How Did Salem Become the Witch City?

Episode Description:

How does a town infamous for executing twenty people for alleged diabolical witchcraft rebrand itself as "Witch City"? Salem spent centuries trying to forget 1692, then something changed. Join descendants Sarah and Josh as they uncover the surprising story of how grief, guilt, and capitalism collided to transform Salem into America's Halloween capital. From the first witch-themed business to the controversy over memorializing victims, this is the untold story of who chose to remember, who profited, and what got lost along the way.

What You'll Discover:

Why did Salem stay silent about the trials for over 150 years, and what finally broke that silence? Who made the first move to capitalize on witch trial history (the answer might surprise you)? When the city had a chance to build a memorial in 1892, why did descendants of the accusers fight so hard against it? And how did a fish company, a souvenir spoon, and a Knights Templar march help pave the "yellow brick road" to Witch City?

Keywords: Salem witch trials | Witch City | Salem Massachusetts | Halloween tourism | dark tourism | historical memory | commercialization of tragedy | Salem history | 1692 witch hunt | American history | New England | modern witchcraft | Pagan community | tourism | memorialization | historical injustice | colonial America | Arthur Miller | The Crucible | Haunted Happenings

About The Thing About Salem: Sarah and Josh are descendants of Salem witch trial victims investigating how their ancestors' tragedy became a tourism empire, and what that transformation reveals about memory, commerce, and identity.

Links

HauntedHappenings.org

Salem Tourism Information

The Salem Witch Museum

Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project

Massachusetts Court of Oyer and Terminer Documents, ⁠The Salem Witch Trials Collection, Peabody Essex Museum

Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt

The Thing About Salem Website

⁠The Thing About Salem YouTube

⁠⁠The Thing About Witch Hunts YouTube

⁠The Thing About Witch Hunts Website

Sign the Petition: MA Witch Hunt Justice Project

www.massachusettswitchtrials.org

Support the nonprofit End Witch Hunts Podcasts and Projects

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
OK, here's the scenario. You're in Salem.
It's 2025. Everywhere you go, there are
witches. There's witch museums.
There's people in which costumes?
They're witchcraft stores. The high school mascot is a
witch. There's a witch on the water
tower. There are witches on the police
cars and on the police uniforms themselves.

(00:23):
How did a town that was infamousfor a witch hunt come to be so
obsessed with witches? How did Salem, MA become the
witch city? Welcome to the thing about
Salem. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
I'm Sarah Jack. We are descendants of those who

(00:43):
experienced the Salem witch trials.
Today. We're not following the yellow
brick road to the Emerald City, even though it's about the same
age of the Witch City, but examining how Salem's
transformation into Witch City had its own carefully paved path
to community reinvention and prosperity.

(01:06):
Of course, Salem, MA is the siteof the infamous Salem Witch
Trials. The crisis began in winter 1692
as 2 girls in Reverend Samuel Paris's home began experiencing
violent fits, his daughter Bettyand his niece Abigail Williams.

(01:26):
What started in one household spread rapidly through the
community, triggering accusations of diabolic
witchcraft that would claim 25 lives.
By September 16, 9220. People have been executed and
five more had died in jail. In 1692, the witches were

(01:47):
believed to serve the devil. So because no one serves the
devil, we know that there were no witches in New England in
1692. Nathaniel Hathorn, or you better
know him as Nathaniel Hawthorne.He changed the spelling of his

(02:08):
last name. He's the great grandson of Judge
John Hathorne. But he put AW into the name to
make it Hawthorne. And he writes.
In 1835 he publishes 2 short stories that are connected with
the witch trials, Young Goodman Brown and Alice Jones Appeal.

