery. We talked a lot about the spirits and curses associated with Salem. Some say the only real curse in Salem is that once you live here, you never leave, Carter joked.

In 2011, the haunted house on Essex Street was caught in the middle of a well-publicized feud that apparently pitted zombies against witches. According to several reports, the Witch Mansion’s competitor, the Nightmare Factory, unleashed a smear campaign claiming that one of its wayward zombies was deliberately tripped up while handing out flyers. My belief is this is a false report, said my future boss Ken Mendozzi. No ‘bumping’ ever occurred…Witches will not be bullied by zombies.

Witch Mansion is next-door to Omen, a popular witch shop housing an altar to the dead. There’s a video online from a Witch Mansion surveillance camera showing what looks like an unseen force knocking over a vampire figure in the 186 Essex St. lobby. We had an employee walk out after seeing that video, said John Denley, the mastermind behind the haunts at Witch Mansion. Yes, one of Salem’s haunted houses is also allegedly haunted. We’re in Salem, Denley mused. Of course the space is haunted.

My most profound encounter in Salem was at the Old Burying Point on Charter Street. I spotted a full-bodied apparition of a lady in white coming from what I learned later was the gravestone of Giles Corey’s second wife, Mary. It’s my theory that Mary Corey’s residual energy is looking for her husband. She’s heading oddly toward the very spot where the stubborn but determined old man was crushed to death. Yes, love does exist in the afterlife.

The Samuel Pickman House, which is eerily perched on the corner of Charter and Liberty Streets, became a regular point of interest. One guest on my tour shot a photo from the window that continues to haunt me. The misty, white image looks like a man. Perhaps it’s the demonic entity that ghost lore enthusiasts claim possessed the man who savagely murdered his wife and daughter there.

Contrary to popular belief, the Giles Corey plaque at the Salem Witch Trials Memorial next to the Charter Street Cemetery doesn’t contain the remains of the twenty victims of the 1692 hysteria. Corey was pressed to death over a two-day period and allegedly cursed the sheriff and the city. The location of his remains is unknown. Photo by Sam Baltrusis.

I’ve also seen what looked like a little girl, who was allegedly abandoned and died, peeking out of the Pickman House window. I remember shivering in the beauty and the madness of the moment. Somehow, I felt her pain.

As the season progressed, the tenor of my ghost tour turned progressively dark. I have been pushed, scratched and tapped by the ghosts of Salem. Some of the spirits were harmless. Others were not.

After Halloween, the city becomes a literal ghost town, and it was during the off-season when my team members did our primary research. My assistant and I spent hours at the Salem Public Library, specifically in the room dedicated to the city’s local history. Oddly, the late, great author Robert Ellis Cahill’s name kept popping up along the way. Jennifer Strom, the librarian behind Salem Links & Lore, used the Salem ghost lore expert as her Ancestry.com example at the library workshop. Cahill is one of those quirky, local characters I wish I had the honor to meet. After reading his books, I feel like I have.

Apparently, it’s common for Salemites to secretly believe in ghosts. Susan Szpak, the librarian specializing in the city’s local history, talked about a typical interaction with people researching their house’s history. Most people who do research on their home in Salem think their house is haunted, she said without hesitation. I tell them, ‘Based on the things I hear, I wouldn’t be surprised that it is haunted.’ She talked about a few eerie encounters at the former John Bertram mansion, the library’s historic space, including librarians feeling like there is a presence in the room. Mr. Bertram was a great man, so I think he’s just checking in to see how things are going in his former home, she says with a laugh.

While writing Ghosts of Salem, I’ve uncovered some historical inaccuracies tied to a few of the city’s ghostly legends. For example, the spirit allegedly haunting Ropes Mansion, Abigail, wasn’t married to Judge Nathaniel Ropes, as is commonly believed. However, she did die tragically from burns received when carrying coals from one room to another. Yes, sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. Many legends—like William Austin’s Peter Rugg literary character, who stubbornly rode his horse into a thunderstorm in 1770 and was cursed to drive his carriage until the end of time—didn’t exist. However, people over the years have reportedly spotted the ghostly man with his daughter by his side frantically trying to make the