Yesterday’s post, in which I anticipated what today held in store, was prescient, if I do say so myself. We were indeed beset on all sides by witch imagery, and our tour guide was in fact a local college student in a period costume with a flair for hystrionics. But let’s start at the beginning.

Salem seems to have a conflicted, love-hate relationship with its witch history. On the one hand, the witch trials are understandably seen as, well, witch trials. One wonders if 300 years ago an accused witch would have decried the whole thing as a “communist hunt.” On the other hand, and in saying this I mean no ill will, Salem doesn’t really have a lot else to attract tourists. And so it is that witch imagery is omnipresent. Even the local constabulary sports the silhouette of a flying crone.

We started off at the Salem Witch Museum, which is as straightforward of a name as you’re going to find. We were the only two people on the tour (evidently June is their slow season). Our guide was the aforementioned young woman inclined to stagecraft who’s getting her master’s in Salem history. As she took us past barely-animated tableaux of witch trials and suchlike, she explained the sordid history, which I’ll summarize here:

In 1692, the two daughters of Salem’s new minister were found cavorting in the woods. This was frowned upon in Puritan society, so the girls offered an excuse which would become a pop culture phrase in the 1970s: “The Devil made me do it.” Indeed, they claimed that one (or sometimes a few) local witches had cast spells on them. To strengthen their case, the girls would occasionally fall into catatonic states or writhe uncontrollably. Now, in those days, witches were very much considered a thing, and the townsfolk set about the business of discovering who these witches were, and putting an end to them.

In the year and a half that followed, accusations and counter-accusations flew, and some 200 people were arrested as witches. Nineteen of them were hanged. The hysteria came to an end only when the Governor’s wife was accused of witchcraft, and the Governor decided it was time to grow up and enter the (then-dawning) 18th Century.

We then went to Salem’s Witch Dungeon Museum, which is a recreation of one of the jails (or, in the local vernacular, “gaols” where accused witches were held. They were not pleasant accommodations. And even if you were lucky enough to be acquitted, you then had to pay off your debt for the cost of food, shackles, and other provisions you had used before you could be released.

For a somewhat less lurid, even somber meditation on the events of 1692, we visited the (presumed) site of the hangings. For years no one was really sure where this storied “Gallows Hill” was located, but recent scholarship says it’s at a place known as Proctor’s Ledge, which sits behind the local Walgreens. A memorial was erected on the site in 2017, with the names of each of the 19 victims. (Excluded are the names of two dogs that also were hanged as witches.) (I am not making this up.)

But not all of modern Salem’s witch infrastructure is quite so gloomy. There is, for example, this brass statue of Samantha Stephens from the 1960s sitcom, “Bewitched.”

The statue was erected by TV Land in 2005, and it caused a bit of controversy. Some residents felt it showed an insensitivity towards witches…or at least toward those who were accused of being witches. “It’s a distortion of what went on,” harumphed one resident to NPR when the statue was unveiled. You think? A pretty blond witch living as a housewife in suburban 1960s America, with Paul Lynde as her wisecracking, campy uncle? Yeah, I guess that’s a distortion of what actually happened in a 17th-century Puritan community.

By the way, TV Land has erected statutes of other fictional characters in their hometowns, including Bob Hartley (Bob Newhart) in Chicago, Ralph Kramden (Jackie Gleason) at a New York bus station, Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore) at the same downtown Minneapolis corner where she throws her hat in the opening titles, and Andy and Opie Taylor (Andy Griffith and Ron Howard) in Raleigh, North Carolina. Sadly, Ron Howard is the only surviving member of this entire entourage.

Finally, as we were getting a little saturated with witchy things, we decided to have a fresh, cleansing experience at Salem’s….wait for it….pirate museum! After a day of witch gaols and hangings and men being crushed to death, nothing restores your faith in humanity like a bunch of displays about bloodthirsty marauders on the high seas.

Brew of the Day

It turns out most of Salem’s brew pubs are closed on Tuesday. So we tried a restaurant that was supposed to have a good beer menu. Here is said menu:

You’ll note that it’s all IPAs and lagers. Not a manly beer to be had. And for some reason, every single place we’ve been to over the past two days has PBR.

I had a margarita.

The devil made me do it.