How Salem Stole the Witch Trials
The legacy of the 1692 witch trials has made Salem, Massachusetts the unofficial “Capital of Halloween” in the United States, bringing countless visitors and dollars to the city every October. However, not many know that most of the action in the Salem Witch Trials took place outside of Salem. Why does Salem get the fame, and what does that tell us about our understanding of history?
Finding a needle in a haystack and finding parking in Salem, Massachusetts, during the month of October are equally difficult tasks.
It seems strange out of context. The North Shore of Massachusetts is a nice place, but it isn’t exactly the Amalfi Coast. There aren’t many in-your-face tourist attractions that bring you there. People don’t stop by Beverly or Peabody after they go to Salem; they just leave. What Salem has pulled off is quite impressive. It would be a normal, decent suburb without having been the site of one of the most unique events in American History. The Salem Witch Trials give Salem an unmistakable air that peaks at Halloween, a distinct feeling of autumn coziness and Halloween spirit tinged with the legitimately spooky knowledge that a tragedy unfolded there.
Halloween enjoyers are drawn to Salem largely for this feeling, as well as some fairly tacky Halloween and Witch Trial-themed tourist attractions like museums, bar crawls, and “ghost tours.” Salem has been chosen as our Capital of Halloween solely because of the Witch Trials. It’s a story almost every American child learns early on in their social studies or history class. In 1692, a town was whipped into hysteria. What started with a few young girls having fits turned into accusations of witchcraft and covenant with the devil, full-on persecutions, neighbor turning on neighbor, scores being settled in the most peculiar way. It’s an unbelievable tale of mob mentality, human nature, and just how insane people were back in the day. People were genuinely being executed for witchcraft within one lifetime of the American Revolution.
For me, it was always wild that it happened right over there. I grew up around a half hour from Salem, and my mom has worked there for my entire life. I spent a lot of time in Salem. Outside of autumn, it’s a perfectly normal town. Could things have been so different back then? We learned a lot about Puritan behavior and culture growing up in Massachusetts, but nowadays it survives mostly through weird liquor laws and a few very WASP-y people. How could all of these famous scenes have happened in Salem?
Wait a second, did they happen there?
The traditional narrative I learned about the Salem Witch Trials is that they started when a few preteens, probably inspired by the unbelievably boring and repressive reality of life in Puritan Salem, decided to fake being afflicted with witchcraft conjured by others in town. They started with very easy targets, such as an enslaved woman and town outcasts, before others joined in. Over time, some of the most influential and respected people in the community were being thrown in jail off unfounded accusations. Absurd sham trials played out, where the accusers had psychotic fits when defendants were brought near them. Medieval “witch tests” were used as evidence to sentence people to death. While many were genuinely swept up in this mob and religious fervor, some clever people used the Witch Trials as an opportunity to get rid of people they were in land disputes or family rivalries with. In all, nineteen people were executed: fourteen women and five men. Over 200 people were accused in total.
There are many names that have become famous from this episode (certainly more famous in Massachusetts than other US states and especially other countries): Abigail Williams, Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, Giles Corey, John Proctor, John Hathorne, Mary Eastey, and more. Due to the sheer insanity of the events, they come off more as characters in a drama than real people, and history takes a lot of humanity from individuals. In fact, they actually are characters in The Crucible, a play which dramatizes the Witch Trials and has greatly contributed to popular memory of them. After reading this narrative in your textbook or on a Wikipedia page, you might get one line that essentially says “all of these people were from Salem Village, by the way.”
Sorry, Salem Village? Do you mean Danvers?
Salem Village has been called Danvers since the 1750s. Almost every important person in the Salem Witch Trials is from Danvers. But all the museums and memorials are in Salem.
Salem Town, where the trials and executions happened, is called Salem now. The trials and executions aren’t the bulk of the story, though. I personally find the context of the preexisting disputes and social dynamics the most interesting part of the Witch Trials. Either way, the accusations, arrests, and arguments all happened in Danvers. Most scenes in The Crucible happen in Danvers. The official formalities happened in Salem, and while they’re interesting, I’d still say they aren’t the real story. Once someone went to trial in the Salem Witch Trials, their fate was decided. The drama happened in Danvers.
Throwing another wrench into the story, the Witch Trials weren’t limited to Salem and Danvers either. Most accusations took place outside of either town. In fact, the town of Andover (where I happened to grow up) had the most accusations, at over 100. However, even people in Andover don’t know that. Salem has an unbreakable grip on the event’s legacy.
Now, Andover isn’t as well known because the hysteria died down before anyone in Andover was tried and executed. Fair enough. I don’t think they should be called the “Andover Witch Trials,” because despite how historiographical you want to get, obviously the people who got tried and executed are going to be the main event.
With that being said, what claim does Salem have to them, though?
I know what you’ll say, it’s the name. The people who died were from Salem Village (at the time) and they died in Salem. Very Salem-themed. Just slap Salem on the tagline and call it a day, right? Still, most of the action took place in present-day Danvers. Anything else that happened in previous centuries in Danvers would be referred to as having happened in Danvers, not Salem Village. If someone’s ancestors had come over on the Mayflower, settled in Salem Village/Danvers, and the family stayed there until the present day, that person would say “my family is from Danvers.” They would not say “my family is from Salem Village.” As a completely unrelated example, the D.R. Congo was called Zaire for most of its history before its name was changed in 1997. If someone was referring to something that had happened in Zaire/the D.R. Congo in 1985, when it was called Zaire, they would be more likely to refer to it as having happened in the D.R. Congo, despite what it was called at the time. And that’s a place that had a different name for half of its history as an independent country. Danvers has been called Danvers for more than 70% of its history. By all logic, Danvers should have the nominal claim over events that transpired in Salem Village.
