SALEM, Mass.—Three centuries ago, hysteria swept this town and residents accused about 200 people of witchcraft. This month, local resentment toward witches is brewing again.
One million tourists, many sporting black pointy black hats, layers of mascara and long capes, are expected to course through this city’s historic downtown in October to visit cemeteries, haunted houses and witch museums. Traffic is choked. Sidewalks are jammed. The line at Dunkin’ runs 20 deep.
“It’s hellish,” said Bri Chisholm, a social worker who has lived in Salem all her life. “Last night, we walked a half mile in the pouring rain with our groceries in brown paper bags because we couldn’t park anywhere.”
Salem’s streets are narrow and crooked. The front doors of its centuries-old homes swing open onto skinny sidewalks designed for austere Puritans. On a recent Sunday, they were packed with out-of-state tourists, many of them munching candy corn.
“Salem Haunted Happenings,” as locals call the Halloween festivities, is bigger than ever. When pandemic lockdowns lifted, what had been a mostly regional tourist attraction went national, according to the tourism department. Cellphone data shows visitors coming from as far away as Ohio, Texas and California.
The hordes inject millions of dollars into the local economy. Homes rent out for $2,000 a night. Hotels book up a year in advance.
Last year, Stacia Cooper, director of a local tourism board, scolded her high-school-age son when he spent $300 on an 8-foot Sasquatch costume. So far this fall, he has made more than $1,000 posing with tourists.
Lines for restaurants, museums and gift shops started building in August. Last weekend, they stretched for blocks. Knots of tourists clustered every 100 feet around street performers dressed as headless horsemen, one-armed pirates and 10-foot ghosts.
On congested roads, tour buses competed with Amazon delivery vans and SUVs with New Jersey plates to squeeze through jammed intersections. Traffic backs up into neighboring towns.
“Total roadblock,” said Bob Baker of nearby Marblehead, who recalled being stuck for hours on an ill-timed trip through Salem. Living in the belly of the Halloween Industrial Complex, he said, isn’t for the faint of heart. He tries to bunker down in his house through the fall.
At the heart of Salem’s draw is a dark history. Starting in 1692, members of a quarrelsome community of Puritans began accusing their neighbors of consorting with demons.
More than 20 were executed, mostly by hanging. One man was pressed to death under a pile of rocks. The property of some of the dead was confiscated. Many of their bodies were buried in unmarked graves.
When the wife of the governor of Massachusetts was accused of witchcraft, he banned the use of “spectral evidence” in court, and the hysteria ended.
Over the next 30 years, most of the judges, jailers and accusers responsible for the murder spree apologized, and families fought to clear the names of the executed.
By and large, the city tried to forget what had happened out of shame and regret—only to have it periodically thrown in its face. Before the Civil War, Southerners clapped back at moralizing Northern abolitionists by saying that at least they “were not guilty of burning their grandmothers at the stake,” said Rebecca Johnson, a former professor of American religious history turned Salem tour guide.
Even through the 1950s, the subject was rarely discussed in Salem, another guide, David Mulhern, told 15 tourists as they walked through the crowded streets. “When you visit New York, do you ask about Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher? You don’t because people don’t want to talk about it.”
The television show “Bewitched” gave witches a makeover in the 1960s. In 1993, Hollywood released the movie “Hocus Pocus,” which was filmed in the city, introducing millennials to the witches of Salem.
Goth witches, feminist witches and mother earth witches have gravitated to Salem, where they have set up witch shops and a thriving Wiccan community. The witches of old were considered handmaidens of the devil. Today, the term is a catchall for practitioners of nature-based spiritualism.
Salem’s Halloween season has been cranking along for two months already, with the city doing its best to control the chaos. There is a website devoted to street closures and a promotional campaign urging Boston area residents to take public transportation. Porta potties line the streets in an effort to keep tourists from urinating in the bushes.
Ezequiel Dominguez, owner of a downtown barbershop called Clean Cut Studio, said business drops off in September and October because regular customers don’t want to brave the crowds.
“There’s no place to park,” he said. “Customers are always canceling.”
Other businesses, though, are cashing in.
Leanne Marrama, a self-described witch and co-owner of a store called the Pentagram, said she works 12 hours a day in September and October. Last Saturday, Celtic music and incense drifted through the packed store while she and six other witches did half-hour Tarot card readings for $90 a pop. Some Salem witches charge as much as $500, she said, which he calls “just gouging.”
Across the street, tourists traipsed through a nearly 400-year-old cemetery, examining rough-hewed stone benches inscribed with the names, dates and manner of execution of each resident put to death as a result of the trials. A nearby loudspeaker beckoned tourists to a wax museum for the low, low price of $26.
“I’d like to see a life-size wooden replica of the gallows where they hung the witches,” says Dona Newman, a tourist from Melbourne, Fla. “It would give a real sense of how intense it must have been.”
Chisholm, the local social worker, found it all a bit creepy. “I worry we’re commercializing a tragedy,” she said.
Robert Lutts will be happy when November rolls around. Cabot Wealth Management, which he founded, has an office in downtown Salem. Six portable toilets now stand just outside his office. One year, he called the city to report a man on a loudspeaker preaching against demons.
He tries to vacation in October to avoid the turmoil.
“We don’t like it at all,” he said. “But when there’s 1,000 people right outside your window, there’s not much you can do about it.”
Write to Douglas Belkin at Doug.Belkin@wsj.com
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