Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (2016)

I

THE UNHOMELY

houses and mansions

My wife and I began searching for a house in 2008, precisely when the real estate market was crashing, just as those first waves of foreclosures and short sales were hitting the market. We were finally able to afford houses whose prices had been ridiculously inflated only six months earlier. Occasionally we went to those open houses with smiling real estate agents and bowls of candy, where owners had recently landscaped or repainted, but we could never seriously consider any of these homes. The ones that mattered had lockboxes, were abandoned or in the process of being abandoned—houses that reeked of disrepair and despair.

We spent the summer touring nearly every distressed property in the neighborhoods east of Hollywood—Los Feliz, Silverlake, Echo Park, Atwater Village—looking for a home. There were, of course, the hoarding houses: homes we couldn’t enter because of the high stacks of magazines and newspapers or other safety hazards, where we could only peer in through the windows. Far more common, though, were the malformed do-it-yourself homes. Los Angeles is a zoning no-man’s-land, host to thousands of unpermitted additions and modifications, which means each house on a block of once-identical residences will look different. Dozens of bungalows in East Hollywood were built as seven-hundred-square-foot cottages, and, over time, extra bedrooms were added, garages converted, crawl spaces enlarged into dens—often without rhyme or reason or any real sense of purpose. Living rooms were constructed behind existing bedrooms, so an exterior window would look from one room to the next; thousand-square-foot homes somehow contained four or five bedrooms, each one barely more than a closet cut from some once-sane layout; bathrooms sat in the middle of kitchens; bedrooms without windows were built into the sides of hills; doors on a second floor opened into empty air. The effect was vertiginous: you walked into a room and felt a sense of unease before you could say why.

Throughout that stifling summer, we walked into home after home that had been closed against the light but bristled with claustrophobic air. We took to nicknaming these places: the Flea House, after whatever it was that bit our agent; the Burn House, with its charred patches of wall and blackened carpets; Tony’s House, after the name on the novelty license plate stuck to a bedroom door, a detail particularly creepy amid the otherwise empty gloom of the house, as though Danny Torrance would big-wheel down the hall at any moment.

It seemed impossible that anyone had called these places home. I found myself thinking of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and her description of the eponymous haunted mansion:

This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a place fit for people or for love or for hope.

These homes, too, seemed without concession to humanity, but in a sense they were just the opposite. These were not the caprices of strange, wealthy men whose hubris unleashed a holy terror. Instead, they were the products of dozens of lower-class families trying to make their homes a little bigger, a little more livable, creating unworkable labyrinths out of necessity.

The feeling of moving through these spaces—particularly as we were visiting seven or eight of them in an afternoon—was indescribable. A sense of wrongness pervaded so many of these homes. In the end, the only word that seems useful for talking about the houses is one made famous by Sigmund Freud: unheimlich. A German word, it means literally “unhomely” or “not of the home,” “unfamiliar,” “eerie and ghostly”—more idiomatically translated into English simply as “uncanny.”

Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny” is among the stranger of his well-known works. He doesn’t really know where to begin with the uncanny—when it comes to the feeling, he admits, “the present writer must plead guilty to exceptional obtuseness.” One wonders why he’s bothering with the subject at all. Mostly he wants to contradict another psychoanalyst, Ernst Jentsch, who first attempted to define the uncanny in 1906, thirteen years before Freud’s essay. Jentsch posits the sensation of the uncanny as stemming from a kind of cognitive uncertainty, where one is unclear as to whether an object or figure or person is inanimate or somehow alive.

Freud, unconvinced by Jentsch, begins by surveying dictionaries, copying out as many different definitions of “uncanny” as he can. What finally catches his attention is the fact that heimlich, in addition to meaning “homey” or “familiar,” can also mean “hidden, locked away.” He finally seizes on Friedrich Schelling’s definition of unheimlich: “Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden, and has come into the open.” This formulation works for Freud—he is, of course, interested in repression—but it doesn’t work as well for haunted houses. What, after all, is being repressed? Jentsch’s notion, of a confusion between the living and the inanimate, might work better—think of the anthropomorphized façade of The Amityville Horror’s house. With a haunted house, the question is: to what extent is the house itself alive, and to what extent is it inanimate?

