Salem Museum Gives In, Exhibits 1692 Witch-Trial Materials

In 2017, Donna Seger, a history professor at Salem State University (Massachusetts) wrote an open letter to the leadership of the Peabody Essex Museum, a big, rich institution in downtown Salem that along with being a major art museum, controls (and usually hides) the town’s historical archives. Her letter stated, Please reconsider your decision to …

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Salem—It’s an International Brand

On August 3, 2018 Jason Mankey posted his list of the “25 Most Influential Living Pagans” on his blog—a good list, but slanted toward the English-speaking world (the “Anglosphere”). On August 10, Jaime Girónes responded at The Wild Hunt with “The 15 Most Influential Pagans in México.” I read it with interest, but I broke …

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Not Everyone in Salem was a Puritan

Just a post-postscript to my earlier series of posts about witchcraft and Salem, Mass. We tend to phrase the story of the 1690s as Puritans hunting “witches,” and it is true that members of the Puritan churches set the moral tone in most of New England. But they were not the only colonists. Most came …

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The “Salem-Santa Fe” Mystery Solved

A month ago I blogged how astonished M. and I were to see that Kakawa, the Santa Fe-based chocolate house, was about to open a new store in Salem, Mass. Imagine our surprise to see this storefront on Essex Street next to the [Peabody-Essex] museum: Kakawa is coming! Sure, I’d believe it in Aspen, Colo., …

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Turning Dead Puritans into the Mighty Dead: Redefining Salem

The last time that I walked through the Salem witch trials memorial adjacent to the Charter Street cemetery, I saw that someone had left a rolled-up paper at John Proctor’s memorial bench.[1]No one ever seems to sit on the benches, perhaps because they usually hold offerings of one sort or another. Was it a petition? …

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Salem, Arkham, and H. P. Lovecraft

What Bourbon Street is to New Orleans’ French Quarter, Essex Street is to Salem, Mass. When it’s party time (October), this is where the party happens. Otherwise, it is the chief tourist-commercial street, whether you want the Peabody Essex Museum, Christian Day’s witch shop, or The Witch House, which was actually the upscale home of one …

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Hawthorne’s Witches and a Secret History of Salem

A century and a half after the Salem witch trials, they still lived in the mind of a young Salem writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). From his fiancee’s window, if he had a good arm, he could have thrown an ink bottle at the headstone of his ancestor John Hathorne, a leading judge in the trials, …

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Where Were the Witches Hanged in Salem? (Part 2)

Read Part 1 here. Once there was a dirt road, the “Boston road,” that ran beside a pond on the way out of Salem.  (Now it is called Boston Street.) Then there came a railroad, and a shoe factory, and today a Walgreens drugstore with the actual witch execution site in back, next to the …

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Where Were the Witches Hanged in Salem? (Part 1)

I left our Salem apartment last Thursday to walk to the site, but what people used to think was the site is not the site. In fact, the true location, which was of course known at the time and remembered through at least the mid-18th century, when the last persons who witnessed the executions of …

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