(02:30):
And one interesting thing, in Alice Jones Appeal, Hawthorne
actually comments on how there'sno memorial on Gallows Hill in
Salem. And of course, in 1851,
Hawthorne published The House ofthe Seven Gables, and that is
set in Salem and features a character who was descended from

(02:51):
a judge in the witch trials. So it directly confronts the
history and he's willing to talkabout it.
After the Civil War era, Salem'stransformation began.
It went from tragedy to tourist attraction at a high pace.
Charles Wentworth of them published this massively

(03:13):
successful chronicle of the Salem which trials called Salem
Witchcraft in 1867, and he did start lobbying for memorial on
Gallows Hill. All this writing that was going
on in the 19th century, there were some really famous people.
They were famous in their own time.
And there were people that I know I read in school growing up

(03:39):
in poetry classes. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he
wrote a play called Giles Quarryof the Salem Farms and that was
published in 1868. And John Greenleaf Whittier
contributed a poem for the 1885 dedication of Rebecca Nurse's
monument in Danvers. And so if you go to the Rebecca

(04:00):
Nurse homestead today and see the memorial in the cemetery,
you will read Whittier's poem. So by 1880, Salem was attracting
tourists. It was pulling in 30,000
tourists annually, drawn by boththe Salem Willows amusement

(04:21):
park. But also they're increasingly
drawn by the dark history of Salem and the witchcraft trials,
never once to miss a commercial opportunity.
Salem's own Parker Brothers, youmay have heard of them for a
thing called Monopoly. Well, they released E witchcraft
game in 1888 and then New England Magazine launched a

(04:44):
series called Stories of Salem Witchcraft in 1891.
Cementing Salem's witch houses both tragic history and popular
entertainment. I love this next piece of
commercial history because it's music and I love the arts, but
the March of the Salem Witches was a Salem cadet band song that

(05:08):
was composed by Jean Massoud in 1896.
It was commissioned by the localKnights Templar chapter, and it
would have been commissioned formarching.
So it was for a performance and it was published by George H
Walker and Company, and it included one of the very first

(05:32):
advertisements for Daniel Lowe and Company's Witch Spoon.
So you had this song, March of the Salem Witches.
It's getting performed at Willows Park by the Salem Cadet
Band. It's advertising the Witch
Spoon, which is the first souvenir spoon in the US.
One big point of development in the becoming of Witch City was

(06:00):
the Witch Trial bicentennial in 1892.
People prepared for this in advance, wanted to have special
events happening. It was a special occasion, and
so they wanted to mark the 200thanniversary of the Salem Witch
Trials. But marking it revealed a
community wrestling with how to remember its darkest chapter,

(06:22):
and whether profit and memorialization could coexist.
The Essex Institute pushed for an ambitious 45 foot stone
lookout tower on Gallows Hill, envisioning an educational
memorial about the dangers of witch trials.
But the opposition argued that they did not want to celebrate

(06:44):
its great shame. They did not want to be Shame
City. The 1892 Salem Visitor's Guide
became the 1st edition to feature the iconic Salem witch,
and advertisements exploded. They advertised a witch cream
skin lotion, souvenir photos of witch trial locations, and

(07:06):
Daniel Lowe's now famous souvenir Witch Spoon, which was
sold from his shop at the cornerof Washington and Essex, the
site of Salem's first meeting house.
We're on the cusp of the moment we've been waiting for for Salem
to become Witch City. And so it was around the time of
the bicentennial that Pettingill's Fish Company became

(07:30):
the first business to use which city branding They branded a
line of fish as which city fish.The yellow brick road had
officially arrived, paved with equal parts remembrance and
retail. The 20th century saw Salem's
long, complicated dance with itswitch trial past finally tipped

(07:53):
decisively toward embrace, though not without resistance
along the way. It was a City Council that was
delaying memorialization. They voted down $1000 memorial
appropriation in 1931. Thomas Gannon donated land on
the Gals Hill for a park and memorial in 1936, but nothing

(08:16):
came to fruition. There were multiple memorial
efforts in the early 60s and 70sand they just stalled out.
In another move to honor at least one of the Salem witch
trial victims, it was 1945 that a man began petitioning the

(08:36):
state to pardon and Pudiator, who was hanged for witchcraft in
1692, and he kept this effort going until a bill was finally
passed in 1957. Twelve years of waiting to get
Ampudiator's name cleared, and it included Ampudiator and

(09:02):
several others, words to that effect.
Marian Starkey's 1949 best selling book, The Devil in
Massachusetts, reignited public fascination, directly inspiring
Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which premiered in 1953.
That same year, Walter Cronkite's You Are There

(09:22):
dramatized the trials for television audiences, and by
1962, the Salem Evening News, the Chamber of Commerce, and
even the Police Department were proudly sporting which on
broomstick logos with which citybranding.
More Floodgates opened in the 70s with Laura Cabot when she

(09:44):
established her witchcraft shop and Salem Witch Identity in
1971. Also the Salem Witch Museum
opened in 1972, followed by the Witch Dungeon Museum in 1979.
And Parker Brothers released theWitch Pitch Game in 1970.

