The House of the Seven Gables is a Colonial mansion in Salem, Massachusetts, as well as the title of a novel written in 1851 by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The author spent a lot of time in this 1688 house, which was owned by his second cousin, Susannah Ingersoll. A guilt-ridden descendant of a witch-trial judge, Hawthorne appropriated the house as a gloomy symbol of a dark past. This moral murk comes clear in the tour of the house and the modest home in Salem where Hawthorne was born, which has been moved to the same site.
