The Salem Witch Trials Were Atrocious, Not Amusing

"I don't want to be an old curmudgeon," a Salem resident named Patrick told me, "but it seems like we have this horrific crime committed against the women on one hand and the Disney version of witchcraft on the other. The women weren't wearing those hats, I'm sure."

The Salem witch hunts ended in 24 executions, largely on charges of devil worship. Almost all involved women who died by hanging. But a male victim, an 81-year-old farmer named Giles Corey, was pressed to death after refusing to plead either way.

Nowadays, the town runs a month-long celebration called Haunted Happenings. The participants include costumed celebrants cruising the main pedestrian street. A few dress up as Hollywood witch characters offering to pose for photos, they hope, for money. Buses blaring music ply the streets.

There are Salemites who would like a rebranding around the city's fabulous Peabody Essex Museum and stunning colonial architecture. Also, the waterfront, which once served as the nation's biggest port, its tall ships venturing to and from all four corners.

But you can't escape Halloween, even at historically significant locations. The House of the Seven Gables is the real thing, a fine structure built in 1668. But as the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's gothic tale of the same name, it feeds into the Halloween theme.

Architectural dignity is obviously hard to maintain. Mobs gather at the 18th-century Ropes Mansion because it was featured in the 1993 movie "Hocus Pocus." (Ghost City Tours will take you there.) And enthusiastic crowds pile into the pirate museum, basically a converted old storefront.

One shudders to think what the Puritans who held the witch trials would have thought of all this frivolity built around bar hopping and puddles of fake blood. The Puritans, after all, banned celebrations of Christmas "as were superstitiously kept in other countries, to the great dishonor of God and offence of others" — an order of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1659.

All right. People are having fun, Halloween tourism fills Salem's town coffers, and the residents can use the back roads. Far be it for we starchy moderns to deny access to the Witch Dungeon Museum.

But let us recognize that all those executed "witches" were real people caught up in a mass hysteria. They were, in essence, murdered. The witch trials were really not funny.