History
Naumkeag and the Harbor
Salem was Naumkeag, the “fishing place,” where generations of Indigenous people lived and passed through for centuries before Roger Conant moved his settlers here in 1626, ahead of the Massachusetts Bay Colony itself.
The harbor made the town. Salem’s ships sailed the world for trade, the Grand Turk came home from China in 1787 with more than 500 chests of tea, and the East Indies trade brought the Derbys and the Crowninshields their greatest profits. Elias Derby’s mansion stood where Old Town Hall is now. Nathaniel Hawthorne held a post at the Custom House from 1846 to 1849, the job the National Park Service says inspired his classic novel.
1692
The witch hunt didn’t start in town. It began in February 1692 in Salem Village, the farming parish that is now Danvers, when two young girls showed signs of what was believed to be demonic possession. Governor William Phips set up a special Court of Oyer and Terminer, and it accepted “spectral evidence”: a witness’s word that the accused person’s spirit, or “spectral shape,” had come to them while the accused’s body was somewhere else. No alibi could answer that. Accusations spread across twenty-four communities.
Phips barred spectral evidence, then shut the court down on October 29. When it was over, at least 155 people had been jailed, nineteen were hanged, Giles Corey was crushed to death with stones, and at least five more died in jail. Massachusetts voted to clear the accused and pay restitution in 1711, and apologized in 1957.
The Witch City
Salem leaned in. The trials’ bicentennial in 1892 brought postcards, guidebooks and souvenirs, and spread the “Witch City” name.
Bewitched filmed here in 1970, and Laurie Cabot opened what is believed to be America’s first witch shop on Derby Street. In 1982 the Chamber of Commerce and the Salem Witch Museum started Haunted Happenings, and about 50,000 people came that first October.
The record caught up too. In 2016 the Gallows Hill Project confirmed that the hangings took place at Proctor’s Ledge, not on the summit of Gallows Hill where most people had put them, and a memorial opened there the next year.
Why Is Salem Haunted?
A Court That Took Ghosts as Evidence
Salem’s ghost stories start in a courtroom that took a specter’s visit as evidence, and the trial papers carry ghosts of their own. In a letter to Judge Samuel Sewall, Thomas Putnam wrote that his daughter Ann saw “a man in a Winding Sheet” who said Giles Corey had pressed him to death, and who told her, “It must be done to him as he has done to me.”
Author Sam Baltrusis thinks that is the root of it. “My theory in my new book is that the reason why Salem is so weird about the ghost lore is due to the spectral evidence from 1692,” he told the Boston Globe in 2018.
Twenty-Five Dead
The University of Virginia’s Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive counts at least twenty-five deaths: nineteen hanged, one tortured to death and at least five who died in jail. Most of Salem’s best-known ghosts are those people, or the men who judged them.
A Lost Execution Site
For more than three centuries nobody could say exactly where the nineteen were hanged. The Gallows Hill Project worked it out in 2016 from the court records and modern mapping, and found the spot on a ledge that is now surrounded by houses.
The Judges Stayed
The men who ran the trials never left town. Judge John Hathorne and Judge Bartholomew Gedney are buried in the Charter Street burying ground, laid out in 1637, and Judge Jonathan Corwin’s house on Essex Street is one of the stops Salem’s ghost tours share most. “The weird thing about Salem is they have a love-hate relationship with their ghosts,” Baltrusis told the Globe.
