The witch is a traveler. She has traversed continents, cultures, and epochs, carrying with her millennia of conflicting ideas about sex and gender, magic and power. The witch has made us travelers, too. She leads us on a journey through the horrors and wonders of myth and history. Seeking the timeless archetypal witch, those who were branded witches centuries ago, and those who identify as witches today requires travel both literal and figurative. Witch Hunt is a guide through this mercurial terrain.
Witch Hunt traces the legacy of the witch through significant sites across Europe and North America. Witches no doubt appear in cultures around the world, but the witch who looms largest within the nebulous conceptual region we call the West—the monstrous maiden out to seduce and destroy men, the Satanic sorceress hell-bent on killing crops and livestock, the horrible hag out to consume children—was born in ancient myths, raised in medieval times, and came to full furious fruition in the early modern era.
Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, thousands of people accused of witchcraft suffered and died. Families were ripped apart. Villages were decimated. Terror, torture, and paranoia ravaged communities. It is a delicate matter to craft a travel guide through such horrifying episodes in human history. Whenever we immerse ourselves in periods of historical oppression, we run the risk of glamorizing or aestheticizing them, which can make light of real people’s pain and trauma. First and foremost, this book aims to honor the victims of the witch hunts.
And yet, the morbid appeal of the witch hunts is the reason they continue to survive as a subject of intrigue. Cunning women, stunning sirens, and vengeful crones strike fear into the hearts of young and old. Sexually gratuitous confessions and untrammeled cruelty against a backdrop of apocalyptic weather, religious corruption, and personal power struggles; magic, destruction, and seduction all wrapped up with a poisonously pretty bow—the whole thing is so Shakespearean the witch hunts literally inspired the writing of Macbeth.
The most curious piece of this puzzle, however, is how we got from witch being a word you didn’t whisper without fear of recourse in early modern times to an identity voiced proudly by thousands of people in the twenty-first century. “The transformation of the witch from a figure who had occasioned fear and loathing for the best part of 2,000 years into one perceived as sympathetic—even aspirational—is one of the most radical and unexpected developments of modern Western culture,” proclaims John Callow in Embracing the Darkness: A Cultural History of Witchcraft.
Witch Hunt explores this radical shift in Italy, France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It tells the story of the witch on the ground, through sight, touch, scent, and sound. My journey began with a visceral need not merely to read history but to feel it in full-body immersion. I sought out art, literature, scripture, and academic scholarship, but my research deepened in the moments when I put myself in a hallowed place and simply sat still. There is no substitute for the magic of place.
Halloween in Witch City
Salem, Massachusetts
Handmaidens of the Lord should go so as to distinguish themselves from Handmaidens of the Devil. —Cotton Mather
Salem was a ghost town on Devil’s Night. I trekked through the soaked grounds of Salem Common in the dark, not a soul in sight. Red lights burst like flames from the windows of a stately home across the street. The Salem Witch Museum lurched into the night sky next door, turning shades of blue and green and purple. A lone man appeared, stumbling in circles toward me, deeply drunk or perhaps deep in ritual. I wielded my umbrella like a shield, hoping he would take his presence elsewhere. He hovered nearby in uncomfortable, wobbly silence before disappearing into the abyssal borders of the park.
Just then, there was movement in the gazebo at the center of the common. A man in clerical robes towered over a woman in street clothes. They seemed to be in the middle of some sacred rite, as if he were initiating her into something terrible. At least that’s what my imagination conjured up as I passed the two strangers. They became sinister statues in the domed platform, as the costumed man held the woman’s face in his hands and kissed it, uncannily slow, no one around to witness the bizarre scene but me.
A thick mist twisted through the trees. The carnival booths ready for the next day’s Halloween festivities were slick with rain, the glow of string lights overhead melting into orange and yellow leaves shivering in the wind. The city I traveled so far to see was nearly empty, and the sinister lore of Salem was getting to me. I wasn’t frightened by supernatural evil or the lure of Satan’s sweet embrace in the woods, though. It was the threat of everyday men, drunk on power or just plain drunk that sent me hurrying back to my Airbnb that night. They were the real danger in Salem centuries ago. After all, the most frightening part of the witch hunts has never been the fantastic lore about the Devil and his minions, but the evil that men do.
