In Brief
At Turner's Seafood at Lyceum Hall in Salem, Massachusetts, staff keep catching a woman in a long white gown in the mirrors and windows. They think she's Bridget Bishop — the first person hanged in the Salem witch trials, on land that was once her apple orchard.
The Full Story
Inside Turner's Seafood at Lyceum Hall in Salem, Massachusetts, the staff keep catching a woman in a long white gown. She shows up on the main staircase, and in the mirrors and the windows — a reflection of someone who isn't standing in the room. They think they know who she is, and the reason has nothing to do with the building.
It has to do with the dirt under it. The restaurant at 43 Church Street sits on land that was once the apple orchard of Bridget Bishop, the first person executed in the Salem witch trials. She was hanged the morning of June 10, 1692, convicted two days earlier on the testimony of neighbors who swore her specter had come to torment them in the night. The case against her was built mostly on that — people describing a version of Bridget Bishop that walked through walls and pressed down on them while they slept.
For a long time, none of that touched the place. The Salem Lyceum opened its hall here on January 19, 1831 and grew into the largest in the state, with around 1,200 members filing into a 600-seat amphitheater to be lectured at. Emerson spoke from that stage 32 times. So did Frederick Douglass and Thoreau. On February 12, 1877, Alexander Graham Bell stood there and placed the first long-distance phone call to his assistant 35 miles away in Boston, while 500 paying customers leaned in to listen. A century of all of it, and nobody ever reported a ghost.
The sightings only started after the hall became a restaurant in 1989. Glassware shatters on its own. Objects slide around the bar. Staff feel watched near the basement stairs, and report voices, shadow figures, cold spots. The woman, though, is the one they keep coming back to. A former employee told the History Channel about her: "When I came up the stairs and looked up, I saw another woman standing on the other staircase leading up to the loft." She believed it was Bishop, she said, still around, professing her innocence.
When Syfy's Ghost Hunters investigated, the team spent a long while on a mirror, since the woman seems to live in the reflections more than the rooms. The one thing they couldn't explain wasn't the mirror. It was a register receipt that printed itself with a time stamp and the words "Good Morning."
And there's the detail no one can place. Staff and guests keep smelling fresh apples inside, and out on the sidewalk too, where an orchard once grew and hasn't for more than three hundred years.
