Why We’re Still Bewitched by the Salem Witch Trials

I know what it is to lose my sense of reality. To slip so deeply into the horrors of my mind that I can’t get out. To be an eleven-year-old girl.

I spent my adolescent summers away from home; my parents were divorced and according to the custody arrangement, I was to spend every summer in my father’s home. I was lucky enough to have my own bedroom and access to a neighborhood swimming pool and a library where I could check out all the books I could hope to read.

I didn’t have friends though, and those summers away I felt so cut off from the world I knew, the context in which I made sense of myself. For two and a half months a year, I was a different Alex than the Alex I’d been at home. I was a guest in a house that was not my own, as much as my father and step-mother tried to make it so.

I spent the long, hot days in my bedroom reading books, writing in my diary, and retreating deeply into myself trying to find proof that I was the same person I’d been before. The summer I was eleven, I began scratching corners. I began counting vertical lines everywhere I went: phone poles, fence posts, table and chair legs, and trees—all in intervals of six that I tapped out alternately with my big toes inside my sandals. I became obsessed with numerical palindromes; the patterns I could create by writing “1221 2112 2112 1221” over and over, extending the pattern to fill notebooks. The longer the pattern, the deeper my horror. I realized that I’d never reach the end of the pattern. Even typing this out today makes my fingers itch.

My father pleaded with me to explain myself. He slept on the floor next to me in my bedroom. He propped a painting of Jesus on a chair next to me, which just scared me more. He tried to get me to meditate. He took me to a counselor at the local high school who recommended a course of therapy for what appeared to be symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety.

Had it not been 2002 but instead 1692, my symptoms might have received a different diagnosis: bewitchment. The doctors would have believed it, and I would have, too. According to Stacy Schiff’s The Witches, throughout the year of 1692, thirteen girls claimed to be bewitched in Salem Village, Massachusetts. Abigail Williams, age eleven, was first. She was the niece of Reverend Samuel Parris, and she had come to live with her aunt and uncle. In fact, half of those who claimed to have been bewitched were girls living away from home; it was a common practice in the Puritan colonies to send children to live with other families in order to build hearty character.

I know what it is like to be eleven and trapped in the horrors of my mind. I know what it is to be nine, and twelve, and thirteen, and be so swept up in what my peers are doing that I would rather die than stand apart from them.

Schiff says there are many theories explaining why the bewitchment and hysteria gained the traction they did. Some blamed a hallucinogenic fungus that grew on grains. Others blamed the cold weather—people were bored and repressed and needed an outlet. And others blamed the Reverend Samuel Parris, Salem’s minister, who needed to bolster his waning popularity among his congregation. The prevailing theory now is that Abigail Williams, age eleven and away from home, struggled with a form of mental illness, or epilepsy, or both. In the absence of a clear diagnosis and on the fertile ground of 17th-century Puritan paranoias, the hysteria spread.

Whatever caused the hysteria that began with the claims of Abigail Williams’ bewitchment spread. More were accused of witchcraft in 1692. A hunt to find all the witches in their midst began. And the nonsensical trials that followed resulted in nothing other than a guilty verdict. The result was deadly: Over the course of the next year, accusations spread and nineteen accused witches were hanged publicly and five more dead in the local jail, and one pressed to death, according to the Boston Globe.

In the absence of a clear diagnosis and on the fertile ground of 17th-century Puritan paranoias, the hysteria spread. 

All these years later, Salem survives in our culture through stories that take what happened and reconstitute them, each with their own agendas to warn, to entertain, to titillate. I set out to the place where it all began.

As I planned a trip up with my husband, I imagined a quaint New England town, all autumnal reds and oranges and cobblestone streets and historic mysticism. I was here to see if I would feel anything. I wanted to talk to ghosts, to experience something supernatural, and maybe untangle a bit of the past. The road to Salem led through unassuming post-industrial New England towns with faded storefronts, pawn shops, and old colonial-era buildings with cracked paint. The first witch-related business I saw was Dairy Witch, an ice cream shop set back from the road with a witch on a broomstick on its logo.

We wandered to the Essex Street pedestrian mall, a half-mile walk closed to cars. The street was lined with kitschy tourist shops selling witch hats, tarot cards, poppets, and t-shirts saying “I got stoned in Salem.” There were also bookshops, candy stores, a place selling colorful, 1950s-inspired dresses, and a magic store where tourists could get their cards read at a velvet-covered table in the front window. There were women in colorful knitted witch hats, and children in Halloween costumes. It felt a bit like Disneyland, minus the colorful characters, and with an undertone of mass murder and hysteria.

