Peabody Essex Museum

One of the oldest continuously operating museums in America, founded in 1799 by sea captains who collected curiosities from around the world. The museum houses over 840,000 works of art and contains a 200-year-old Chinese house transported from China.

The Peabody Essex Museum traces its origins to 1799, when twenty-two Salem sea captains who had sailed beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn founded the East India Marine Society with a charter requirement that members collect "natural and artificial curiosities" from their voyages around the world. By 1825, the collection had grown large enough to fill the newly constructed East India Marine Hall, formally dedicated on October 14 of that year in a ceremony attended by President John Quincy Adams. Today the museum holds over 1.8 million objects spanning maritime art, Asian export art, and American decorative arts -- along with the world's largest collection of original Salem witch trials documents, some five hundred manuscripts on deposit from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court until 2023. It is the sheer age and global provenance of this collection, gathered from distant ports by sailors who often never returned home, that some believe has drawn restless spirits from across the globe to this corner of Salem.

Staff and visitors have long reported strange occurrences within the museum's galleries, particularly around artifacts with dark or unknown histories. Objects have been observed shifting position, and some visitors describe a persistent feeling of being watched, especially in the older East India Marine Hall where nine carved ship figureheads -- salvaged relics of vessels whose crews sometimes perished at sea -- gaze down from the walls. The hall itself, described as one of the handsomest rooms in New England, still contains the original display cases from 1825, and some accounts suggest the atmosphere grows noticeably colder near certain maritime artifacts despite consistent climate controls.

The most haunted property in the museum's care is the Ropes Mansion at 318 Essex Street, a Georgian Colonial house built in the 1720s for merchant Samuel Barnard and later acquired by Judge Nathaniel Ropes. In March 1774, during the colonial unrest leading to the American Revolution, an angry mob attacked the mansion over Ropes's Loyalist sympathies. The judge, already suffering from smallpox, died the following day -- the family maintained that the disturbance hastened his death. Decades later, in 1839, his daughter Abigail suffered an agonizing fate when her dress ignited from the mansion's fireplace. According to historical records, "her petticoats went up in flames," and she endured three weeks of suffering before dying from her burns.

Visitors to the Ropes Mansion report hearing the sounds of Abigail's agonized screams echoing through the upper floors, and a ghostly female figure has been spotted walking through hallways and appearing in the windows. Former caretakers Rick and Georgette Stafford reportedly captured a photograph during a routine insurance appraisal that showed what appeared to be two hands of a man seated on a couch in an empty room -- believed by some to be the ghost of Judge Ropes himself. Unexplained temperature drops, doors opening and closing without cause, disembodied voices in empty rooms, and objects moving independently have all been reported by both staff and visitors. The mansion, which gained wider fame as "Allison's house" in Disney's Hocus Pocus in 1993, suffered another significant fire in August 2009 that destroyed plaster ceilings, carpets, and wallpaper -- some have speculated about paranormal involvement, though the cause was determined to be electrical.

The museum also houses Yin Yu Tang, a sixteen-bedroom Chinese merchant's house from the Qing Dynasty that was disassembled in China's Huizhou region and painstakingly reconstructed inside the museum, opening to visitors in 2003. While no formal investigations have been conducted, visitors have noted an unusual atmosphere within the transplanted house, and one writer described it as "a place of spirits -- memories, yearnings, history." The museum embraces Salem's supernatural reputation each October with its "Haunted Histories" programming, where costumed storytellers bring to life chilling tales of murder and mystery based on real events from the collection's archives, blending New England's sinister past with the paranormal.