It was a dark and stormy night, because all of the best nights truly are.  We had just moved into our first house in Salem, a beautiful 1782 structure, built by Nathaniel Chamberlain, a bricklayer who had worked on Elias Haskett Derby’s Grand Turk, the first ship to sail directly to China from the colonies. Needless to say, the house had a lot of history, and though it needed quite a bit of work, we were thrilled with it and all of its mysteries and quirks.  

 

We moved in with our three cats; the Japanese Bobtail, Muta, a little girl who loves nothing more than snuggles and more snuggles, our big black Maine Coon, Rameses, the poster boy for this book and our tour company, who loves to run around at all hours of the night like a fluffy cannonball, and Marco, our quiet grey Maine Coon who used to live in an antique bookstore in Maine before coming to us many years ago.  

 

On this stormy night, Rameses had already hidden somewhere unfathomable (he’s afraid of thunder), Muta was fast asleep, and Marco was making his late night patrols around the house.  As was to be expected in an older house in an historic neighborhood, it was only a matter of time before we lost power. Gathering some candles and heading to the parlor, our new old house was alive with creaks and squeaks and things that went bump in the night.  We began to talk about what it must have been like for each successive generation who had the good fortune to share in the history of this home. Merchants to foreign lands had once walked these same wide pine floorboards, and we were so fortunate to have found a place with such rich history.

 

The candlelight flickered as the storm grew more intense, and out of the corner of my eye I caught movement.  At first I dismissed it as a trick of the moving light, combined with the overall eerie atmosphere of the evening and conversation. But no, as I turned my head there was certainly something there, if only for the briefest of moments.  What it was, I could not rightly say; a spectral sphere of incomprehensible substance was floating through the air, past the fireplace, past the china cabinet, past the doorway to the secret pass-through, and then, without pausing a moment, out through the wall by the window. It vanished within half the span of a breath, and I turned to my husband to tell him what I had seen, managing to get only so far as a, “Did you just see…” before our quiet grey cat Marco tore into the room like a bolt of lightning himself, following the course the inscrutable phantom had taken. With a powerful leap he sprang forward to where it had vanished into the wall, and created a mighty thud with his front paws.  He looked frustrated and confused for a few moments, then, with nary a backwards glance, returned to his evening rounds.

 

Clearly, we had a ghost hunting cat.

 

Over the past 5 years, we have taken our love of history and fascination with the supernatural, and developed our company, Black Cat Tours, into a place where the visitors of Salem can learn about the true histories that make up so many amazing stories of a city that truly has magic in its blood. We have been fortunate to hear so many fantastic tales of ghostly visits, creepy encounters, and unexplainable events that we decided it was high time to put them all together in a way that shared the eerie tales with our passionate research into the antiquity behind them.

We know that not everyone can make the visit to Salem, so we hope by bringing it to you in these stories, you will feel like you are truly walking the cobblestone streets with us, and experiencing the chills that only the Witch City can bring you.  And if you have been fortunate enough to see Salem with your own eyes, think of this book as a way to take home all of the venerable tales, and maybe a ghost or two with you!

 

Copyright Lara and Daniel Fury 2018