J. W. Ocker - A Season with the Witch

To Lindsey, Esme, and Hazel.
My witches three.

Salem, Massachusetts, is the strangest city in the United Statesand thats a country full of strange cities. Las Vegas comes to mind. So does Los Angeles. North Pole, Alaska, is a good example. But the strangeness of these cities makes sense. We can easily trace the reasons they are odd and understand why they jut out from the map. We can see how a city that has successfully capitalized on a vice would use every form of spectacle to lure more vice-prone visitors to its desert wonderland. Or how a city, the primary industry of which involves actors in costumes amassing colossal riches and fame by pretending for a mass media, would develop into a place skewed from the norm. And we can understand how a small, isolated city with few resources except snow and a high latitude would settle on Christmas as a marketing angle.

But the strangeness of Salem... makes... no... sense.

Sure, 1692 is the reason. But its not a good reason. The Witch Trials constituted a nine-month episode in the citys four hundred busy years of history. But somehow those measly months created a modern identity and an international reputation for Salem.

The episode itself was strange, of course. I mean, a couple of tween girls playing with eggs panicked an entire region into believing it had been infiltrated by supernatural servants of Satan, escalating to the point that more than 150 people were accused. Most of them were jailed, and nearly two dozen were executed. Thats certainly weird enough to merit an exhibit at the local history museum, and could be a defining event for a city, I guess. Certainly its that bizarre.

Except that its not unique. Not even close.

In Europe, the quick with torches, stakes, and nooses had been actively hunting witches for at least two centuries before buckled shoes printed New England soil. Estimates place the number of victims of the European witch hunts at anywhere from fifty thousand to two hundred thousandso at the low end, holy-cow-thats-a-lot and at the high end, holy-cow-thats-a-lot.

In 2011, Vard, Norway, erected a memorial to the ninety-one victims of its seventeenth-century witch hunt. Lancashire, England, long ago turned its Pendle witches incident, in which ten people were hanged in 1612, into a tourist draw. Torsker, Sweden, has a witch memorial for the more than seventy victims who were beheaded and burned in 1675. So does Ellwangen, Germany, for a staggering 450 victims in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Zugarramurdi, Spain, has a whole museum dedicated to its witch trials of 1609, in which some seven thousand were accused. There are other memorials and museums all over the continent. Theyre just hard to find because Salem overpowers the search results, despite not being anywhere near the deadliest, strangest, nor most poignant witch trial in human history. Even all the dramatic stuff like burnings at the stake and dunking chairs never happened in Salem.

The Salem Witch Trials werent even the first witch trials in America. That dubious bit of monster hunting took place in Hartford, Connecticut, where Alice Young was hanged in 1647 on the spot of what is now the Old State House. Fifteen years later, Hartford would hang another four convicted witches. And thats still thirty years before Bridget Bishop swung in Salem. All told, there were around one hundred people tried for witchcraft in America before the crystal ball dropped on 1692. And that includes Boston, which had shaded its Common a few times with the bodies of accused witches. In fact, Bostons last executed witch was hanged three and a half years before Salems first.

Nor were the Salem Witch Trials the witch trials to end all witch trials. Witch hunting continued throughout colonial America and Europe for at least another century. Hell, theyre happening today. In Africa, India, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Southwest Pacific, men, women, and children are being arrested, tried, tortured, and executed for knowing good recipes for eye of newt and toe of frog. The United Nations estimates that thousands per year are killed for being witches. In 2016. We have robots on Mars and supercomputers in our pockets, and people are still afraid of the hoodoo.

Yet Salem is, alone in this country and on this planet, Witch City. It doesnt make sense. And it gets weirder.

Salem is not defined today in terms of the the Bible-clutching, black-clad Puritans who settled the area and who were both victims and villains in the trials. Instead, it is defined in terms of a cartoon version of what the victims were accused of being: witches, with pointy hats, flying broomsticks, and all.

The Salem police have Halloween-style witch-on-broom silhouettes sewn on the shoulders of their uniforms and painted on the doors of their patrol cars. The local high school mascot is a Wicked Witch of the Weststyle witch. Every year they graduate whole new classes of Salem Witches. The masthead of the city newspaper features a red cartoon witch. The seal of the fire department is a witch. The orange street signs in the tourist area all have Halloween witches on them. The latest tourism branding campaign for the city involves a conical witchs hat. And thats not counting the private businesses of Salem, where everything from laundromats to cab services to restaurants are themed with flying-broom hags. At some point, dark magic overtook the dark history, and the fantasy became more prominent than the facts. Which, to me, is fine. Im not judging and, in fact, will defend it. I just bring it up here to say that its weird.

Now, keep in mind, Salem has four centuries of noteworthy, non-witchy history, so its not like it doesnt have options. For instance, it was the birthplace, home, and inspiration of author Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the founding authors of American literature. Thats... not too shabby. Its also where the National Guard got started. Alexander Graham Bell lived and experimented there for a couple of years and gave one of the first public demonstrations of the telephone in Salem. Parker Brothers was founded in the city by native sons, and it was there that the world was introduced to everything from Monopoly to the Nerf ball. It was also one of the most important seaports in early America, pivotal in trading with the Orient and privateering against the British navy. And, of course, it has been through every American war, including those against the French, the Native Americans, the British, and the South. The Revolutionary War almost started in SalemGoogle Leslies retreat sometime. It has enough eggs in its cultural basket to Halloween-prank a whole city, even if that basket has been swapped for a cauldron.

But it gets weirder still.

By digging up the land to ferret out perceived witches, the judges and accusers of the Salem Witch Trials inadvertently prepared the ground for real Witches (capital W) three hundred years later.

Today, the city of Salem is the home of actual Witches, men and women who practice Wicca or Witchcraft or a related neo-pagan religion. Nobody knows quite how many Witches have lived in Salem over the decades or are there today. Estimates run from the hundreds to the thousandsthe latter estimate would put the number of Witches somewhere around 5 percent of the citys populationacross uncounted covens and temples. But regardless of how many Witches live in Salem, the religion is undeniably a prominent part of the citys culture and economy and a powerful draw for Witches across the world.