In the early 1920s Salem investors formed a hotel company, sold stock, and built a Colonial Revival house at Hawthorne Boulevard and Washington Square West, beside Salem Common and near sites tied to Nathaniel Hawthorne (including the later-moved birthplace). The hotel opened 23 July 1925 with about 150 rooms. The Salem Marine Society, which sold or conditioned use of the ground, kept a meeting room: a rooftop cabin modeled on the East Indiaman Taria Topan. A ship’s wheel in the tavern is part of that maritime décor and of later ghost stories that say it turns untouched.

Haunt lore is twentieth-century. Room 612 and the sixth-floor hall are tied to a woman in white who appears and vanishes; some tellers call her Bridget Bishop. Room 325 draws reports of a baby or child crying inside the room, faucets or lights operating with no one at the controls, and guests touched or uncovered in bed. Apple scent with no fruit in sight is often folded into the same Bishop-orchard story. Voices, knocks, and footsteps fill out the rest.

That orchard association does not hold up against the Lyceum file. Historians and the Salem Witch Museum place Bridget Bishop’s orchard on the Church Street / Lyceum ground, not on Washington Square. Secondary accounts say Hawthorne managers have called the hotel-orchard link a mix-up, possibly spread by paranormal television. A 2007 Ghost Hunters visit and a 1990 Houdini séance in the ballroom are part of the hotel’s media history. They did not settle a paranormal cause. Bewitched used an elevator here in the 1970s. That is television, not a haunting.