But, really, it’s the most basic definition of “uncanny”—“unhomely”—that matters. The haunted house is precisely that which should be homey, should be welcoming—the place one lives inside—but which has somehow become emptied out of its true function. It is terrifying because it has lost its purpose yet stubbornly persists. Neither alive nor dead but undead, the haunted house is the thing in between.

There are haunted structures of all kinds: churches, hotels, toy stores. There are haunted bridges and haunted alleyways, haunted parks and haunted parking lots. But in the United States, the most common—the most primal—haunted place is a house. Home ownership has always been intertwined with the American dream; we have magnified this simple property decision in part because it represents safety and security. The haunted house is a violation of this comfort, the American dream gone horribly wrong.

Even if its very construction isn’t distorted, as with the homes in East Hollywood, a house can still attract ghosts, still attract stories. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard offers a succinct and plausible nonsupernatural explanation for why the structure in which we live can itself feel alive. Our houses are the places where we spend the most time, and they are, as he suggests, the places where we do the most dreaming. More than just a place of shelter, a place of comfort, or a place of privacy, the house for Bachelard “shelters daydreaming” and “allows one to dream in peace.” The more elaborate a house, the more spaces it has, the more evocative it is for our dream life: “If it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated.” It is in the corners and crevices—the places just off the main traffic corridors—that our dreams, like dust bunnies and forgotten toys, accumulate and our imagination begins to run wild. “Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which to hide ourselves,” Bachelard notes, “is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.” Live in a house for any length of time, and you make it your own memory palace.

Such places in which we’re actively dreaming, he suggests, become so associated with those dreams that the building itself seems to vibrate psychically: “The places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.” As Vladimir Nabokov once put it, “When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object.” Just by lingering in a house, you could say you end up sinking into its history.

Houses seem to live, in other words, because we spend so much time living in them. Buried inside the word “inhabit” is habit: a way of being, the patterns and repetitions of life. One’s habits and one’s surroundings are engaged in a constantly changing, ever subtle dance. Houses are designed with certain patterns of behavior in mind, even though those patterns sometimes change faster than architecture can keep up. And of course everyone will use a house differently, leave different patterns of wear. I spent my childhood in homes that were built as part of subdivisions—my house replicated four or five times over on the same street. Visiting one of these doppelgängers was always a vertiginous experience: everything the same and yet totally different. Cool blue walls instead of white, a nook that held a flower vase instead of a bookshelf, a room used as a library instead of a bedroom—an utterly unfamiliar landscape that I could, nonetheless, walk through blindfolded.

This is another way to make sense of that haunting sensation: to walk into a home and recognize, even if you can’t name the feeling, that someone else not only lived here but adopted patterns of life completely alien to your own, whose daily ritual and marks of wear will never match your own. Haunted houses are the repository of the dreams dreamt inside them—both our dreams and those of previous occupants. This can make even the most simple of houses feel, at times, alive.

Houses outlast us; they contain more than one generation’s worth of stories. They can become, in turn, repositories of family histories, for both good and ill. And though ghosts may be specific to the places they haunt, they can reflect larger preoccupations and concerns of their time and place, echoing the anxieties of a community and its people. One can treat an old house like a geologist’s core sample—a physical representation of time—accruing meaning and history through the years of successive owners. To own an old home means inhabiting not just your own imagination but the imaginations of all those who’ve lived there before you.

The houses in this section have earned their reputations in no small part by combining all these various aspects: an odd construction, an unnamable feeling, and an anxiety made physical through a building whose past isn’t entirely known or understood. Like the Merchant’s House Museum in New York City, they’ve inverted not only the notion of what a home represents but also the very architecture of the house. In the process, they’ve become puzzles that seem to demand some kind of response, riddles for which there is no obvious answer.