*
The next morning the rain came in undulating sheets. Branches did backbends in the squall. Despite nature’s screams, Salem slowly came to life for its most hallowed day.
Halloween has roots in the fiery harvest festivals of Europe like Samhain, the Celtic celebration of “summer’s end” and a time of death and rebirth in preparation for the cold, dark half of the year. Samhain is thought to be when the separation between the living and the dead—the veil—is the thinnest. For contemporary Pagans, it remains an occasion to honor those who no longer walk among us (the Catholic holidays All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day are roughly the same time), and many practitioners provide offerings to their ancestors—like those of Mexican heritage do on Día de los Muertos.
Things are never what they seem on Halloween. Our masks become more visible, and we reveal more of ourselves—both literally and figuratively—through the costumes we choose to wear. For twenty-four hours, identity is a category in disarray. Intimates become unrecogniz- able; strangers become fast friends. This carnivalesque atmosphere is only heightened in Salem, setting up potential scares at every corner and the option to channel forbidden energies you wouldn’t dare to at home.
Caught in a reverie about the sacred and profane ways we celebrate this transitional part of fall, I ducked into a side street to get some respite from the fast-growing crowd. It was afternoon, and the weather was humid and wet like a fog machine was malfunctioning somewhere. I narrowly avoided a fanged clown, a trio of Hocus Pocus drag queens, and Jack Skellington on stilts only to find myself in the company of a small black cat, rubbing up against the brick facade of the Old Town Hall. She was a liminal creature, like all of her kind. She could easily have been a consort of goddesses or Satanic star of supernatural affairs, like the black cat Tituba confessed she encountered in 1692 that said, “serve me.”
Taken with this visitor, I followed her as she padded across the cobblestones of Essex Street. Her tail undulated in the air, becoming a hypnotic pendulum that coaxed me into an imagined past. She finally settled in front of a seafood restaurant down the street—not unusual fare for a cat—but in a flick of her vertical pupils we were in some other place—or, rather, some other time. Apple trees were everywhere. Unpicked specimens littered the ground, their protective skins pulled apart by insects and small animals, leaving their browning flesh exposed to the elements. A figure moved through the orchard back into a wooden house, her gait brisk. There were noises inside, glass shattered. A man roared “Bridget!” and a woman’s screams echoed through the rafters as the sound of flesh met flesh. She ran outside, her face bleeding.
The cat beckoned me to watch, clawing at my calves to keep me in place. Seasons turned, the trees withered, and Bridget’s face turned shades of blue and green and purple as snow kissed the outstretched boughs around her home. The sounds in the house continued, forcing Bridget in and out of court as neighbors lodged complaints. He hit her; she hit back. She deemed him “old devil” with every blow and ended up in court again for coarse language. She was forced to sit out in the town square, mouth gagged, with her foul offense written on a piece of paper fastened to her forehead. And then one summer, the fighting stopped.
I watched Bridget prepare herself for the silent funeral and scrub her home of every trace of his violent musk. His land and his livestock were hers, but she had debts to pay and there would be little time to enjoy these new riches. Soon enough, she was accused of witchcraft, of appearing as a spectral black cat. Later, she was accused of theft. A lack of evidence saved her, but she was now marked with a heretical stain.
The harvests came and went and came, and only a few years later, Bridget was back in court. Now remarried to a woodcutter, she was accused of bewitching Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Mary Walcott, and Ann Putnam Jr. The young girls were tormented by unseen evil, beset with terrors that drove them into fits. Demoniacs? Casualties of conversion disorder? Perpetrators of petty revenge on a power trip? Whatever the case may be, witchcraft was the diagnosis, and Bridget Bishop was a suspect.
I stood in the middle of the street, unbothered by people pouring around me. I saw Bridget’s day in court in the old courthouse. She climbed to the second floor to face a reckoning with a town that didn’t care a lick for her life. Witness after witness testified against Bishop, saying she tried to force them to sign the Devil’s book, that she hit a child with a spade, that poppets stuck with pins were found in the walls of her home. They said she killed her first husband. They found a “preternatural teat” when they searched her trembling body. “I know nothing of it. I am innocent to a witch. I know not what a witch is,” was all she could manage. But even though a second examination failed to find that same bit of flesh, she was the first to fall victim to the hang- man’s noose.
