Salem, Massachusetts
After successfully Halloween-ing in Sleepy Hollow for the past three years, my friends and I (the Halloween All-Star Team) decided that we were ready to tackle Salem. I'd been to Salem once, in August of 2007, but I was eager to go back. We stopped along the way to pay our respects to Lizzie Borden, and visit some Hocus Pocus filming locations, and in the end we spent about one and a half days exploring Salem.
Salem is known best as "Witch City," because of the notorious happenings in Salem Village (present-day Danvers) circa 1692. 19 people were hanged after refusing to confess to charges of witchcraft, and one man—Giles Corey—was pressed to death. It's a little strange for a town to embrace a shameful past to the point of celebrating the very thing that caused the panic—witchcraft and witches—but most of the witch hoopla feels so far removed from the historical event.
The Witch House is the only surviving structure with any real ties to the Witch Trials—Judge Corwin lived and worked out of the house—and it was definitely a solid marketing move to name it such. Even without the witch connection, I would have loved the house—I have never seen a black house that I didn't love. In fact, Salem is full of the most adorable colonial-era homes with dark siding and colorful trim, and I defy you to find a more perfectly spooky style of house.
If the Salem Witch Trials had never happened or things had turned out differently, maybe Salem would be known as "Hawthorne City" after its most famous literary resident. After c
, I was excited to tour its namesake house, which also includes a tour of Hawthorne's birth house, which was moved onto the property to save it from demolition.
Salem on any October weekend is a bit of a madhouse, and we eschewed any ticketed tour until Monday, when things emptied out slightly. There are definitely parallels to Roswell in that both towns' identities are based around events in their pasts that have morphed over time into cheesy tourist destinations. I actually thought that Salem was a bit light on witch-themed things, even if we saw witch patches on policemen, witch emblems on firetrucks and every year the high school graduates a whole new class of "Salem Witches."