The Turner-Ingersoll Mansion — known universally as the House of the Seven Gables — is one of the best-preserved 17th-century houses in New England, built in 1668 and still standing on the Turner Street waterfront with its profile of steeply pitched rooflines essentially unchanged. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a regular visitor in the 1840s and used it as the inspiration and setting for his Gothic novel of guilt and inheritance; the mansion's fame in American literature has kept it immaculately preserved.
Tours of the interior run throughout the day and include the hidden staircase, the period-furnished rooms, and Hawthorne's birthplace next door on the grounds. The site also administers several other historic structures on Derby Street. The waterfront location is evocative on its own — the house overlooks Salem Harbor with Derby Wharf to one side, and the views back toward the Custom House across the water have barely changed since Hawthorne's time.