I was jostled back to the present by a crowd of tourists in costume, cackling and hooting. The cat became a phantom itch around my ankles. There was no courthouse, no Bridget, save for a play reenacting her trial—Cry Innocent—that was about to begin, mere steps from where her orchard once stood.
*
Halloween in Salem is witch tourism at its finest. Visiting the city at any other time of year doesn’t make nearly as much as sense once you see jack-o’-lanterns lit and leering at you from local homes and shop windows, the streets shut down, overrun with costumed revelers, and incensed Christians protesting and proselytizing in front of the bronze Bewitched statue amid the crowd. The number of witch-hatted heads bobbing along the cobblestones increases exponentially, and witchcraft shops can barely contain the droves of gawkers and curious dabblers who mix in with the practicing witches in search of books, candles, oils, or burnables for their own celebrations.
It’s a confusing mix of supernatural and historical lore that draws people to Salem throughout the year. The numerous museums, tours, plays, and merchandise reflect this ambivalence. Misinformation abounds—as it often does when witches are the subject in question—so “Witch City” has become a microcosm of the ways Western culture conflates and confuses ideas about witches and witchcraft.
Salem was the site of America’s most infamous witch hunt in 1692, but those “witches” being hunted were merely women and men caught up in a frenzy driven by a mystery illness, intercommunity conflict, Puritanical zeal, and a broken justice system. The backdrop to all this? Eldritch darkness of the material and spiritual kind.
“In isolated settlements, in smoky, fire-lit homes, New Englanders lived very much in the dark,” Stacy Schiff writes of Salem in The New Yorker, “where one listens more acutely, feels most passionately, and imagines most vividly, where the sacred and the occult thrive.”
During the frigid winter between 1691 and 1692, two prepubescent girls in Reverend Samuel Parris’s household began to exhibit signs of an unexplainable illness or, rather, they fell into “fits.” At times they would be lifeless and still—all but dead to the world—then suddenly crescendo into violent cries and howl as if pinched and bitten by unseen entities. Upon multiple examinations, it was determined the reverend’s daughter and niece, Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams, had been bewitched.
A growing number of girls began to exhibit the same symptoms across Salem Village, and the first three accusations were unleashed against Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. Good was a beg- gar known for unruly, aggressive speech; Osborne was an outcast who rarely attended church; Tituba was an enslaved woman Reverend Parris had brought from Barbados. Under questioning—and, likely, physical aggression—Tituba confessed to a meeting with the Devil, saying that Good and Osborne were indeed witches and many more lurked in Salem, too.
As the group of afflicted accusers grew, so did the number of accused witches.The town was in such a state of upheaval that the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which had been convened in Salem Town to oversee the case, began to throw procedure out the window. “In Salem, the usual standards of evidence in New England courts had been abandoned for a time,” explains Robert W. Thurston in The Routledge History of Witchcraft, “due to a strong sense that a conspiracy by evil forces against the good people was at work.”
Dozens were accused of witchcraft based on spectral evidence—Bridget Bishop included. The possessed girls blamed Bridget for sending her specter to attack them, and a male neighbor accused Bishop of sending her spirit form to terrorize him in bed at night. Rebecca Nurse, an elderly grandmother, was also accused by the girls of afflicting them with her specter and “urging them to sign the devil’s book.” Nurse was later convicted and hanged, too. Martha Carrier would suffer the same fate, charged by the same possessed cadre of causing harm with her ghostly apparition. (They also revealed Carrier was told by the Devil “she should be Queen of Hell”—a plumb position indeed.)
Just as in Europe, the accused in Salem were predominately women. “Puritan belief made it easy to hold women responsible for the failures of the emerging economic system,” writes Carol F. Karlsen in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. She explains that the Puritan clergy had long fostered the idea that “if anyone were to blame for their troubles it was the daughters of Eve.”
