In Brief
At the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, visitors report a shadow climbing a hidden staircase they believe sheltered fugitives in 1692. The stairs were built two centuries later, for a museum. The house's real ghost predates them all.
The Full Story
At the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, people report a shadow on the secret staircase. It moves up and down a hidden stairwell off the dining room, reached through a false-backed closet, and the story visitors tell is that the stairs once hid someone fleeing the 1692 witch trials.
They didn't. The staircase was built in 1908.
The house itself is real and old. The earliest section went up in 1668 for John Turner, a Salem sea captain who partly funded it selling fish to slave plantations in the West Indies. It passed through three generations of Turners, then to the mariner Samuel Ingersoll, and then to his daughter Susanna. Hawthorne, her younger cousin, visited her here, and her stories and her house became his 1851 novel.
Hawthorne had his own reason to think about 1692. He was the great-great-grandson of Judge John Hathorne, the chief examiner of the accused during the trials, who unlike many around him never apologized for it. The author added a "w" to the family name. Of his ancestor he wrote that the judge "made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches." The witch-trials shadow runs through this house by blood, not through a staircase.
But the novel has no secret staircase. Neither did the building. When the philanthropist Caroline Emmerton bought the place in 1908 and restored it as a museum, her architect added the hidden stairway because Emmerton felt the story needed one. "We feel the absence of the secret staircase," she wrote, "just as we feel the absence of a bit of a picture-puzzle that has been lost." She invented it. The fugitive legend grew up around an invention barely a century old, and the shadow people see is climbing stairs that postdate the trials by more than two hundred years.
The house's own ghost was here long before any of it. Susanna Ingersoll was born in this house in 1784 and died in it in 1858. She never married, owned more than 60 properties around Salem, and Hawthorne and his friends called her "the Dutchess" over games of whist. She is the figure visitors report most: a woman walking the halls room to room as if doing chores, then watching from the upper windows before she dissolves.
There is a phantom boy too, reported in the attic and gardens, footsteps and giggling upstairs. No one knows who he is. But Susanna they know. She is the one person on record who was born in this house and died in it, and by every account, she stayed.