CHAPTER ONE

THE SECRET STAIRCASE

Salem, MA

Houses of any antiquity in New England,” Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, “are so invariably possessed with spirits, that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to.” It’s true: you could spend a good portion of your life cataloging the haunted houses of New England: the Captain Fairfield Inn of Kennebunkport, Maine, whose original owner, Captain James Fairfield, wanders the basement; Captain Grant’s, a B&B in Prescott, Connecticut, haunted by colonial spirits; the Sylvester Knowlton Pierce mansion in Gardner, Massachusetts, haunted by Pierce, his family, and a murdered prostitute from the years when the house was used as a brothel; and of course the house Lizzie Borden occupied in Fall River, Massachusetts. The countless ghosts that linger in the stately mansions up and down New England only multiply.

Despite this glut of spirits, no place in New England has a greater reputation for being haunted than Salem, Massachusetts. Home to the most famous miscarriages of justice in America’s early history, Salem hosts the spirits of the nineteen men and women executed during the witchcraft trials of 1692. Strange fax machine messages come through in the office building that now stands on the old courthouse grounds. In the apartment complex built on the old Salem jail, toasters jump up and down without warning. And in the alleyway behind the Turner Seafood Restaurant—on land that many believe once belonged to Bridget Bishop, the first person executed during the witch trials—a tree drips blood.

Here in Salem, amid all these ghosts stands the House of the Seven Gables, one of the most well-known haunted houses in the country—a first among equals. Set at the end of Turner Street, looking out over Salem Bay, the house doesn’t stand out; it’s no taller than its neighbors, and without the signage and the parking lot you might miss it altogether. Its distinguishing feature is its color: it’s painted entirely in matte black, as though it wants to suck all the available light into itself. Its name, curiously, is a bit of a misnomer. The house does not actually have seven gables; it has nine, though not all of them are original. This architectural confusion, you could say, is just one of the many strange aspects of the house—a house that defies description down to its very name.

The house started small, built by John Turner, a wealthy sea captain and merchant, in 1668. Through the years and generations, the building was enlarged several times, then pared back, as it passed to Turner’s son and then his grandson John Turner III. Bankruptcy forced John III to sell the property, and it came into the hands of Susanna Ingersoll, who, among other things, was the aunt of Nathaniel Hawthorne. By the time Ingersoll bought it, the house had apparently already been nicknamed the House of Seven Gables, though by then it had, at best, four gables. The house, during the years, has gone through so many various additions and renovations, such that its shape, at least up until the early twentieth century, was never truly stable.

It was Ingersoll who first encouraged a young Hawthorne to write about Salem when he complained to her about a lack of subject matter. “Oh there are subjects enough,” she replied and, gesturing to an old piece of furniture by the fireplace, went on: “Write about that old chair. You can make a biographical sketch of each old Puritan who became in succession an owner of the chair.” Ingersoll’s prompting led Hawthorne to one of his first writing projects, a children’s book in 1840 called Grandfather’s Chair. A decade later, riding high on the sudden success of his novel The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne returned to Ingersoll for further inspiration. This time he turned to her house.

At the center of Hawthorne’s gothic romance The House of the Seven Gables is a house with a buried past that continues to affect its modern-day inhabitants, a house that seems somehow evil in ways we’re hard-pressed to define. Its construction isn’t quite right: it’s “a rusty wooden house,” its seven gables facing toward various points of the compass, with a “huge, clustered chimney in the midst.” What’s more, the book’s narrator tells us, it’s curiously anthropomorphic: “The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within.”

It’s true that the house, which still offers regular tours, can feel unsettling. Walking through its rooms you feel the discomfiting effects of its low roofs, its tight rooms, and its misshapen layout. The centuries-old wood timbers seem, perhaps, to bow and breathe. Convincing yourself the house is alive is not terribly difficult.

For his novel, Hawthorne concocted a backstory to explain his fictional house’s unsettling presence. The house’s origins are tainted. It was built on fertile land owned by a man named Matthew Maule. The avaricious Colonel Pyncheon, desiring the property, fabricates an accusation of witchcraft against Maule, which results in Maule’s execution and allows Pyncheon to easily acquire the land, on which he builds his massive, sprawling mansion.