There were other reflections of old-world witch hunts in Salem, too. Englishman Michael Dalton’s Countrey Justice was in use across the Eastern Seaboard, and the legal manual affirmed that the testimony of the afflicted or bewitched—including that of children—was admissi- ble evidence in cases of witchcraft. In his manual, Dalton references nine-year-old Jennet Device supposedly speaking truth to power about Malkin Tower.
Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister who consulted on the Salem trials and who crafted multiple sermons and publications on the subject, also had a grandfather born in Lancashire. Mather had been told of the Pendle witch trials growing up and compared the incident to the one at hand in The Wonders of the Invisible World. When Mather delves into the case of minister George Burroughs, one of the few men to hang for witchcraft in Salem, he writes: “When the Lancashire Witches were condemn’d, I don’t Remember that there was any considerable further Evidence, than that of the Bewitched, and then that of some that con- fessed.” Although torture wasn’t technically legal under Massachusetts code, as in Lancashire, the appalling conditions of the jails and callous interrogation methods applied to the accused remain highly suspect. (There’s more on that subject at the Witch Dungeon Museum.)
By the end of 1692, well over 150 people had been accused and dozens had undergone trial when Governor William Phips forcibly concluded the craze. Fourteen women, five men, and two dogs had been hanged, and one man had been tortured to death with heavy rocks. A few more people died in prison. Within the following years, Reverend Parris, a judge, and members of the jury involved in the case would express deep regret at the outcome of the trials. It became Salem’s greatest shame.
For centuries after the end of the Salem witch trials, writers, philos- ophers, artists, and politicians alike would appropriate the story for their own devices—most notably Arthur Miller. Though many Americans take his 1953 play The Crucible as a documentation of what happened in Salem, it is in no way historically accurate and best understood as a polemic criticizing Cold War McCarthyism. While Miller and his ilk were busy twisting history to create great art, scholars were hard at work trying to uncover the exact motives for Salem’s witch hunt. Stacy Schiff details a laundry list of causes that historians have come up with in The Witches: Salem, 1692. She writes:
Our first true-crime story has been attributed to generational, sexual, economic, ecclesiastical, and class tensions; regional hostilities imported from England; food poisoning; a hothouse religion in a cold climate; teenage hysteria; fraud, taxes, conspiracy; political instability; trauma induced by Indian attacks; and to witch-craft itself.
Scholars still disagree about what exactly happened in 1692. Robert W. Thurston suggests that Salem hysteria was “above all the problem of evidence during a panic, not any broader streams of thought or eco- nomic development that produced the Salem witch hunt.” However, he does recognize that Indian attacks, sexism in early modern society, and additional local issues “sharpened suspicion that Satan was on the scene.”
Others continue to offer alternate readings of New England’s most haunting debacle.
Salem was the place where the witch’s body was irrevocably politicized in North America. Because of Salem, “witch hunt” remains a potent political firebomb—and frequently misused metaphor—in the contemporary United States. The fact that there is no single, universally agreed-upon narrative of the Salem witch trials can be frustrating, but makes them endlessly fascinating. Such is the allure of Salem, a beloved destination for travelers hell-bent on miring themselves in his- tory, myth, witchcraft, and mystery.
*
I went in and out of shops, museums, and memorials, trying to make sense of Salem. In the buildings on Essex Street, ghosts, witches, and pumpkins peered out of every glass orifice. Neck crooked beneath an umbrella in full costume, I was a Satanic chorus member of Cats in desperate need of a hair dryer. Droplets splattered in all directions as I passed books excavating Salem’s past and witchy merch that ran the gamut from charming to uncomfortably tacky. (The “I Got Stoned in Salem” shirt, a gruesome play on Giles Cory’s death by pressing, gave me pause.) Nearby, I saw a Hawthorne vs. Poe sign in a window, pitting Salem’s greatest novelist against another master of the macabre. (The house Nathaniel Hawthorne made famous, the House of the Seven Gables, is still an eerie must-see.) I was equally taken by the various mundane bits of infrastructure emblazoned with witches on broom- stick—police cars, water towers—that have been transformed into sights in their own right.
