“I could have sworn she was a witch,” my friend Sharon said. We were sitting on a latticed bench looking out at sea, staring at a giant skeleton ship, the kind Coleridge mummified in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “Can I have some cigarettes?” asked a woman with a toothy grin. She seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Her wispy hair was jumping in the wind and she wore a long gown which was black. She was wall-eyed and weird.
An American town has creepy tales of witch-hunting to tell
Sharon had just bought a pack of Natural American Spirit that assures smokers “100 per cent addictive-free natural tobacco, light mellow taste”. She gave five of her 20 cigarettes to the woman who crackled a ‘thank you’. The next minute she was gone.
How did she know your bag contained cigarettes? I asked Sharon. “Because she’s a witch,” Sharon shot back.
We were at Salem, the home of the witches. Nineteen of them were hanged from the gallows, over 300 years ago. In January of 1692, daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village fell ill. The girls are “bewitched”, said the village doctor, without realizing that his diagnosis was to begin the biggest witch-hunt ever in America.
Overnight, Salem turned a spooky town. Innocent people, some 150 men and women were rounded up because their names had been “cried out” by tormented young girls as the cause of their pain. They were thrown into prison. The first to be tried was Bridget Bishop. She was found guilty and hanged on June 10. Thirteen women and five men followed her to the gallows on three successive hanging days, 313 years ago.
“I live at Gallows Hill where the witches were hanged,” Tracy tells me. She’s sitting outside at a strip mall in front of a psychic’s shop. I ask her whether she be the psychic. “Heaven’s no,” she giggles, patting her poodle with a pink bow sitting pretty on her lap. The Salem resident walks me through folklores of her town, saying that around October 31, a tsunami of tourists arrive to celebrate Halloween, the festival of the witches that originated here.
Is the park near her home haunted? I ask Tracy.
“Well there’s an eerie energy around the area ... the air is so still and the vibes bewitching. I take my ‘baby’ (read: the pink-bowed poodle) late at night for a walk. We both love it.”
But surely the spirits of Tituba, the black slave of the 12- year-old girl who accused her along with Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne to be witches, must still fill the nightly air with shrieks of injustice?
Tracy is one of those women who don’t want to go there. She gives me a broad smile and starts a new conversation with the poodle. It’s time-out for me.
“I will speak the truth as long as I live.” These words are still ringing in my ear after I have left the Salem Witch Museum that choreographs the full story of the witch trial with drama and effect. “Oh Lord, help me. It is false. I am clear. For my life now lies in your hands ...” says an old woman by the name of Rebecca Nurse before going to the gallows.
Martha Corey, Margaret Scott, Mary Easty, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmott Redd, Samuel Wardwell, and Mary Parker are hanged next. They continue to cry innocent.
Massachusetts has a violent past. The early settlers landing on its shores brought smallpox and ambition to build another England in America. They transported their Common Law and their shopkeepers’ mentality; they carried blueprints of Queen Anne chairs and the King’s English, driving the native Indians out of homes to build their own. The states they set home came to be called ‘New England’. Today, you find the descendants of the British sprawled in colonial homes and grand estates oozing with money and class in these six states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
Along with slavery and cruelty to blacks and the hunting of native Indians, the English built the highest seats of learning like Yale in New Haven, Connecticut and the Harvard University in a small town they named Cambridge, Massachusetts. The grand Charles River divides Cambridge from Boston, the maritime heartthrob of prosperity reaching its zenith in the centuries to follow.
Salem, only 14 miles away from Boston, became the 6th wealthiest coastal town in America.
Ben, the friendly skeleton gives us flyers about the ‘House of Wax’ filled with ghost stories, myths and monsters and stops by our bench on the waterfront for a chat on witchcraft. “Women and young girls dabbling in the occult in the 17th century began to hallucinate and accuse their enemies of being witches. Science has proved that a mold in the wheat that the early settlers ate contained ergot which is used to make LSD, the drug that causes hallucinations.”
Salem may be famous for its ‘haunted happenings’ but it also owns Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter, born and raised here.
Had the telephone man, Alexander Graham Bell, not given his first public demonstration of his invention at Salem, what would all the nerds at Harvard and other colleges have done without their cell phones? The campus is a cell nucleus where one sees students walk and talk clinging to their lifeline, the cell. So young ones prostrate before Mr Alexander Bell, the inventor of the phone.
If you use a lead pencil named Dixon, then you should know that “Graphite Joe” Dixon, its founder, started his manufacturing at Salem. And if you have spent hours at the Monopoly board, furiously buying hotels in Park Lane or Mayfair to cash in on your real estate from your fellow players, whose luck of the draw lands them on your properties, then you will be happy to hear that George Parker invented this game as a 16-year-old Salem High School student in 1883.
So shall one drop the witches that Salem so cruelly hanged and also delete from our memories the inhuman prison cells where men and women were cast, most meeting their death by disease and starvation rather than the gallows? But Salem’s history is writ in The Crucible, that playwright Arthur Miller made memorable. It is a segue of the witch-hunt of the 1950s when Senator McCarthy intimidated Americans over the anti-Communist furore and ruined the lives of many. America conformed as a “silent generation of students populated the nation’s campuses, while their professors shrank from teaching anything that might be construed as controversial”.
“The Black Silence of Fear” as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called it blanketed the nation, and meaningful political dissent had all but withered away.
Witch-hunting is alive and thriving today, many in Salem tell me. After 9/11 and the more recent London bombings, there is a hysteria against the Muslims, in particular Pakistanis now.
“I could have sworn she was a witch,” my friend Sharon said. We were sitting on a latticed bench looking out at sea, staring at a giant skeleton ship, the kind Coleridge mummified in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “Can I have some cigarettes?” asked a woman with a toothy grin. She seemed to have appeared from nowhere. Her wispy hair was jumping in the wind and she wore a long gown which was black. She was wall-eyed and weird.
We were at Salem, the home of the witches. Nineteen of them were hanged from the gallows, over 300 years ago. In January of 1692, daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village fell ill. The girls are “bewitched”, said the village doctor, without realizing that his diagnosis was to begin the biggest witch-hunt ever in America.
Tracy is one of those women who don’t want to go there. She gives me a broad smile and starts a new conversation with the poodle. It’s time-out for me.
Along with slavery and cruelty to blacks and the hunting of native Indians, the English built the highest seats of learning like Yale in New Haven, Connecticut and the Harvard University in a small town they named Cambridge, Massachusetts. The grand Charles River divides Cambridge from Boston, the maritime heartthrob of prosperity reaching its zenith in the centuries to follow.
Salem may be famous for its ‘haunted happenings’ but it also owns Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter, born and raised here.
So shall one drop the witches that Salem so cruelly hanged and also delete from our memories the inhuman prison cells where men and women were cast, most meeting their death by disease and starvation rather than the gallows? But Salem’s history is writ in The Crucible, that playwright Arthur Miller made memorable. It is a segue of the witch-hunt of the 1950s when Senator McCarthy intimidated Americans over the anti-Communist furore and ruined the lives of many. America conformed as a “silent generation of students populated the nation’s campuses, while their professors shrank from teaching anything that might be construed as controversial”.