But Pyncheon’s house, despite its splendor, is cursed, and the night the colonel hosts a gala to celebrate its completion, he’s found dead at his desk, blood dripping from his mouth. Nor is the colonel the only ghost of the mansion; his great-granddaughter Alice, who had “grown thin and white, and gradually faded out of the world,” has come to haunt the House of the Seven Gables: “a great many times,—especially when one of the Pyncheons was to die,—she had been heard playing sadly and beautifully on the harpsichord.” In this landscape of greed and calamity, ancestral curses and mournful ghosts, Hawthorne turned the oddly built house on Turner Street into a rival of the abandoned castles of Europe’s gothic novels.

Though Ingersoll’s own house lacked the melodramatic origins of Hawthorne’s invention, ghost stories have become so firmly associated with the house that, as one historian suggests, they “form a patina, a part of the thing itself.” While the management doesn’t go to great lengths to play up its haunted past—there are no ghost tours, and the tour guides seem uneasy if you press them for stories—its odd construction and subsequent reputation have nonetheless attracted numerous stories, usually involving Susan Ingersoll or Hawthorne. One former visitor to the house sent a photo to the Web site graveaddiction.com, which collects paranormal testimonies, where supposedly in one of the upper windows you can see “what appears to be a teenage girl peering back out! No, the closer you magnify it the more it becomes apparent that it is an older woman complete with sunken eyes and hair!” (I’ve looked and can’t see anything myself.) There is another photo that has become particularly famous, of the house’s exterior fence, in which supposedly the ghost of Hawthorne’s son, Julian, can be seen—though everyone I’ve shown the image to agrees it’s a shadow or, at best, a raccoon.

Many of the ghost sightings and other mysterious incidents revolve around the house’s bizarre hidden staircase, its most enduring architectural feature. Just to the left of the main fireplace is a small door, one that could perhaps lead to a wood closet but in fact opens onto a strange, winding, claustrophobic staircase. Twenty steps that haphazardly curl around the house’s main chimney ascend to an attic—a short but oddly perilous journey.

It is here, on this staircase, that many guests to the house have reported feeling the presence of ghosts. Visitors describe feelings of vertigo, an inability to breathe, and a pressing need to flee the house. “I began to feel … as if I was on a high mountain top where the oxygen becomes less. I felt sort of dizzy and off balance in all directions,” one visitor wrote on Grave Addiction. Another tourist reported that while he was climbing the hidden staircase, “I heard a woman’s voice RIGHT next to my ear whisper a ‘Shhh, Shhh’ type of sound. I thought it was my girlfriend trying to spook me, so as I turned my head to say ‘knock it off,’ I saw she was still 3 to 4 feet behind me.” Another writer later recounted in detail how

as we moved through the house, I suddenly became aware of a disquieting “presence” around me. I felt it at first when we went to a dining area, and it grew stronger once we went up a cramped brick-lined stairway into the attic. Later, after we stood outside, I mentioned to my sister that I felt odd—“displaced,” if that makes sense… . Something touched me when I was in that house—plugged into my subconscious somehow. I don’t know what or who … but I’ve come to believe that a piece of “it” attached itself to me.

How long has this spectral presence haunted this mysterious staircase? Does it date from 1692, during the town’s infamous witch trials, or perhaps even earlier? Did a young Nathaniel Hawthorne feel it, and did this presence haunt him when he set out to immortalize his aunt’s home as the most famously haunted house in American literature?

The nation was still young when Hawthorne began writing, but he could already draw inspiration from Puritan New England’s buried past and hidden legacy. Salem has long embodied a contradiction in the bedrock of American consciousness: upright piety mixed with hypocrisy, sober religion mixed with violent hysteria. Hawthorne’s own great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was one of the judges who presided over the Salem witch trials of 1692, and Nathaniel had grown up knowing about the family legend—that one of Hathorne’s victims had cursed him and his descendants.

