Lyceum Hall

This building sits on the apple orchard of Bridget Bishop, the first person hanged in the Salem witch trials. Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone here for the first time in 1877. Today it's Turner's Seafood restaurant.

Nobody saw ghosts here during the Lyceum Hall days. Not when Emerson lectured (at least thirty times), not when Frederick Douglass spoke on "Assassination and Its Lessons" after Lincoln's death, not when John Quincy Adams presented "Faith and Government," not when Thoreau took the stage. It was only when the building became a restaurant that the sightings started — perhaps because a restaurant has more connection to Bridget Bishop's apple orchard than a lecture hall ever did.

Lyceum Hall stands at 43 Church Street, established in 1831 by the Salem Lyceum Society to provide "mutual education and rational entertainment." The Observer called Salem's Lyceum "the theatre of New England." Nathaniel Hawthorne never spoke here, but he served as the Lyceum's corresponding secretary from 1848 to 1849.

On February 12, 1877, something happened inside these walls that had nothing to do with ghosts: Alexander Graham Bell made the first public demonstration of the telephone, calling his assistant Thomas A. Watson at the Boston Globe eighteen miles away. A bronze plaque on the front of the building marks the occasion.

The building was constructed over an apple orchard once owned by Bridget Bishop, Salem's first "convicted witch," hanged at Proctor's Ledge on July 10, 1692. The evidence against her was spectral testimony and slander. Thrice-married and defiant of a woman's expected role in seventeenth-century society, she made an easy target.

Since the building became a restaurant, patrons and staff have reported a woman in a long white gown that drifts behind her as she walks. She appears in reflections throughout the building — in light fixtures, windows, any surface that might catch an image. Doors close and open on their own. Lights flicker without explanation. Boxes have been thrown down the stairs by something nobody could see.

The building has been featured on Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures. It is currently occupied by Turner's Seafood, which has built a reputation as one of the finest restaurants in Salem. The hauntings do not seem to deter diners. And Bridget Bishop, it seems, has never truly left the ground where her orchard once stood.