The somber side of Salem is just as compelling. Visitors can find a memorial for those hanged and tortured to death next to Salem’s Burying Point cemetery in an enclosure of twenty benches dedicated to each victim. Some of these victims’ partial last words are chiseled into stone beneath your feet as you enter, an apt metaphor for their silencing. A ten-minute drive takes you to the location of the gallows at Proctor’s Ledge, where another memorial was erected in 2016 to those hanged there. Due northwest is the Witchcraft Victim’s Memorial across from the site of the Salem Village Meeting House where many examinations took place, as well as the Rebecca Nurse Homestead. Both are in Danvers, the former site of Salem Village. The sprawling grounds of the homestead feature an 1885 memorial—arguably the first Salem witch trials attraction—which was built to honor Nurse long after death.
But what of witchcraft? For Salem today is far more than a site of murder, persecution, and fun-house spooks. It is also the home of many practicing witches. In 1970, TV ’s bounciest, blondest, and most benign witch, Samantha Stephens, hung her pointed hat here in several Bewitched episodes (hence the statue on Essex and Washington), but it was Official Witch of Salem Laurie Cabot who ignited Salem’s witchcraft revival when she opened her first witchcraft shop in 1971. Some fifty years later, Salem is overflowing with witchcraft as much as it is witch history. There’s the yearly Psychic Fair and Witches Market, Salem Witches’ Halloween Ball, Olde Salem Village Dark Arts Night Faire, and a panoply of stores offering all kinds of books, services, and classes. Some establishments explicitly reference Salem’s past—Hex: Old World Witchery sells Bridget Bishop poppets and The Cauldron Black offers courses that delve into historical folk magic traditions. Other shops do so implicitly—HausWitch harnesses the intersection of politics and witchcraft in its intersectional feminist wares and workshops.
After dark, Halloween reached fever pitch across Salem. The sky was blackened violet and people were proudly blood-dripping, wig-wearing, and pentagram-clad. I decided to push past my fear of crowds and step full force into the maelstrom for a walking tour.
As with every attraction in Salem, there are so many options it’s hard to know what to choose—but healthy skepticism is always a good place to start. I chose a tour equally enamored with skepticism: the Satanic Salem Walking Tour. Crafted and led by veteran tour guide, practicing witch, and historian Thomas O’Brien Vallor, the walk is affiliated with The Satanic Temple and takes you through Salem both real and imagined. Witty, irreverent, and historically accurate, Satanic Salem draws important parallels between the witch trials and our contemporary political climate, warts and all.
Nimbly moving amid the throng of costumed revelers clogging every inch of the city, we learned about Salem’s past and present. Like the best art and writing that have been spun from Salem’s legacy, the Satanic Salem Walking Tour helps to unveil the destructive potential of Christian fundamentalism and unchecked governmental power. (It also underscores the many ways contemporary activists, feminists, Satanists, radicals, and rebels are fighting back against this scourge in the present.) In between stops, Vallor offered up withering bon mots like “We should be called the hysteria city, not the Witch City” or “the Puritans were the Taliban of Christianity.” Fog hung specter-like in the unseasonably warm night as the group kept moving, the wind whipping my hair into Whitesnake video heights.
Two and a half hours later, the walking tour ended near the Old Town Hall. Our guide graciously answered questions from the group about witchcraft (all witches aren’t Wiccan!), Satanism (it’s not just Devil worship anymore, kids!), and local transportation (Uber on Halloween, are you kidding?) before disappearing into the night with a flourish. The streets remained alive with a teeming psychedelic congregation, drunk on booze and illusions. Halloween still had a hold on Salem.
I headed to the outskirts of town thinking of the dead that this holiday is supposed to memorialize and the ways in which their memories have been embraced and distorted in Witch City. Although I have visited many times, Salem always seems to remain just out of reach. Is it a haunted theme park? The witch industrial complex gone wild? A sacred site of cultural memory? A charming New England town? It is all these things—but more. Like so many cities with weighty history, Salem is a shape-shifter, becoming the place you want it to be when your feet are on the ground, when you walk among its people and parks and streets. Like the archetypal witch, Salem’s magic lies in eluding simple characterizations.
Reprinted with permission from Red Wheel/Weiser, Witch Hunt by Kristen Sollee is available wherever books are sold or directly from the publisher: www.redwheelweiser.com.