I had arranged to meet Dan Gagnon that afternoon in Danvers, a town about five miles north of Salem. Though Danvers was formerly known as Salem Village. He’s a local high school teacher and lifelong Danvers resident who hosts historical witch hunt tours. He asked me to meet at the Witchcraft Victims’ Memorial, which sits off a quiet road next to a small park. After the chaos of the Essex Street Pedestrian Mall, Danvers was refreshingly quiet. It was late afternoon and crickets chirped in the trees around me. The memorial was the only indication that anything here might be worth commemorating.

You wouldn’t know it from the lack of crowds or businesses or ghost tours, but Danvers, not Salem, was the true site of the Salem witch trials. The location of this memorial, on a nondescript stretch of road abutting soccer fields, was chosen for precisely that reason: It’s across the street from the site of the Salem Village Meeting House, the center of historic Salem Village and the site of the original questionings of Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.

A refresher for those foggy on what happened: In late January of 1692, Abigail Williams started complaining of invisible bites and pinches. Her body shook as if she was having a seizure and she barked like a dog. Soon, her little cousin, nine-year-old Betty, caught the affliction. A doctor was called in, who diagnosed the “evil hand.” A witch was in their midst.

One of the first women accused of witchcraft was Sarah Good, a poor widow whom Schiff described as seeming to have “wandered into the village directly from the Brothers Grimm.” Under questioning, Good named Sarah Osborn as a witch. The girls stopped thrashing long enough to corroborate. Then, the girls named a third witch: Tituba.

Tituba Indian had likely been purchased in Barbados and brought to Boston in 1680. When she was brought into the tavern for questioning, she did something different from the other two women: she confessed guilt immediately. She confirmed the girls’ claims that Sarah Good and Sarah Osborn were witches; in fact, she said, the three of them had flown through the night on poles as far as Boston together. The three were sent to jail to await their trials–where evidence and truth did not matter. Tituba would be the only one of the three to survive the year.

Tituba was able to survive because of a strange loophole in the justice system at the time: those who confessed to witchcraft were clearly reformed and therefore could not be killed for their actions. Because she was an enslaved woman, no record of her version of events remains beyond her March 1692 deposition when she confessed to practicing witchcraft. Beyond that, the archival records that have survived are prosaic, cold facts recording her status of enslavement, her imprisonment at the Salem jail, and her eventual sale after the trials had ended. As the hysteria evolved that year and more women were accused and put on trial, this loophole became just one of the ironic inconsistencies that led to twenty five deaths and more than thirty community members accused, among them pregnant women, and one child, Dorothy Good, who was either four or five years old when she was arrested.

By the time I got to Danvers, I felt weary and jaded from what I’d seen in Salem after just a few hours. Given the dark history and the annual spike in tourism in the area, I wondered what a Danvers native thought about the trials—and what they’ve become in our collective memory. I imagined that being from a place so close to Salem’s annual fall tourism but constantly correcting the record for the sake of historical integrity would be frustrating. Which is why I contacted Gagnon, who is a member of the Danvers Historical Society and has published books and articles about the history of the Salem Witch Trials. Gagnon was reserved; in his khakis and checked button up he reminded me of my own high school history teacher, but younger.

In 1629, the Puritans came to Massachusett land and named their settlement Salem. Trees were cut down, the Massachusett people were displaced, and tensions rose between the indigenous peoples of the land and the Puritans who now laid claim to it.

According to Schiff, within a decade, farmers began spreading to outlying areas, claiming more land for their homes and farms. About five miles away, a community of farmers cohered, and called its settlement Salem Village. In 1667, Salem villagers began petitioning Boston for independence from what had become known as Salem Town. Once Salem Village was granted independence, construction began on a parsonage. A minister moved in, and then another. And 20 years later, it was in this parsonage in Salem Village, where Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris, pointed the first fingers that would begin the Salem Witch Trials. In 1752, Salem Village was renamed Danvers while Salem Town kept its name and the connection to an event that didn’t even take place there.

This is a history Gagnon knows in his bones. His family goes back generations here, though “not that far back,” he assured me. He grew up playing soccer on the fields by the memorial and assiduously avoids downtown Salem between September and November.

His hesitation to sensationalize his town’s history matches my impression of Danvers as a whole. Salem’s website features the town’s logo—a swishy witch’s hat—above the city’s slogan “Still making history.” The site boasts a witch museum, a witch village, a festival of the dead, and a theatrical performance of a witch trial where afterwards tourists can pose for photos “with a replica of the hanging tree” (though, the page noted the event is “suitable for all audiences”). Danvers’s website, on the other hand, is sober with a backdrop image of boats on a marina on the Porter River and links for residents to make payments to government organizations or to report potholes. The website makes no mention of its history; the streets aren’t lined with signs boasting tourist destinations or ghost tours. Where Salem Town seems to capitalize on this history, the former Salem Village seems intent on escaping it.

Gagnon told me it’s not avoidance of the history that drives Danvers’s demureness. It’s that it’s still too soon.