Still, I’ll admit you can put a lot of Salem’s claim down to the Salem Village name. It’s the most simple explanation, but I don’t think it tells us everything.
Salem seems to get busier every year, each October bringing more “witch tourists” and fans of the haunted. Danvers has close to none of this going on. Much of that comes down to the built-in advantages Salem has when it comes to being a tourist destination.
Salem has a population of around 45,000, while Danvers comes in a bit shy of 30,000. Not a huge difference, but Salem’s is a compact 45,000 while Danvers’ is a spaced out 28,000. Salem is actually nearly three times as dense as Danvers. Salem’s downtown is charming, walkable, and inviting. It feels like one of the quieter neighborhoods in Boston, despite being a suburb. Outside of witch-related attractions, it has a university, a solid museum, a restaurant scene, and more. Perhaps most importantly, it’s along the coast, so its use as a port has made it a significant place since it was founded. Basically, even if you took away all the witch stuff, Salem would still be a place people stop by for one reason or another. It was already a destination, just not a tourist one.
Danvers has precisely none of this going for it. That’s no knock on Danvers; it’s a pleasant place. It’s just your typical small town, though. You don’t just go to Danvers to spend the day there. There isn’t really a place to spend the day anyway. If you have specific business there, you may find yourself in Danvers. If not, it’s not a place on your radar.
Ironically, if you look up “Danvers attractions,” you’ll find the old homes of people in the Witch Trials near the top. It’s almost sad, it’s like Danvers is shouting “Here! We have the places these people actually were! Someone notice!” You can feel Salem laughing as some Tuesday night ghost tour pulls in more money than Rebecca Nurse’s homestead garners in a year.
Salem deserves some credit for this. Building and maintaining a semi-walkable and accessible city is the foundation for Salem’s success. It was easy for Salem to build up their witch-based tourist frenzy because it was already a cool place. Some clever marketing, a couple well-made sites like the Salem Witch Museum, and you have your money machine. The vibes come first, the actual history second.
However, one dark part of the history has certainly contributed to Salem’s control of the Witch Trials’ legacy. There’s a famous phrase in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.” History, which is journalism when it’s first written, sticks closely to the same principle.
I casually dropped in earlier that while the people executed in the Salem Witch Trials were from Danvers, they were executed in Salem. Executions were anything but casual in 1692. It’s well documented how much of an attraction public executions were in the old days and the odd frenzy they stirred in people. Around this same time, executions in Europe were drawing crowds of tens of thousands, mobs who fought to get the best seats and woke up early to drink and socialize before. People were literally pregaming individuals being publicly killed. This stretches back to the gladiators and long before. Executions were an event, like a baseball game. Naturally, they inspired a lot of emotions.
If you were someone who had grown up in the strikingly monotonous environment of Puritan Massachusetts, seeing someone be publicly executed would probably be one of the most visceral experiences of your life. It would be the first thing that came to mind looking back at this whole debacle. Even if they didn’t write anything down, passing down the story of the Witch Trials to one’s descendants or telling others would contribute largely to the collective memory, especially in a place like Salem. It’s not like anything particularly significant has happened there since.
Remember, executions drew crowds. Many of the people at any of the executions weren’t present for any other part of the Witch Trials. When describing one of the most vivid and traumatizing things they had ever witnessed, a person would lead with “it happened in Salem,” not “the people executed were from Salem Village.” For those who were present for the entire course of events, the execution would likely still be the part they remembered most clearly. These were people they knew their entire lives, perhaps their relatives, going to the gallows.
Not to mention that people being executed for witchcraft is what makes the Salem Witch Trials memorable as a whole. Accusations can and have happened everywhere. I could accuse you of being a witch right now. People legitimately being killed over the accusation is what turns it into an enduring, hypnotizing, unbelievable historical event.
Therefore, a lot of people led with what bled, and Salem entered into historical infamy. The part of the event that inspired the most emotion is what people mentioned first to their kids, told to historians, wrote about and dramatized. That part happened in Salem. It’s reinforced by the attractions, reputation, and draw that Salem possesses. The Salem historical-industrial complex has crushed Danvers’ aspiring tourism industry. By the time anyone realized most of the story unfolded in Danvers, it was far too late. Most still don’t realize.
I think it’s clear by now that I don’t really believe Salem “stole” the Witch Trials, at least not in a deliberate or conscious sense. You could actually take this piece and use it to argue that Salem has a better claim to the Witch Trials than Danvers. That would be completely valid. What I’d like a reader to take away is that history isn’t always what it seems, and many different factors play into how we locate a historical event.
Still, I’ll put in one last shout for Danvers: I think the Salem Witch Trials depended on the specific people involved in it to a higher degree than most other historical events do. If a bunch of other witch trials happened in the present-day United States, we wouldn’t talk about Salem so much. A bunch of witch trials happened in Germany in the 1600s, and no one remembers who specifically participated. It’s the specific people in the Salem Witch Trials and the seemingly unhinged way in which they acted which make the event interesting. We find depth in how much we can’t relate to these individuals. They were shaped by a culture, values, and beliefs that are long gone and were largely confined to their time and area. They are a window into a particularly strange society, and their names survive for a reason.
The characters in this story, whether they were innocent, gullible, or sinister, have made a mark on the psyche of Massachusetts and the United States. They were from Danvers.
