Rockafellas

History

In the spring of 1692, the First Church’s meetinghouse stood on this corner of Essex and Washington Streets, just beside where Rockafellas is now, and it was where Salem Town’s witch-trial examinations began. On April 11, Elizabeth Proctor was brought there for questioning, with her husband John beside her, in front of a crowd that included her accusers. That July, Rebecca Nurse was excommunicated in the meetinghouse before the church’s elders, and Giles Corey was cast out of the church while he was being tortured.

The brick building that stands here now is the one the First Church put up in 1826, designed by the Boston architects Solomon Willard and Peter Banner. The congregation worshiped upstairs and rented the ground floor to shops. In the 1870s, the National Exchange Bank added a vault on the first floor. Around the same time the outside was rebuilt in the High Victorian Gothic style, and the building got its towers.

One of the tenants was Daniel Low, a jeweler whose company moved into a corner shop here in 1874. In 1891, its souvenir witch spoons made Daniel Low & Co. famous across the country, and a mail-order catalog followed a year later. Low had a fatal heart attack while working in his store in 1911. In 1923, the First Church sold the building to the Low family and moved to its church at 316 Essex Street, and Daniel Low & Co. kept the store going until the mid-1990s. Rockafellas opened in the building in 2003.

Hauntings & Lore

The ghost stories here are older than the building. The first was told in court in 1692, and the newest turned up on the restaurant’s screen saver soon after it opened.

The Board in the Meetinghouse

On June 2, 1692, Bridget Bishop was walked under guard from the Salem jail to her trial, the first of the witch trials, and on the way she passed the meetinghouse. Cotton Mather, the Boston minister who wrote up her trial the next year in The Wonders of the Invisible World, recorded what happened next. She “gave a look towards the House,” and a “Daemon invisibly entring the Meeting-house, tore down a part of it.” People ran in at the noise and found a board, “strongly fastned with several Nails,” carried to another part of the room. Mather counted it among the evidence the court heard against her.

The Lady in Blue

Rockafellas’ best-known ghost is a woman in a blue dress. The stories about who she was don’t agree. Salem Ghosts, US Ghost Adventures’ Salem tour, tells of a young woman named Sarah. A sea captain courted her when he was home on shore leave, but she loved a young sailor. In that telling, the captain led her into the alley beside the First Church and beat her to death with a board. Then he got the church’s minister to help him hide her body in tunnels under the building.

Ghost City Tours tells it another way. She was waiting in the tunnels for a sailor, told him she was carrying his child and asked him to marry her, and he strangled her there. Its guides pass on a third version too, in which she worked for Daniel Low & Co. and was found dead in the vault one morning.

What the Record Says

None of these deaths turns up in the record. Salem’s published vital records list the town’s deaths up to 1849, and they show no murdered Sarah and no woman killed in the town in those years. The town’s newspaper, the Salem Gazette, reported no killing in the alley between the 1820s and 1850. The only sea captain murdered in Salem in those decades was a victim, not a killer: Capt. Joseph White, killed at 82 in 1830 at what is now the Gardner-Pingree House.

What can be traced is when the blue dress appeared. Co-owner Kevin Marchino told CBS Boston that one of the restaurant’s first bartenders took a picture of the building on Essex Street. It ran as the computer’s screen saver for about a year, he said, until one day “there was a figure of a woman in a blue dress.” “Two days later the computer died,” co-owner Dave McKillop added. The owners have leaned in ever since. She has her own mural inside and a drink named for her, and McKillop tells of a diner whose Cosmopolitan exploded while she ate, leaving nothing but the stem.

The Man in Black

The building’s other ghost is a man in a black suit, and in Salem Ghosts’ telling he’s the unfriendly one. He “does not like women,” lashes out at them, and keeps mostly to the upper floors, where the church used to be. Who he was depends on the teller. That telling makes him the minister who helped bury Sarah, or perhaps Daniel Low. Other guides say he was a minister who killed himself on the spot where the building stands, though Salem’s vital records list no minister’s suicide before 1850. Of everyone named, only Low is known to have died in the building. McKillop told CBS Boston that when you’re upstairs alone, “you kind of get the feeling it’s time to go downstairs.”

The Tunnels Below

Nearly every version of the Lady in Blue ends underground, and so do the owners’ stories. Marchino told CBS Boston that the basement is the most haunted part of the building, and that its tunnel was used for the Underground Railroad. The vault where one telling puts her scream is real: the bank built it in the 1870s. The tunnels are less certain. Salem’s legend of smugglers’ tunnels running from the wharves to downtown cellars is “largely a myth,” says Spellbound Tours, a Salem ghost-tour company. The real passages, it says, are a few small maintenance tunnels and walkways between neighboring buildings.