Introduction

Salem Witch Trials memorial featuring a series of inscribed stones throughout the burial ground.

Charter Street Cemetery, dating to 1637, is one of Salem's oldest burial grounds — but notably absent are the victims of the witch trials, who were denied Christian burial. Instead you'll find John Hathorne, the unrepentant hanging judge whose legacy so haunted his descendant Nathaniel Hawthorne that he added a 'w' to his name and spent his literary career processing the guilt. A Mayflower passenger rests here too. The cemetery closes at dusk — guests view it from beyond the iron gates, which somehow makes it more unsettling.

guests will hear about Salem's movie history and see one of the iconic filming locations of the movie Hocus Pocus

Pass through the epicenter of historic Salem filled with shopping, sightseeing and history.

Today home to Turner's Seafood at Lyceum Hall, and the site of the first public demonstration of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, this storied building stands on the former property of Bridget Bishop, Salem's first executed witch. Hanged in 1692, Bishop has never quite left. Ghost hunters have recorded unexplained audio here, staff report persistent disturbances in the upstairs Bridget Bishop Room, and her face has been captured in upstairs windows. One of Salem's most documented and genuinely unsettling hauntings. We cover her story, her legacy, and her ghost!

This is the site of Salem's original witch gaol — where the accused were chained in dungeon conditions while awaiting trial. Among them was Dorothy Good, four years old, who confessed to witchcraft not out of guilt but out of desperation to stay near her imprisoned mother. Her mother Sarah was executed anyway. Dorothy spent eight months chained in darkness, alone, until her spirit went silent. She survived. She never recovered. Her ghost is said to still search these grounds for her mother — and those with a maternal instinct have reported feeling small hands tugging at their coats and bags in the dark. The weight of this story, on this ground, is something you feel before your guide has finished telling it.

We stop near the former Essex County Jail — built in 1813, it became the oldest active penitentiary in the United States before closing in 1991 under a court order citing inhumane conditions. But this ground holds something older and darker. This was once an open field where Giles Corey was pressed to death in 1692, the only person in American history executed by pressing. Corey refused to enter a plea, and with his dying breath cursed the sheriff and the city of Salem. Every sheriff who kept offices here before the jail's closure reportedly died of heart ailments — and Corey's ghost, seen before the Salem Great Fire and other calamities, is considered Salem's most feared and malevolent spirit. The Howard Street Cemetery next door holds prisoners who died inside, their gravestones marked with skeleton hands pointing skyward. This is not a ghost story. This is Salem's most documented and genuinely feared haunting — and we treat it that way.

Behind St. Peter's Church lies a garden that most Salem visitors never find. Dark, enclosed, and built on top of the dead. The gravestones were moved to the front when the church was rebuilt in 1833. The bodies were not. Beneath the ground you're standing on lies Philip English, accused witch, escaped prisoner, and one of Salem's wealthiest and most defiant merchants. A French-speaking Anglican among Puritans, English fled to New York in 1692 with his wife Mary to avoid execution, returning after the trials to spend his remaining years suing Salem for everything that was taken from him. He donated this land as a final act of defiance, establishing Salem's first Anglican church on the doorstep of the community that tried to destroy him. Our guides bring you here after dark, where the stories get darker and the air gets heavier.

In 1830, Captain Joseph White — wealthy sea captain and slave trader — was bludgeoned to death in his sleep inside this Federal-style mansion on Essex Street. A hired killer entered through an open window. The trial that followed gripped the nation and inspired Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, with details from the prosecution speech echoing directly into the story's most famous lines. The murder is also said to have inspired Parker Brothers to rebrand the British board game Cluedo as Clue. Witnesses still report ghostly faces in the windows and unexplained footsteps inside. This is one of Salem's most consequential and most haunted addresses