Murphy Funeral Home

A former funeral home that handled thousands of Salem's dead over the decades. People who visit say the place still feels like something lingered after all those years.

The sounds come after hours. Footsteps down empty hallways. Weeping in the chapel, as if mourners from some long-finished service never left. Doors opening and closing on their own, and then the temperature drops — sudden, localized, with no draft to explain it.

Murphy Funeral Home has served Salem's families since 1893, when Patrick W. Murphy founded one of the city's first funeral parlors on the site where the Hawthorne Hotel now stands — land that once held Bridget Bishop's apple orchard. Bishop was the first woman executed during the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. For over 130 years and five generations, the Murphy family has prepared thousands of Salem's dead for burial, and that volume of grief has left a mark on the buildings they have occupied.

The business moved through a succession of locations, each with its own connection to Salem's past. After operating at what became the Hawthorne Hotel site, the funeral home relocated to a building across from Immaculate Conception Church on Hawthorne Boulevard, then to the corner of North and Federal Streets in 1941. Federal Street has profound connections to the witch trials: it was once home to the Salem Witch Jail, where the accused — Sarah Good, Sarah Osbourne, and others — were chained in dark dungeons. Giles Corey may have been pressed to death nearby. The current facility at 85 Federal Street, built in 1965, sits within this corridor of suffering.

Staff members across the decades have reported seeing figures — adults and children — moving through the embalming rooms and viewing areas during the quiet hours of night. The strongest evidence for the haunting is the consistency of the accounts: different employees, different years, the same descriptions.

Paranormal investigators have theorized that funeral homes become repositories for concentrated grief — that the intense emotions of thousands of services embed themselves into the structure. At Murphy Funeral Home, where generation after generation of Salem families have said their final goodbyes, that accumulated weight may explain why some of the departed seem to linger.

The Murphy family, now in their fifth generation, maintains their commitment to dignified, compassionate care. Whether they are serving only the living is another question.