(10:05):
And what we all love Bewitched. They filmed 8 episodes in Salem
that summer and that just reallyturbocharged the tourism.
And by 74, more than 1,000,000 tourists were visiting annually,
not in the month of October. That's the annual 1,000,000.

(10:26):
This brings us to our modern celebrations and Witch City's
Halloween Capital Festival haunted happenings.
That's what the Witch City is about for tourists now.
We just did a full episode on that last week and we encourage

(10:46):
you to check that out to learn more about how which city also
became basically Halloween City,the Halloween capital of this
world. But in 1982, basically the Salem
Witch Museum and the Salem Chamber of Commerce teamed up
together to launch this haunted happenings.
It was at first a weekend event,but it's since expanded to a

(11:10):
full month. 31 days of Halloweenevent all October.
There are events every day in Haunted Happenings now.
Even after Haunted Happening started in 1992, another very
big memorial project came to fruition during the tercentenary

(11:32):
of the Salem Witch Trials. It has 20 granite benches with
the names of the victims. The dedication ceremony in 1992.
This was the 300th anniversary of the witch trials, and this
was the first memorial to those witch trials in the city of
Salem itself. So it only took three centuries

(11:55):
for them to get around to doing memorials, even though, you
know, Hawthorne was calling for it in 1835, and there must have
been other voices calling for iteven before then.
So it's 1992. They called in Arthur Miller,
the playwright of The Crucible, to speak at this dedication.

(12:16):
They also bring in Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, to
speak. And just a year later, we see
the other side coming back to the for the pop culture aspect
of the witch. In 1993.
Disney released Hocus Pocus in 2001.

(12:38):
A student at Salem State University realized that there
were five women who were not included in the 1957 resolution
who had not had their names clear as convicted victims of
the Salem witch trials. And as we've established, all
the victims were innocent. So she worked with a local

(13:00):
representative and the General Court adopted a amendment to the
1957 resolution that had exonerated and Budiator.
These names were added on Halloween day in 2001.
The governor signed this into fruition.

(13:22):
In 2005, the bewitched statue ofSamantha Stevens was dedicated.
In 2017, another memorial was dedicated at Proctor's Ledge,
which was determined to be the hanging site of the Salem Witch
Trials, and then in 2022, another person was found to have

(13:46):
not been cleared. She was convicted during the
sandwich trials, but her name was not featured in the reversal
of a tanger or the 1957 or the 2001 Bills.
It was Elizabeth Johnson, juniorof Andover, and she finally got
her name clear in 2022. In closing, we'd like to talk

(14:09):
about what it means to be the Witch City.
Now, Salem was Massachusetts's first city.
It was founded in 1626, and the name Salem is basically the
English form of the Hebrew word for peace.
Salem means peace. And so you have to take that
into consideration when you lookat the history of it and what it

(14:31):
is today. Behind Salem's commercial
embrace of which city, which hasa great ring to it, lies this
truth. Every generation has had to
actively choose to memorialize the victims.
From the nurse descendants working a decade to raise
memorial funds in the 1870s to the City Council repeatedly

(14:52):
voting down commemoration efforts through the 20th
century, remembering the human cost of 1692 has never been
automatic. The witch Legos and tourist
attractions were deliberately cultivated.
But ensuring that 20 people executed as witches and the
survivors who built new lives from exile remained more than

(15:12):
footnotes requires persistence and purposeful effort.
Salem's transformation to which city isn't just about tourism.
It was about the community deciding again and again that
profit and memory could dance together down the same path.