Certainly Salem was a place ripe for haunting, and Hawthorne would repeatedly return to wrongs unavenged in his hometown to propel the more gothic aspects of his fiction. This is the recurring structure of a classic ghost story, after all: the ghost remains because it cannot believe the perverse normality of a world that has gone on living, that has forgotten whatever personal tragedy happened here. The carpets are cleaned, the furniture is sold, and the house continues with new inhabitants, the ghost alone keeping vigil over whatever once took place.

With The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne took a house that, by accident of haphazard and evolving construction, had acquired a gothic patina and imbued it with the history of Salem—transforming the house into a microcosm of not only the town’s rise and fall but also its hidden secrets and unrighted wrongs. The goal of the novel, as Hawthorne writes in his preface, is to “convince mankind—or, indeed, any one man—of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms.”

And in Hawthorne’s novel, it is precisely because the house is the physical spoils of this injustice that it becomes haunted. The book pushes and pulls against the stain of the past, straining under the effort of breaking free of it. There is only one way to escape this curse, according to Holgrave, the novel’s young hero: we must tear down old houses altogether. Holgrave, a daguerreotypist (the technology was brand new then, suggesting a cutting-edge man of the future), opines that we shall soon live to see the day “when no man shall build his house for posterity.” He instead imagines a country in which “each generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses,” a simple change that would ameliorate most of society’s ills. “I doubt whether even our public edifices,” he concludes, meaning capitols, courthouses, and other government buildings, “ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and reform the institutions which they symbolize.” As the ill-gotten remnants of the past, the buildings that have borne witness to the sins of the fathers, the houses we inherit must be destroyed. If we want to truly be free of the past, we must first start by destroying our ancestral homes.

Holgrave’s proposal is seductive, and certainly each generation dreams of remaking itself anew without the baggage of the ones that have come before. But even though architecture embodies the past, the past is more than the buildings we leave behind, and even cities that are famous for demolishing old buildings in favor of the new—Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas among them—have not escaped their pasts.

Holgrave’s dream of a world free of property inheritance stands in stark contrast to the actual context of the witchcraft crisis, which was far more about real estate and land acquisition than we normally assume. While we mainly associate the Salem witch trials with hysteria, religious fervor, and scapegoating, scratch the surface some and one finds property disputes and shady transfers of property and money.

One of the first girls who claimed to be afflicted, twelve-year-old Ann Putnam, initially accused the servant Tituba, as well as two other women, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. At the time Osborne was involved in a property dispute with Putnam’s parents. Osborne’s first husband had died owning a fair amount of property; he wanted to leave some of it to his sons, who were second cousins to Putnam. Osborne and her second husband wanted to keep all her first husband’s property for themselves. This dispute was ongoing when Putnam accused Osborne of visiting her as an apparition and “pinching and pricking” her “dreadfully.”

Ann Putnam would a few weeks later also name Rebecca Nurse as a tormentor. Like Osborne, Nurse was involved in land disputes with the Putnams. While some of the women accused during the crisis were marginalized—servants, widows, or otherwise impoverished women without community support—Nurse was a well-respected figure in the community, pious and well liked by many. What was happening in Salem was no longer the traditional model of witchcraft persecution, in which primarily the defenseless were targeted. It was now clear there was money to be made and land to be gained.

Among the most rapacious players in this drama was the Essex County sheriff, George Corwin, who’d quietly begun seizing property and assets of those convicted of witchcraft. One of the richest citizens to be accused of witchcraft, Philip English, managed to flee Salem to avoid trial, but after he disappeared, Corwin seized his house and other assets, roughly 1,500 pounds’ worth. In the case of John and Elizabeth Proctor, Corwin didn’t even wait until they were convicted and began removing their property while they were still awaiting trial, leaving nothing for their children. On December 12, 1692, a new law—meant explicitly to protect Corwin—allowing the seizure of property and land of those convicted of witchcraft was passed. The situation got so out of hand that the governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phips, finally complained to William Stoughton, lieutenant governor and chief justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer (the body empowered to try the Salem witches), that Stoughton “by his warrant hath caused the estates, goods and chattles of the executed to be seized and disposed of without my knowledge or consent.” (After Corwin’s death, supposedly, Philip English put a lien on his corpse, seizing the sheriff’s body and refusing to relinquish it until Corwin’s relatives paid him what little was left of his estate.)

