Top 3 haunted houses
1. The Lizzie Borden House
It shouldn’t have happened here, in this austere raw-boned structure on 2nd street. Implausible that it occurred in broad daylight at one of the busiest times with horses, buggies, and street traffic only mere feet from the front door with the number 92 tacked to its column. And yet, it did. Two people, Andrew and Abby Borden, both in their golden years by that era’s reckoning, were mercilessly hacked to death with a hatchet; Abby as she cleaned the upstairs guest room, and Andrew as he lay napping on the sitting room couch downstairs. Not a sound had been heard by the myriad pedestrians outside, but the house, now stained with blood, had witnessed it all.
Andrew Borden bought the home in 1872 and immediately had it remodeled from a two-tenant dwelling into a place his small family could call home. He chose the house due to its pragmatic location—a short walking distance to his businesses on main street, one block over. It sat amid other businesses, horse stables, stores, a laundry, and a make-shift restaurant.
Andrew’s wife kept house and took pride in it, while his two daughters Emma and Lizzie looked about at the heavily floral-covered walls as a prison. A young Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan, was the only other inhabitant. There were no hallways in the house, with the exception of an upstairs landing. One had to go through one room to get to another. As a result, locks abounded. Locks that would play an invaluable role in the murder mystery that would captivate the world after that fateful morning of August 4, 1892.
Today, the house is just as it was. The furnishings retain their rightful place, the décor has been painstakingly duplicated, and the original hardware and doors are still intact. Artifacts from the murder case are displayed while memorabilia from the era line shelves and mantel tops. A visitor is literally transported back to that morning when a perfect storm of events culminated in a double murder.
https://lizzie-borden.com/
2. The Haunted House of the Seven Gables
They say that there is no house in Salem more haunted than the Turner-Ingersoll, better known to many as the House of the Seven Gables. With its Gothic-inspired cross-gables and dark-as-coffee wood clapboards, Turner and Ingersoll’s infamous House of the Seven Gables looks like something out of a Hansel and Gretel spin-off.
And we all know what happened to them--the breadcrumbs worked only for so long.
But while Hansel and Gretel faced their own fate, the Turner-Ingersoll has been given a variety of fates over the years; a variety of identities, too, depending on the century and on the owner.
Once the home of a hat and shoe merchant, this historic property on Salem’s Derby Street now belongs to the House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association along with several other centuries-old homes. Today, it functions as a museum and event location, welcoming all through its doors to learn about the Salem-born author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and life during the 1840s.
As for the ghosts of the Turner-Ingersoll, it depends upon who you ask as to whether or not they exist. Will you believe in the haunted House of the Seven Gables?
https://7gables.org/
3.The Salem Witch House
Just fifteen miles north of Boston sits a four-hundred-year-old structure as foreboding as it is famous. The Witch House is thick with black timber, two-and-a-half stories tall. Located at 310 Essex Street in the McIntire Historic District of Salem, the house stands in testimony to the Witch Trials of 1692. The Witch House is the only surviving structure with direct ties to Salem’s Witch Trials — architecturally extraordinary, historically essential. Yet the haunts of the house extend past the hysteria. Purchased in 1675 by Judge Jonathan Corwin, magistrate of Salem’s Witch Trials, the Witch House remained with the Corwins until the mid-1800s. The “Corwin Curse” marked the house by 1718; eight Corwin lives were lost to premature death, catastrophically crippling the Corwin estate.
Rumor once held that the Witch House was used for the trial’s preliminary examinations, though this was later disproved. The Witch House itself harbored no witches, though Judge Jonathan Corwin did execute nineteen charged with witchcraft. Even the mason of the house was accused, and acquitted, of witchcraft. But is the Witch House, now a “Historic Home” of Essex County, haunted? If so, by whom?
