This past weekend, I took my daughter and two of her friends to Salem, Massachusetts – site of the (infamous) 1692 Witch Trials. I thought the trip would provide me with an inspirational jump start to my creativity going into NaNoWriMo. Almost 400 years-old, Salem is a beautiful New England seaside town crowded with antique homes and steeped in history. Ironically, it is also home to more self-proclaimed witches than any other place in the U.S.Since I love history and early American architecture, I was in my element. As the girls went from shop-to-shop, I marveled at the old buildings surrounding me. They were painted in authentic early American colors of dark and mid-range browns, grays, greens and yellows – but most were white. The styles ranged from early colonial to federal, Greek revival to Victorian. I could feel their character and their history.
We visited a haunted house with at best mediocre effects, but the girls got a thrill out of it anyway. We then went over to the Peabody-Essex museum to go to another haunted house attraction that was supposed to be much better. What we found was a crowded market with vendors selling everything form devil horns, to crystals and talisman’s, t-shirts to buttered popcorn.
There wasn’t a store or kiosk I passed that didn’t have some sort of reference to a witch on a broom for sale in some form or another. Suddenly, it struck me how wrong all this was. How all these people, and the town, popularize and profit from the tragic events of 1692.
They advertise as though there were real witches here. There’s no mention of the fact that there was a gross miscarriage of justice, where 19 people were wrongly hanged by the town, an 80 year-old man was crushed to death, and another four people died in prison. In addition, another 150 wrongly accused people were imprisoned – wrecking their lives and livelihood in the process.
I bet, that if I polled 100 people, that not one of them could tell me the name of even one of the victims that was murdered by Salem’s own townspeople. I’d also bet that most of them wouldn’t be able to tell me how the victims were killed. I’m sure many would proclaim they were “burned at the stake”, or drowned – as I have heard people say in the past when they referenced the “Salem Witches”.
I came to Salem for inspiration – I left in disgust and a little sad as I wondered what those poor souls would think of the spectacle their wrongful deaths had become.
Posted by WFMeyer 
