In Brief
At the Ropes Mansion in Salem, Massachusetts, a Ropes daughter stood too close to the fire in 1839, her dress caught, and she died of the burns. Staff and visitors say her screams still come from near the hearth. Most of them know the house as the one from Hocus Pocus.
The Full Story
The Ropes Mansion is a Georgian house at 318 Essex Street in Salem, Massachusetts, and the spirit people report most often there died by the fireplace. In 1839, Abigail Ropes — a daughter of the family, who never married — stood too close to a fire in the house. Her dress caught. The burns took roughly three weeks to kill her. Her obituary in the Salem Gazette called it "a distressing illness of three weeks caused by her clothes accidentally taking fire."
Staff and visitors say she's still near the hearth. They describe a woman's agonized screams by the fireplace, and a female figure — the one most often seen in the house. It's local tradition, not anything written down. But it's the story people keep coming back with, and it sits over a real death in a real room. For a long time the legend got her wrong, calling her the Judge's wife. She wasn't. She was a Ropes daughter who died unmarried, and the wife version doesn't survive a look at the record.
She isn't the only one reported here. The house had been bought in 1768 by Judge Nathaniel Ropes, a Harvard man who held loyalist sympathies. In March 1774, a mob came for it, throwing mud, sticks, and rocks at the windows to protest his ties to the crown. Ropes was already gravely ill with smallpox. He died the next day, the stress of the mob said to have helped it along.
The story goes that he stayed too. He's said to favor a couch in the front hall, where he sits a while and rests. Former caretakers Rick and Georgette Stafford claimed to photograph him there during an insurance appraisal — two disembodied hands resting on the couch, and nothing else. That image ran in Robert Cahill's book, "New England's Ghostly Haunts." "Here the judge sits for a spell on the front hall couch," Cahill wrote.
The mansion is older than either of them. It went up in the late 1720s for a merchant named Samuel Barnard, passed through three Ropes generations, and became Salem's first historic house museum. A heat gun stripping the exterior paint set it ablaze in 2009 and gutted the upper floors; it was rebuilt and reopened in 2015 with fifteen furnished rooms.
Most people who stop outside don't know any of this. They know it as Allison's house from Hocus Pocus, filmed there over one long day and night in the fall of 1992. The cameras caught the exterior. What people report is happening inside, by a fireplace, where a woman burned and never quite left.