In Hawthorne’s novel, at least there is the possibility of justice, as Pyncheon’s avarice leads in short order to his death. Hawthorne attempted to blend what he called “romance” and the “novel”: despite his general adherence to realism, supernatural elements creep in. For one, Hawthorne implies that the accused wizard Matthew Maule is, in fact, capable of damning Pyncheon. As Maule faces his accuser from the gallows, he turns to Pyncheon, “with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy,” crying, “‘God will give him blood to drink!’” before he dies—a phrase that haunts the novel when Pyncheon is found dead of unknown causes, blood spilling from his mouth.

In this Hawthorne borrowed a bit from history: while Sarah Good awaited execution on the gallows, she defiantly told one of her accusers, the Reverend Nicholas Noyes, “you are a lyer; I am no more a Witch than you are a Wizard, and if you take away my Life, God will give you Blood to drink.” According to the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Hutchinson, Noyes did ultimately die, in 1717, of a hemorrhage, which was seen by some as Good’s prophecy fulfilled. The popular narrative of Salem, perhaps, also partakes of a blend of fact and fiction and a sneaking suspicion that the ghosts of Salem are in fact capable of supernatural vengeance. Perhaps it’s true that ghost stories arise from an injustice unavenged, but perhaps it’s also true that part of what keeps such injustices alive in our consciousness is the titillating possibility that they were not entirely unjust.

This may explain why we have returned so many times in the past three hundred years to Salem, trying again and again to make sense of what happened there. Numerous theories have been advanced as to what happened in Salem: everything from actual witchcraft to petty juvenile delinquency, from hallucinations induced by ergot poisoning to an outbreak of encephalitis. Some of these theories fit better than others, but the theories—and the books—keep coming, as though the question itself can never be fully answered, as though the itch can never fully be scratched.

The House of the Seven Gables was in bad shape when Caroline Emmerton bought it in 1908, for the measly sum of $1,000. Emmerton, a philanthropist from a wealthy Salem family, had long been involved with the settlement house movement—a program that helped provide education and other social services to impoverished and immigrant children—and in the old house on Turner Street, she saw a unique opportunity. By restoring the ruined house to its former glory, she could revitalize a piece of Salem’s past and use revenue from tours to fund the town’s Settlement chapter.

Emmerton had first seen the house when it was owned by Henry and Elizabeth Upton. “My first visit to the House of Seven Gables was in 1879 or 1880, when I was still a young girl,” she later recalled. “I went there with a party of young people and I will remember the thrill that the gaunt old house gave me when I first caught sight of it.” She and architect Joseph Everett Chandler went to work, ultimately spending more than ten times what she’d paid for the house on its restoration.

By then the house no longer had anything close to seven gables; what’s more, it wasn’t even clear where those seven gables had once been. When Emmerton bought the property, the house was T-shaped, with only three gables, though remnants of another set on the south wing were visible. Emmerton and Chandler quickly found traces of another by studying the beams in the attic. In her account of the restoration, Emmerton speaks of reconstructing the seven gables as something of a puzzle and a mystery—tracking down old plans of the house in stacks of probate court records, divining the shape of the old house through traces left in the woodwork. She decided that the seventh and final gable must have been over the back portion of the house, which had been torn down long ago and thus could give no clues.

Only after she’d rebuilt this back portion with its gable did Emmerton discover court records showing the seventh gable over the kitchen instead. Subsequent restoration work further revealed that the house at one point had an eighth gable, over a second-story porch. She couldn’t find evidence that the house had ever had just seven gables, and it certainly didn’t by the time she got done with her restoration. “To console me my friends suggested that Hawthorne called his novel ‘The House of Seven Gables’ because that title was more pleasing and prosaic than the ‘House of Eight Gables’ would have been.”

Though Emmerton stressed that she was careful to not let the book influence her restoration, Hawthorne’s novel persisted as a shadow about the building, she claimed, forcing her and Chandler to second-guess every move, to seek clues where none existed, to add restorations that might not have been true to the house itself.