“It had a deeper effect here and a longer lasting effect,” he said. “The people who lived here in 1692 really couldn’t move away. So they lived here for generations. Everybody was related to some ancestor on either or probably both sides, you know, after a couple of generations and really took that seriously.”

Dan told me that Salem’s tourism industry was actually a recent development. For most of the last 300 years, the witch trials were an ugly memory from history, but not a major draw to the community.

“They knocked down what was left of the jail, which you think would be an important historic site,” he said. “Seeing as Salem only has one structure with direct ties to the witch hunt, it's amazing you would have knocked down any.”

Dan told me it wasn’t until the early 1980s that the city started to use its connection to the witch trials to drive tourism. “Salem had been industrial—factories like linen and the like—and all the factories closed. How are you going to replace this gap in your economy?”

One Boston Globe article I found from 1991 detailed the influx of witch-related tourism to downtown Salem for the 300th anniversary of the witch trials with the headline “Salem’s plans offend witches.” A modern-day witch named Laurie Cabbot said “There’s a chance to set history straight here, and no one’s doing it . . . they’re exploiting the whole issue of witchcraft.”

It surprised me that Salem’s identity as a tourist attraction is a relatively recent phenomenon. As a visitor to the town, I assumed it had always been part of the town’s identity. The tourism industry in Salem certainly goes to lengths to make that seem true, too.

Back in Salem town there’s a small boutique called HausWitch Home and Healing, a light-filled shop with funky, colorful textiles and shelves filled with spell kits, potions, crystals and candles. Its website describes it as “a modern metaphysical lifestyle brand that combines the principles of earth magic, intentionality, interior decorating, and intersectional feminism to bring magic and healing into everyday spaces.” HausWitch is the type of place I would make a beeline for if I’d been in Salem with my friends instead of on a research trip.

“We’ll count how many tiny witch hats come into the store, because that was a trend for a while,” Melissa Rose Nierman told me. She’s married to Erica Feldmann, the founder of HausWitch. Nierman herself runs a business in Salem called NowAge Travel where she offers small-group tours exploring the occult through a historic and intersectional lens.

I wanted to talk to her because I was starting to get the feeling that the story I was telling myself about Salem was a little too simple.

“Why do you think people are drawn to Salem?” I asked her.

“I think a lot of people come here to explore the shadow,” she said. “They want to explore the things that they can’t explore with their office mates in Idaho or wherever they’re coming from. There’s certain people that will come here where they’re like, ‘I'll get a tarot reading because it's October and because that's what you do in Salem, but I would never do that in real life.’ And so it's this thing that gives people permission to explore things that are the other.”

The way Nierman sees it, if a spooky girl's trip to Salem is what people need to feel permission to explore spirituality outside of organized religion, that is fine. After all, that fear of unseen realms—the fear of magic in any form—is what underpinned the atrocities in 1692. In that sense, we’re still haunted.

Nierman says that people come to Salem with an intense hunger for magic though, and that frenetic energy can be overwhelming, especially in October: “It's like too intense. Because it's like, all these people want it. And they're like, I want to experience a ghost. You know what I mean?”

So if any energetic fingerprint exists in Salem, it’s of the people who come searching for evidence of what Nierman calls the shadow. After all, that is what I was there for too, wasn’t it? I wanted to believe in something bigger than what I could see— but the truth of what I’d learned about the town kept getting in the way. I knew I needed to keep trying to understand the town’s past if I was going to get close to feeling anything more.

After all, that is what I was there for too, wasn’t it? 

That night we had booked two tickets for a different walking ghost tour I’d found online that promised to tell the true stories of Salem’s witches, ghosts, voodoo tradition, and even vampires. I was wary, but I went into the tour with an open mind. Maybe I would feel something real.

At eight o’clock, the tour began. Our guide wore a striped top hat straight out of a Tim Burton film and spoke with a tremor in his voice as he promised truly scary, truly paranormal experiences. He said people on these tours had fainted, screamed, and even peed their pants from fear, and he encouraged us to take a moment to protect ourselves however we preferred.

One of our first stops was the site of the old Salem jail, now an office building.

“This is the site of the original witch dungeon,” our guide said. “It was rotting away on this land until the 1950s . . .They intentionally burned that history away. That's how much they wanted to forget about it.”

Our tour group was rapt. He continued.

“There are witch shops and witch museums everywhere in Salem. Some of it’s pretty silly, but it's got a place here, and I'm glad that all of you and the folks on the other tours that come and learn about the witch trials. I think if people hear this history, maybe this kind of persecution will have to happen again to other innocent victims in the future.”

His framing presumes a few facts without proper evidence. First, that there was history related to the witch trials that took place in Salem Town beyond the existence of the Salem jail, which was covered up by the city government. Second, that the city of Salem wasn’t explicitly involved in the creation of this tourism industry, and that it had instead popped up because of some passionate vigilante entrepreneurs who were keenly interested in preserving the memories of those who were killed. And third, that people on these tours wearing witch hats are doing their part to keep the memories of these people alive. He briefly mentioned Danvers when he said the accused had come from “all over.”

