Hawthorne Hotel

It stands on the site of the Franklin Building, which the Salem Marine Society sold for the hotel in 1923 in exchange for a permanent meeting room on the roof, the Cabin, where the Society still meets. The hotel has been a member of Historic Hotels of America since 1991. Its own timeline records no ghost until 30 October 1990, when a séance in the Grand Ballroom tried and failed to summon Harry Houdini on the anniversary of his death; the first annual Halloween party followed in 1991. Historic Hotels of America says guests have reported moving furniture, a ghostly woman and unexplained noises, and that by lore Room 325 is the most haunted; a television station's list of 2021 took the room numbers from a commercial ghost-tour operator. The reports in those sources name no witness and give no date.

The Hawthorne Hotel opened on 23 July 1925 on Washington Square West in Salem, Massachusetts. According to the hotel's own timeline, a flag-raising ceremony led by the Salem Chamber of Commerce and the Salem Rotary Club declared it open, followed by a parade through the city. It is named after Nathaniel Hawthorne, born in Salem on 4 July 1804. The hotel credits the idea of "a modern hotel for the business traveler" to Frank Poor, founder of the Hygrade/Sylvania lighting company, and records that more than half a million dollars' worth of stock in the proposed hotel was sold in a single week of 1923; Historic Hotels of America adds that the Salem Hotel Company, with Poor as its first president, raised the money through the sale of public stock. Construction began in 1924. The site had belonged to the Salem Marine Society, a charity founded in 1766 by eighteen shipmasters from Salem and Beverly. According to the Society, the merchant Thomas Perkins left it the Franklin Building in 1830. The building survived several fires before the fire of 1860 almost completely destroyed it, with the Society's library and archives, hours after its insurance policy had expired. A donation from J. Ingersoll Bowditch led others to contribute, and a new Franklin Building was completed in 1862. In 1923 the Society sold the site for the hotel and received a permanent meeting room on top of it: the Cabin, built to resemble the cabin of a nineteenth-century sailing ship, which has been its headquarters since 1925. Historic Hotels of America says the hotel opened with 150 guestrooms; its website now describes a 93-room property. In the 1950s, to attract motorists, it became the Hawthorne Motor Hotel and covered the Palladian windows of the ballroom to look more modern. In 1985, at its sixtieth anniversary, it was called the Hawthorne Inn, and it took back the name Hawthorne Hotel four years later. In June 1970 the cast and crew of Bewitched, Elizabeth Montgomery and Dick Sargent among them, stayed at the hotel while filming "The Salem Saga", which includes a scene in its elevator. The Marine Society says that by the 1970s the hotel's condition had forced it to take many of its artifacts out of the Cabin for safekeeping, and that after the hotel closed for renovation and changed hands the Cabin was restored by 1977. The hotel joined Historic Hotels of America in 1991 and received its Award of Excellence as "Best City Center Historic Hotel" in 2015. The guests named on the programme's page include Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, George H. W. Bush, Walter Cronkite and Johnny Cash. In 2015 David O. Russell filmed parts of Joy in the Grand Ballroom, the mezzanine and a guest room, and Robert De Niro and Jennifer Lawrence stayed at the hotel during the shoot. The address is 18 Washington Square West, Salem, MA 01970.

The Hawthorne Hotel stands at 18 Washington Square West, Salem, Massachusetts 01970, on the east side of Salem Common; the switchboard is 978-744-4080. Its own site described it in September 2026 as a 93-room property that has been open since 23 July 1925 and works as a hotel rather than a house museum. Two dining rooms of its own carry their own names: The Tavern and Nathaniel's. The Grand Ballroom is let for weddings and conferences, so access to that room on any given day depends on what has been booked into it. The hotel's accessibility page is unusually specific. It offers, in its own words, "2 ADA compliant guest rooms — one on the 3rd floor and one on the 4th floor": room 317 with a roll-in shower and room 408 with a roll-in bathroom and tub. The same page gives lift access to the guest floors; accessible public entrances, with an accessible route from them to the registration desk; extra-wide doorways; grab bars in the bathrooms; telephones with a flashing light; closed captioning on the televisions; and service animals admitted. Arriving without a car is straightforward, and the City of Salem's own directions page sets out how. It puts the city on the MBTA's Newburyport/Rockport commuter rail line out of Boston's North Station; lists MBTA bus routes 450, 451, 455, 456, 459 and 465 as serving Salem; points to a public garage at Museum Place Mall on Essex Street; and places the terminal of the seasonal Salem Ferry, which runs from Long Wharf in Boston, fifteen minutes' walk from Old Town Hall. The ghost is part of what the hotel sells, and the hotel says so itself. Forbes listed it among America's twenty-five most haunted hotels in October 2017, and the hotel's own history page carries the séance held in the Grand Ballroom in an attempt to reach Harry Houdini. In September 2026 its own events listing still carried "A Spirited Evening Connecting with the Other Side". The room numbers that circulate in the commercial literature — 325, and 612 on the sixth floor — come attached to no named witness.