And then there is its crooked spine: the curling, amorphous, and anomalous staircase that curls around the central chimney, snaking skyward as if it might draw out the bad spirits from the house. Emmerton claimed that the secret staircase was rediscovered by Upton, who found on it a “pine-tree sixpence and a book” in 1888 while he was renovating the chimney. She writes that, while she was still a young girl, he showed her the staircase and the book: “It was a religious book, a prayer book or a hymn book, and very ancient.” When the secret staircase was built and why, Emmerton didn’t know for sure, but in her narrative she weighs—and dismisses—several possibilities, including that it was built for smuggling (“Of what use for smuggling is a secret stairway unless it leads to a secret room where goods could be stored … ?”) or that it was used as a hiding place against Indian raids (“Hiding places would hardly avail against Indians whose practice it was to set the house on fire”).

Her best guess was that it had been built by John Turner II, in the fateful year of 1692. Five minutes away was the house of Philip English, who fled after he was accused of witchcraft. When he finally returned, he found his house ransacked, and Emmerton suggested that he built a safe room of sorts in case of future incidents and that this gave Turner the idea to build his own secret hiding place. “Can there be any doubt that the arrest of Mrs. English would make John Turner anxious for the safety of his sisters?” Emmerton asks. “Can there be any doubt that he began to plan to protect them, and whatever plan he hit upon a temporary hiding place in the house would probably be needed. I believe that he built the secret staircase for that purpose—a recent addition to the house giving him the opportunity.”

If Emmerton is correct, then the House of the Seven Gables preserves traces of the witchcraft crisis in its very DNA. Hawthorne’s use of this house was no accident, for no other building remains as haunted by those terrifying months. And yet the seemingly most important detail—the staircase itself—appears nowhere in the novel.

Why doesn’t the novel mention the staircase? If it was so central to the house’s construction and well known by its inhabitants, and if it influenced Hawthorne’s conception of his own gabled house, why does it never appear in the book? There does not appear at first to be any clear answers for such a pressing question. “Thinking it over,” Emmerton writes, “I have been wondering if Hawthorne did not come across in some way, in an old letter, perhaps, some allusion to the secret staircase which he made use of in the first draft or outline of his romance, but on showing it to Miss Ingersoll encountered her strong objection to anything which should arouse the interest of the curious in her house.” Perhaps the hidden staircase was meant to stay hidden, a feature known only to the house’s inhabitants, like some family secret bricked up in the walls.

And yet, Emmerton insists, it exists, it influences the novel, it exerts its force on both readers and those who move through the house. “For it seems to me that we feel the absence of the secret staircase in the story just as we feel the absence of a bit of a picture-puzzle that has been lost and has left an unfilled place in the picture.”

A few years ago the management of the House of the Seven Gables admitted the truth: the staircase was built not by Turner or Ingersoll, nor by smugglers or freedom fighters or witches, but by Emmerton and Chandler themselves when they first restored the house in preparation for giving tours. Hawthorne made no mention of it because in his day it didn’t exist; the door on the first floor that opens to the staircase did, in fact, originally lead to the wood closet.

Reading Emmerton’s explanations for the staircase in light of this information reveals a remarkable bit of mythmaking in which she suggested that the staircase deeply inspired the novel while at the same time offering a reason why Hawthorne didn’t mention it. Hers is also a remarkable effort of literary criticism, turning the staircase into a hidden presence that works on the novel—an absent presence, an architectural ghost haunting a novel about a haunted house.

And she ensured that the house would remain an enduring attraction, above the other colonial revivals and period museums dotting New England. Over the years the tour script has changed every so often regarding the origin and meaning of the staircase, and it remains adaptable to any number of plausible explanations. What Emmerton and Chandler seem to have understood is that the simple addition of an anomalous element to a house’s construction immediately opens up vertiginous possibilities. The secret staircase, simply by virtue of not being immediately self-explanatory, renders the entire house even more uncanny. Its meaning, then, can shift with the times. The Underground Railroad, the witch trials, smugglers, the Indian wars—it can evoke and encompass all these aspects of history simply because it has no real apparent meaning.

