Pickering Wharf

A waterfront shopping and dining district built on the old Salem docks where merchant ships once came and went. The maritime history runs deep here — fortunes made, ships lost, sailors who never came home.

The staff at Mercy Tavern hear them when the restaurant is empty. Men shouting. Fighting. The sounds come from below the floorboards, from tunnel entrances that have been sealed for decades.

Pickering Wharf sits on land that was once the center of Salem's maritime empire. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, over fifty wharves lined this waterfront where ships arrived laden with spices, tea, and silks from China, India, and the West Indies. The wharf is named for the Pickering family — patriarch John Pickering Jr. built Salem's oldest continuously occupied house around 1660, and his descendant Colonel Timothy Pickering served as George Washington's Secretary of State. After the Revolutionary War, as privateering surged and traders flooded in from across the globe, the Derby Street businesses transformed into an infamous red-light district with brothels and an underground tunnel network that reportedly ran for three miles beneath the streets.

These tunnels, constructed in the 1790s by Elias Hasket Derby Jr. using brick passageways with basement fireplaces as concealed entrances, served purposes far darker than smuggling goods. Sea captains used the passages to "shanghai" young men from brothels — kidnapping them through the tunnels to Derby Wharf, where they were forced onto outbound ships. Those who grew sick were reportedly thrown overboard. It is these spirits — the shanghaied sailors, the exploited, the forgotten dead — that visitors and staff say still inhabit the area.

Mercy Tavern at 148 Derby Street, formerly "In A Pig's Eye," occupies a 1700s building sitting directly atop the tunnel network. Beyond the shouting and fighting beneath the floors, patrons have seen ghostly sea captains who walk through walls, spectral sailors who look no older than eighteen, and sudden screams that silence an entire room with no source anyone can identify.

Paranormal investigator Ron Kolek of the New England Ghost Project examined tunnels discovered beneath a nearby shop during renovations. He reported finding 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 tunnel sections and found remarkable artifacts: an antique bank vault, old storefronts, wall murals, and abandoned living quarters with elevators — evidence that an entire underground community may have once existed beneath the wharf district. The discovery gave new weight to the theory that the voices staff hear below belong to people 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. A sea captain paces the waterfront docks at night. A woman in period dress, searching for a sailor husband who never came home, 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 — leans into its reputation. The Haunted Happenings Harbor Cruise departs from here with narrated tales of pirates, ghosts, and sea monsters, and Salem's ghost tours regularly feature the waterfront as one of the most active stretches in a city already famous for the supernatural.