Salem:
The Town That Executed
20 People for Witchcraft
Salem, Massachusetts is a city that has spent 330 years living with what it did. In 1692, in the space of less than a year, the community of Salem executed twenty people for witchcraft, imprisoned more than two hundred, and allowed five more to die in jail. The executions were carried out by hanging — except for one man, Giles Corey, who was pressed to death with heavy stones over two days because he refused to enter a plea, denying the court jurisdiction over his death.
The trials ended. The executions stopped. The people of Salem went back to their lives. The accused who had survived were released, eventually. Some of the accusers recanted, eventually. The colony issued a formal apology, eventually. The last person formally accused — Ann Putnam Jr., one of the primary accusers — was not pardoned by the state of Massachusetts until 2001. Three hundred and nine years after the fact.
Salem has never fully processed what happened there. It has instead built an entire identity around it — the city's official seal features a witch on a broomstick, its police cars carry the image, its tourism industry is built almost entirely on the events of one terrible year. This relationship with its own history is unique in America. No other city has so thoroughly incorporated its darkest moment into its present identity. Whether that constitutes confronting the past or exploiting it is a question Salem has not resolved.
What Actually Happened
The Salem witch trials began in January 1692 when two girls — nine-year-old Betty Parris and eleven-year-old Abigail Williams — began having fits. They contorted, screamed, threw things, spoke nonsense. The community's first interpretation was illness. When a doctor found no physical cause, the interpretation shifted to the supernatural. The girls, under pressure to name who had bewitched them, began to accuse.
The accusations spread with terrifying speed. By the time the hysteria peaked, accusations had reached into every level of Salem society. The accused included a four-year-old child, a former minister, wealthy merchants, and the governor's wife. The court that was established to try the cases accepted "spectral evidence" — testimony that the accused had appeared to the witness in a dream or vision — as sufficient for conviction. By the standards of spectral evidence, no one could prove their innocence, because no one can disprove what someone else claims to have dreamed.
Proctor's Ledge
For centuries, the exact location of the executions was unknown. Gallows Hill was identified as the site, but the specific spot on that hill was not. In 2016, a team of researchers from the University of Virginia and the Peabody Essex Museum used historical documents, topographical analysis, and archival research to identify the precise location where the nineteen people were hanged.
The location is called Proctor's Ledge. It is not a dramatic outcropping or a remote hilltop. It is a small rocky area at the base of Gallows Hill, adjacent to what is now a Walgreens parking lot and a residential neighborhood. For over three hundred years, people had been parking their cars and walking to the pharmacy on the same ground where nineteen people were hanged for crimes they did not commit.
A memorial was installed at Proctor's Ledge in 2017. Visitors who go there describe a weight to the place that has nothing to do with design or landscaping. The memorial is simple — stones with names. The weight comes from knowing what the ground is, and what happened on it, and for how long it was just a parking lot.
Charter Street Cemetery
Charter Street Cemetery — also called the Old Burying Point — is Salem's oldest cemetery, established in 1637. It predates the witch trials. Several figures connected to the trials are buried there, including John Hathorne, one of the judges who presided over the executions and never recanted or apologized for his role. His descendant, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, added the 'w' to his surname specifically to distance himself from the family connection to Hathorne.
Charter Street Cemetery is consistently rated among the most paranormally active locations in Salem. The specific phenomena reported there differ from the atmospheric heaviness of Proctor's Ledge — visitors report more active experiences. Figures seen between the gravestones that disappear when approached. Cold spots that move. Photographs that contain faces not present during the shot. EMF readings that spike without identifiable electrical sources.
A paranormal research team that conducted a documented investigation in 2019 recorded audio that, when analyzed, contained what they described as a voice saying a name — a name that matched one of the people buried in the cemetery. The recording has been reviewed by audio engineers who confirmed it was not equipment malfunction or environmental noise. What it is, they declined to say.
The cemetery is open to visitors. It is free. It is in the middle of downtown Salem, surrounded by tourist shops and restaurants. The disconnect between the ordinary commercial activity around it and what people experience inside the cemetery walls is something that Salem has never quite resolved — the city that built an industry on death cannot always control what that death does to the living who come to visit it.
The Curse
Sarah Good's words from the gallows — "God will give you blood to drink" — directed at the Reverend Nicholas Noyes who had called her a witch — are documented in historical record. Noyes died in 1717 of a hemorrhage. He bled internally and died choking on his own blood. Whether this was the fulfillment of a dying woman's curse or a coincidence of medical history depends on your framework for such things.
Giles Corey's last words — "More weight" — spoken as stones were piled on his chest over two days until he died — have become perhaps the most famous last words in American history. They were an act of defiance: by refusing to plead, Corey ensured that his property could not be seized by the court, protecting his family's inheritance. He chose to die rather than submit to a process he knew to be unjust. He said "more weight" until he could no longer speak.
Salem remembers this. The city has spent 330 years remembering. The question it has never fully answered is whether remembering is the same as reckoning — and whether reckoning is even possible for what was done here, by ordinary people, in the name of fear.