Pickering Wharf

A waterfront shopping and dining district built on the historic Salem waterfront where ships once carried goods from around the world. The area has a rich maritime history filled with tales of sailors, merchants, and tragedy.

Pickering Wharf sits on land that was once the beating heart of Salem's maritime empire, a waterfront that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hosted over fifty wharves where ships arrived laden with spices, tea, and silks from China, India, and the West Indies. Named after the Pickering family -- whose patriarch John Pickering Jr. built Salem's oldest continuously occupied house around 1660, and whose descendant Colonel Timothy Pickering served as George Washington's Secretary of State -- the area saw its character shift dramatically after the Revolutionary War. As privateering surged and an unending flood of traders arrived from across the globe, the stretch of Derby Street businesses transformed into an infamous red-light district, complete with brothels and a network of underground tunnels that reportedly ran for three miles beneath the streets.

These tunnels, constructed in the 1790s by Elias Hasket Derby Jr. using elaborate brick passageways with basement fireplaces as concealed entrances, served purposes far darker than smuggling goods. According to local accounts, sea captains used the passages to "shanghai" young men from brothels, forcibly kidnapping them through the tunnels to Derby Wharf where they were pressed into service aboard outbound ships. Those who grew sick or malnourished were reportedly cast overboard, their bodies lost to the harbor. It is these restless spirits -- the shanghaied sailors, the exploited workers, the forgotten dead -- that visitors and staff say still inhabit the Pickering Wharf area today.

The most concentrated paranormal activity centers on Mercy Tavern at 148 Derby Street, formerly known as "In A Pig's Eye," which occupies a building constructed in the 1700s directly atop the tunnel network. Staff report hearing disembodied voices when the establishment is completely empty of customers, and employees have described the sounds of men shouting and fighting emanating from beneath the floorboards, despite most tunnel entrances having been sealed for safety. Patrons over the years have claimed to see apparitions of sea captains who vanish into walls, spectral sailors appearing to be no older than eighteen, and sudden untraceable screams that silence an entire room.

Paranormal investigator Ron Kolek of the New England Ghost Project was called to examine tunnels discovered beneath a nearby shop during renovations, and according to reports he returned with what he described as convincing evidence of human remains, including indications of two entombed individuals he believed may have been runaway slaves. In 2010, a retired professor and a partner explored accessible sections of the remaining tunnel system and discovered remarkable artifacts: an antique bank vault, old storefronts, wall murals, and abandoned living quarters complete with elevators, suggesting that an entire underground community may have once existed beneath the wharf district. The discovery lent new weight to the theory that the voices staff hear below the floorboards belong to spirits of those who once lived and died in the passages.

Along the wharf itself, witnesses have reported ghostly figures resembling pirates emerging from the harbor waters, walking ashore, and dissolving into nothing. A spectral sea captain has been observed pacing the waterfront docks at night, and the figure of a woman in period dress, said to be searching for a sailor husband who never returned, has been spotted near the water's edge. The modern Pickering Wharf -- redeveloped in the 1970s by Salem Five Cents Savings Bank and opened in 1979 as a shopping and marina complex designed to evoke a nineteenth-century maritime village -- embraces its haunted reputation. The Haunted Happenings Harbor Cruise departs from the wharf offering narrated tales of local pirates, ghosts, and sea monsters, while Salem's ghost tours regularly include the waterfront district as a featured stop, citing it as one of the most actively haunted stretches in a city already famous for its supernatural history.