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We run Spare Keys Stay ourselves, here in Boston. Questions before you book? Daryl answers personally.
Call or text 617-799-4558 [email protected]Registered with the City of Boston · STR-629372
Halloween in Witch City
Salem MA hotels sell out months before Halloween. Whole apartments 35-45 minutes away, sleeping up to 10 in one booking, free parking. Book direct, no fees.
Haunted Happenings runs the whole of October, and it brings more than a million visitors into a city of roughly forty-five thousand people. The arithmetic does not work. Salem simply does not have the rooms.
The Hawthorne Hotel, the best-known place in town, says all its rooms are sold out for the weekend of its October 24 Halloween Ball. Rooms, tours and restaurant tables all fill months in advance, and the vacation rentals near Salem Common go within hours of listing.
So most people going to Salem in October are not staying in Salem. They are staying somewhere in the Boston area and travelling up.
We are south of Boston, and Salem is north of it. Our Dorchester apartments are about eighteen miles from Salem and our Hyde Park apartments about twenty-two, which in practice is a thirty-five to forty-five minute drive depending on the day and the traffic.
A downtown Boston hotel is closer to Salem than we are. We are not going to pretend otherwise. What we offer instead is a whole apartment rather than a room, free parking for every car, and an October rate that has not been rewritten because of Halloween.
The thing that catches people out is not the drive up, it is what happens at the other end. Downtown Salem in October is closed streets, full garages and long queues, and the closer it gets to Halloween the worse it becomes.
Plenty of our guests drive up early and pay for a garage, and plenty leave the car at the apartment and take the commuter rail or the seasonal ferry in from Boston instead - the train is roughly thirty-five minutes and $8 each way ($10 for a weekend pass). Either way, the car sits free where you are staying rather than costing you a nightly hotel garage rate on top of everything else.
Salem trips are rarely solo. They are groups of friends, families with teenagers, or several couples travelling together for a long weekend - and that is precisely the booking a hotel handles worst and an apartment handles best.
Apartments with up to four bedrooms, plus a sofa bed for the largest groups, a full kitchen for the morning after a late night, laundry in most units, and one booking covering the whole group. If you are coming for a weekend in October, book it well ahead. Our own October rates run higher than late summer for the same reason Salem's do, and the larger apartments go first.
Salem's Haunted Happenings runs all of October and, for the city's 400th anniversary, expects more than a million visitors. The Night Faire is October 23-24, and Halloween, Saturday October 31, ends with a 400-drone show at 10pm.
