A tale of an evil house, cursed through the centuries by a man who was hanged for witchcraft, haunted by ghosts of its dead and the terror of its living. Nathanial Hawthorne's works are imbued with a mixture of actual and imaginary and this is an enduring example. The puritanical Jaffrey Pyncheon is the embodiment of Hawthorne's own ancestor, a judge at the Salem witch trials.