Oh, Salem was named Arkham by H.P. Lovecraft. An area encompassing Salem to Ipswich. Inside these bounds is Arkham Asylum. In real life it is even scarier than what Bob Kane or Lovecraft could imagine.
Danvers State Hospital is where they invented the lobotomy. Its building are connected to a series of tunnels that had trains move food and laundry from building to building. Kirkbride in fact connected all of his asylums he built by such tunnels. In these tunnels patients would wander and doodle perverse or surreal illustrations on the wall. The film Session 9 was filmed within its confine. Next to it is a potter’s field in which the patients only received a number to mark their identities. Now it is luxury condos…
Before they were converted for the punishment of the wealthy, my friend Jonathan Archer took one of its towers down that housed the ward for the sexually insane and attached it to a new addition to his mansion.
Jonathan Archer is the descendant of Samuel Archer III who built the first commercial property in which the Parker Brothers sold their first Ouija board out of, Thomas Perkins (Opium dealing Boston Brahmin who is the predecessor to the Skulls and Bones) once owned, and one of the oldest secret societies in America had owned. The Salem Marine Society who pilfered artifacts from around the world through the tunnels attached to this building to their museums still retain a clubhouse on top of the building that stands in that location now. They sold it to Frank Poor who founded Sylvania.
The Hawthorne Hotel is built on a property that once held a building that burned down 6 times taking many lives. In its parking lot once stood the Crowninshield-Bently House which was featured in H.P. Lovecraft’s “Thing on the Doorstep”. Its other parking lot is holy ground for a Jewish Temple once stood there.
Further down the tunnel, this building connects to the second oldest jail in the country. A truly haunted penitentiary that has been converted over to luxury condos to abuse the wealthy once more. This is also attached to a potter’s field haunted by Giles Corey. Just beyond that is the location of the haunted Lyceum in which James Russel Lowell read Dante’s Inferno in English for the first time. A building attached to the nefarious George Peabody’s home on the common.