Old Salem Tavern

Stranger Samuel McCleary died here in 1831. His ghost gave the tavern keeper his fiancee's address. Washington slept upstairs in 1791.

A pale, sickly stranger staggered into the Salem Tavern on a September night in 1831. He gave his name as Samuel McCleary, would not say where he'd come from or why, and slipped into a coma before a local doctor could help him. He died a few days later. On September 6, 1831, the Moravians buried him in the strangers' row of God's Acre, the section of the Salem Graveyard set aside for outsiders who died in town.

Then the knocking started.

The Salem Tavern had gone up in 1784 to house the merchants and traders passing through the Moravian settlement. Non-Moravians couldn't stay in private homes, so the tavern was where the outside world came through the door. George Washington slept there two nights in 1791 during his Southern tour and later praised the community's orderliness. The building is still on South Main Street, still serving food, and still keeping its guest list longer than most.

After McCleary was buried, the tavern keeper started fielding complaints. Knocking inside the walls. Cold drafts in the middle of summer. Empty rooms that guests swore had a voice in them. The disturbances built until the keeper, legend has it, grabbed his rifle one night and climbed the stairs to have it out with whatever was up there. What he met instead, according to the story passed down through generations of Moravian storytellers, was McCleary himself, who gave him a name and an address and asked him to write. The address belonged to the dead man's fiancée in a distant Southern city, Charleston in some versions. Whoever she was, she arrived in Salem, collected his belongings, and laid flowers on his grave. The knocking stopped after that night.

McCleary is the tavern's best-known ghost, but he is not its only dead man. The Moravian archive is ruthless about detail, and it tells us two more stories. In August 1780, a Continental Army soldier named William Brown was left at the tavern dying of gangrene. His wound was so putrid that staff had to move him out to the smoke-house because the smell was unbearable. He died there on August 17. In 1857, German-born jeweler Augustus Staub rented a room at the Salem Hotel and used it to conduct a chemistry experiment. The experiment exploded. His face, hands, and legs were all burned so badly he lived only three hours.

Three documented deaths in one building. The Moravians, to their credit, wrote all of it down.

Today the tavern is a restaurant inside the Old Salem Museums and Gardens district. Staff and diners describe muffled voices in empty rooms, doorknobs turning on their own, and figures that vanish the moment a head turns. Whether it's McCleary or Brown or Staub or someone else from the two and a half centuries of travelers who came through the door, the tavern is one of the few haunted buildings in the South where the ghost's death has a date, a name, and an entry in a 240-year-old church record.