It also illustrates an irony that grated on me the whole time I was there: those who died in the trials cannot simultaneously be both martyr witches and innocent victims of mass hysteria. If we are to believe they were innocent victims, they cannot also be witches. Keeping the memory of those accused alive by dressing up as witches seems almost insulting.

According to our tour guide, Salem’s tourism industry arose from a desire to remember what happened, to #neverforget the atrocities and to inspire us to be more critical of what we believe. But that same industry encourages dozens of occult-adjacent businesses to line Essex Street, the knitted witch hats on sale, and the sheer quantity of ghost tours in operation on any given night, all with the goal of selling the image of a different kind of Salem: a mystical place where magic has existed for hundreds of years. But both cannot be true—can they?

One older woman asked if the witches were hanged at the jail or somewhere else, and whether we’d be going there. This prompted our guide to tell us about Gallows Hill, the location where the accused witches were executed. He said the location was disputed—again, the town not wanting to own up to the facts of its history.

If we are to believe they were innocent victims, they cannot also be witches. 

“I'm not even really supposed to tell you where Gallows Hill is,” he said in a stage whisper. “If you ask nicely, I’ll tell you, but I won't go there with you. It’s not safe.” And then, he told us where it is: Proctor’s Ledge, a few miles outside downtown Salem. It’s a memorial site created in 2016 after researchers compared contemporaneous maps with contemporary ones, conducted analysis of the soil, and confirmed that the bodies of the accused would have been disposed of there. Any curious person could find the location of Gallows Hill in less than a minute of Googling.

After the tour, I skulked back to the car. The theatrics of the night, the deliberate obfuscation of the truth, and the sensationalism all felt icky. I had a hard time believing any of this was an earnest pursuit of preserving the memory of those killed. It seemed craven, an opportunistic corruption of this town’s already tenuous connection to a miscarriage of justice that ended in tragedy.

The morning after the ghost tour, I had plans to visit a couple museums I’d seen on Essex Street, but I was too depressed to go. It all felt fake and manipulative. We had breakfast and my husband convinced me to stop by the Parris Parsonage archeological site back in Danvers. He knew I was disappointed from what we’d seen the day before, but we couldn’t just skip the best-preserved site of the trials. I agreed.

The sun was already bright as we drove back through the autumn leaves to the parking lot by the memorial where I’d interviewed Dan the day before. It was a short walk to the site. We walked past old houses and historic plaques for the Salem Village meeting house, where the trials had taken place. We turned right on Centre Street and I counted the addresses, looking for number sixty-five. Dan told me to look for a blue sign, that the entrance wouldn’t look like anything at all besides a driveway. He was right. If it weren’t for the sign, I wouldn’t have known to turn down the small road. We walked back along a stone path lined with a stone wall that looked hundreds of years old. The neighbors on the right had chickens in coops and gardens fenced in; on the left, an old wooden structure was abandoned after years of use.

We walked back behind the two backyards to a clearing with a wooden fence in the middle of it. This was the site of the Parris parsonage. Inside the fence were two holes in the ground with stone foundations and gravel—all that’s left of the building from the witch trials era. Signs around the site told the history of the place. It had been built in 1681 after Salem Village was granted independence and was continuously occupied until 1784. In 1970, local students excavated the site, and in 1988, it was purchased by the town of Danvers and made into a historical landmark.

It was absolutely quiet. My husband and I stood at the wooden fence and looked in. There was a gate to our right, but it was closed. I rested my forearms on the fence and wondered if we were allowed to go inside.

The moment I thought that, a gust of wind blew toward us, and the gate opened inward, against the wind. I looked at him, my eyes wide.

“A certain kind of person would take that as a sign to come in,” I told him, smiling. Maybe the space was haunted after all, and a ghost was welcoming us in to walk on the land where the trials had started.

I was the kind of person who took it as a sign. I shook my head and walked through the gate.

I stood at the base of the steps of the main house. The stones were worn. I took a breath and walked down the stone steps and into the foundation of the house. I sat on a flat stone. I looked up.

The trees were so tall I wondered if they could have been here back then. At the very least, their ancestors would have been here, the trees that bore the acorns that brought them here. I thought of Tituba in this foreign, stolen land she’d been brought to, cultivating a garden to heal, a sense of home that would invite the accusation of witchcraft upon her. I thought of what this land remembered.

With each gust of wind through the trees, orange leaves fell like snow through the golden morning light. I laid my hand on the earth. After the frenzy in Salem and the disillusionment I felt from the ghost tour, this felt real. And at least for this moment, I was willing to believe it.

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