The story
The Hawthorne Hotel opened in 1925 on Salem Common in Salem, Massachusetts, a city defined in popular imagination by the 1692 witch trials and today by an enormous Halloween season. A six-storey Federal Revival building raised by the local community as a civic hotel, it is named for Salem author Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novel The House of the Seven Gables drew on the town. The hotel is frequently included in lists of the most haunted hotels in the country, with stories attached to certain guest rooms and the upper floors, and guests and staff reporting items moving, lights and taps turning on and off, a figure occasionally glimpsed and a sense of presence. Some tales tie the activity loosely to the maritime history of the site or to the Common outside. These accounts should be presented as guest reports and local legend rather than proven phenomena. Current room and booking details should be confirmed from the official site before publishing.