A portrait of Colonel Pyncheon looms over his family in the house of the seven gables—an ominous reminder of the curse he left behind over a century ago.

The shadow still falls over the New England mansion's current residents, siblings Clifford and Hepzibah—unless they can expose the one secret that offers an escape from the hex.

Set in seventeenth- and nineteenth-century Massachusetts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's gothic tale was inspired by the Salem Witch Trials and by a family home that still stands today. With the town's horrific history, the house became, for Hawthorne and his readers, an important metaphor for ancestral burden.