The ghosts of Salem linger in strange ways. Most of the nineteen men and women executed in 1692 were pardoned in the early eighteenth century, but six women—Bridget Bishop, Susannah Martin, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot Redd, and Margaret Scott—went without exoneration for more than two centuries. Not until 1946 was a bill to clear their names introduced in the Massachusetts legislature, and it failed. It failed again when reintroduced in 1950, and in 1953, and in 1954. It took a change in the bill to get it finally passed, in 1957: the six women would be pardoned, but the legislation would also absolve the state of Massachusetts of any legal or financial obligation to the victims’ descendants. Which is to say, whatever gains had been gotten by Sheriff George Corwin and his ilk, no matter how ill gotten, they would not be righted.

The town seems caught between past and present, like a doubly exposed negative. By the end of the nineteenth century, various Salem businesses (including a fish company, a popcorn factory, and a bicycle company) had begun using the nickname “Witch City” to sell their wares, and by the 1930s the town itself had begun to see itself as a tourist destination. In 1971 the TV series Bewitched filmed a few episodes in Salem and shortly thereafter a Wiccan named Laurie Cabot arrived in Salem. She opened a “Witch Shop” selling witchcraft supplies and trinkets and quickly attracted a following. Dubbed the “official witch of Salem” by Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis in 1977, Cabot more than anyone changed the modern face of Salem, turning it into a mecca for those interested in both the pagan practice of Wicca and the Disneyfied image of witches with their black conical hats and broomsticks.

But what does any of this have to do with 1692? The people executed by the Court of Oyer and Terminer, no matter what else they were, almost certainly were not witches, neither pagan witches nor supernatural servants of Satan. They were devout Christians, wrongly accused; if anything, the condemned would have the same antipathy toward the modern Wiccans as their accusers. Hawthorne’s confusing blend of romance and novel, fact and fantasy, has come to embody how we treated the victims of Salem’s executions. We see them as innocent victims, and yet throughout pop culture we have repeatedly returned to the idea that they were also, paradoxically, somehow supernatural, actual witches. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century pop-culture depictions of Salem—not just Bewitched, but the recent TV series American Horror Story, with its coven descended from Salem, J. K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America, which asserts that a “number of the dead were indeed witches, though utterly innocent of the crimes for which they had been arrested,” and of course the show Salem, in which the town is the scene of an actual metaphysical battle between witches and Puritans—treat the victims of 1692 as actual witches capable of working spells and magic.

These confusions lie at the heart of Salem, and they’re what keeps the town going. It is undeniable that these days the Salem witch trials mean, for the city and its inhabitants, money. The town is overrun on Halloween with tourists, despite the fact that neither Wiccans nor Puritans celebrate the holiday. Salem, with its broom-riding-witch logo on its police cars, has turned tragedy into spectacle. The same unresolved questions that drive scholars to understand the town’s past also fuel its kitsch popularity.

In a town suffused with kitsch, nonsense, and a few tasteful memorials, the House of the Seven Gables wants none of it; tour guides do not bring up haunting and are encouraged to downplay it if asked. The eponymous house of Hawthorne’s novel is presented simply as a historical museum. And yet a big feature of its allure remains the hidden staircase, an architectural feature built originally to beguile tourists.

The ghosts of Salem, and of the House of the Seven Gables, are a product of ambiguous commemoration. We know Salem—we know it to be a tragedy, we hold it up as a cautionary tale about mass hysteria and persecution—and yet we’re also confused: we conflate the dead with actual witches, we attribute actual supernatural powers to those killed, we revisit their deaths for comedy and entertainment. Above all, we fail to apply the lessons we’ve supposedly learned from 1692, for by no means was this the last time in American history when a powerless minority was scapegoated, persecuted, and killed by an ignorant mass. We recall the events of Salem, but we can’t quite remember why they matter.

And so the ghosts remain—they walk the streets, haunt the buildings that have been erected over their hanging grounds. They keep alive the events of 1692 without forcing a reckoning. What remains is barely more than a whisper in the dark or a strange presence on the staircase.