In Brief
Room 325 at the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Massachusetts is the room guests request when they want a haunting. They wake in the dark to a baby crying close by, frantic, when there is no baby. Faucets run on their own. The sheets come off.
The Full Story
Room 325 at the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Massachusetts is the most-requested room in the building, and people request it on purpose. They want the haunting. The story goes that they get it: guests wake in the dark to a baby crying somewhere inside the room, close and frantic, when there is no baby anywhere near them. Faucets turn on by themselves. Lights snap on and off. The sheets get pulled off the bed. One houseman, the staff tell it, came back to that part of the floor mid-shift to find his work setup rearranged, and wouldn't take the assignment again.
Nobody can tell you why. No death, no fire, no tragedy is tied to that room or that crying. The "why" of it simply isn't written down anywhere.
The hotel opened on July 23, 1925, a six-story Colonial Revival building on Washington Square West, named for the Salem novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. It went up on ground the Salem Marine Society sold on one condition: that the captains keep a meeting space inside. So they built one on the roof, a replica of the captain's cabin of an East India barque called the Taria Topan, where the society, founded in 1766, still meets. Staff say the captains never fully left it. A ship's wheel on display in the restaurant is reported to turn on its own, as if by the hands of a long-dead seafarer.
Six floors up, around Room 612, guests report a woman in a long white dress who walks the hall and pauses outside the door. Some in that room describe an unseen presence in the room with them, an icy hand laid on the skin, their hair tugged from behind.
She's popularly tied to Bridget Bishop, the first person hanged in the 1692 witch trials, who owned an apple orchard said to have stood here. That part is the legend the hotel half-tells about itself. Historians place Bishop's actual orchard about half a mile off, near what is now the Lyceum, and the hotel's own managers refute the rumor and say they don't know how it started. They guess the mix-up came off a paranormal TV show.
Which leaves one detail with no easy home. Guests keep reporting a smell of apples drifting through the halls and rooms, when no apples are served, in a building where the orchard everyone blames was never really there at all.
