Is the Coach House haunted?

If you’re like me – lover of all things spooky – you probably asked the same question in your head when looking at booking a hotel for a Salem vacation. Fortunately for you, after my recent stay at the Coach House, I can confirm that it is in fact haunted with the evidence to back it up. And no, they aren’t unfriendly ghosts. In fact, quite the opposite!

A little backstory and credentials on yours truly, my name is Natasha Rusilko and I am the creator and host of Witchcraft and Wellness Retreats. My most recent Salem retreat was at the Coach House and my group and I decided to host a seance on the night of the Lunar Eclipse in Libra.

We gathered together in the main foyer of the Coach House with an Ouija Board (from Salem’s Witch Board Museum, of course!) and an EMF detector to also help connect with the spirits.

Now, I know that horror movies and pop culture have given Ouija Boards a bad rep, but I promise they aren’t as scary as they seem! Communing with spirits used to be something widely accepted throughout our society, especially in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when occultism and spiritualism was rising to popularity. As a proponent of proper and pleasant Ouija Board experiences, I’m here to tell you that you can definitely use them without contacting demons and vengeful spirits.

With any Ouija Board session, or any ritual or seance, it’s important to both protect and cleanse yourself. We started our ceremony by using Florida Water, a cleansing tool much like a smoke cleanse to purify the energy and the space. We also used a protective circle of candles and set the intention that we would only like to talk to friendly spirits. Remember, you’re the one who’s alive – so you hold the power and can tell any spirits you don’t want to talk to to respectfully buzz off.

And then, we opened the portal.

The first and most powerful spirit we spoke to that night came through almost immediately! It was eager to tell us that her name was Elizabeth, but preferred to be called Lizzie. She was communicating through the board, the EMF detector (we asked her to flash the detector all the way from green to red for ‘yes’), and even the internal lights of the Coach House. There were multiple times she used the chandelier above us to communicate her answers, which I had never experienced before!

It was obvious she had difficulty spelling things, so we came to the conclusion that she was a child. She couldn’t give us a straight answer on how old she was, somewhere between 4 and 6, but she got very excited when we clapped for her, much like Tinkerbell. It was a truly wonderful, whimsical, and powerful experience.

We said goodbye to Lizzie, closed the portal, and went on to communicate with a few other spirits that were dearly departed friends and relatives of some of those in our retreat group, cleaned ourselves again, and went to bed.

The next morning, my assistant and I asked Marley (the most wonderful manager of the Coach House) if there were any documentented children named Elizabeth that had lived and/or died at the Coach House. She searched through the records of those who lived in the Coach House, and lo and behold, came across Elizabeth Emmerson.

She was born in 1791 and died in 1797. It doesn’t state on the record how she died, but she was named after her mother (maiden name Elizabeth Newhall) and her father Jeremiah Emmerton was a seafarer and seemed to have quite a few voyages at sea as documentented in his son’s journals.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much known about young Elizabeth, but I can confidently say from what her spirit communicated to us is that she was a happy young girl who seemed bright and loved to talk to people.

So, if you find that during your stay at the Coach House you might hear doors slamming or children laughing, it might just be little Lizzie having a grand old time in the afterlife and it’s nothing to be afraid of! Tell her hello and she just might flicker the lights for you.