The Witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 were fueled by religious hysteria and led to the executions of 19 innocent people. I grew up in the Boston area, and Salem is less than 1 hour north of that city, so I've visited Salem several times. It was also the home of author Nathaniel Hawthorne (and you can visit his "House of the 7 Gables" there) and the Salem Witch museum is there. The latter is a sobering look at the horrors caused by religious "mania" that led to destroying so many families and took lives. In college I read the book "The Devil in Massachusetts" by Marion Starkey, that gave a realistic account of the horrible period in our history.
In 2017, the city finally erected a monument to the 19 people falsely executed for being witches. This is the story from Smithsonian Magazine.
The memorial (shown here in early June) was dedicated on the 325th anniversary of the hangings in 2017. (Christine Woodside)
The Site of the Salem Witch Trial Hangings Has a Memorial
Eight years ago, when they bought their house overlooking a wooded ledge in Salem, Massachusetts, Erin O’Connor and her husband, Darren Benedict, had no idea why that parcel stood empty. The scrubby lot lay tucked between houses on Pope Street, within sight of a large Walgreen’s—nothing much to look at. So when people began to stop by and take pictures of the empty site last winter, they wondered why.
If they’d been there in 1692, they would have known. That’s when the rocky ledge on the parcel next door turned into a site of mass execution—and when the bodies of people hanged as witches were dumped into a low spot beneath the ledge known as “the crevice.” In the night, when the hangings were over, locals heard the sounds of grieving families who snuck over to gather up their dead and secretly bury them elsewhere.
July 19. The date coincides with the first of three mass executions there. On the same day in 1692, five women—Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, and Sarah Wildes—were hanged from a tree on the ledge, and their bodies fell into a “crevice,” where the memorial now marks their names.
Later victims included wealthy landowner John Proctor, killed in August. He had publicly condemned the witch trials and had punished his female servants for claiming to be possessed by witches’ spirits in the hysteria of the day. Proctor’s Ledge is named for his grandson, who bought the land knowing its history.
The Salem witch trials were “the largest and most lethal witch hunt in American history,” wrote historian Emerson “Tad” Baker, a professor at Salem State University in his 2015 book A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience.
In the 325 years since 19 of the falsely accused were hanged as witches in Salem, the coastal town has never forgotten what happened. (Most of the trial activity took place in Salem. Some of the young accusers lived in Salem Village, later renamed Danvers.) Somehow, the site of the hangings had until now faded from memory, replaced by an obsession with the “witches” themselves that borders on kitsch.
SULL STORY ON SMITHSONIAN: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/site-salem-witch-trial-hangings-finally-has-memorial-180964049/?fbclid=IwAR2ikgr-dQnn7JGgfiZc55kV9X8OIrimAvd4giJgSwnp6WM5ZV1bKI9Mves
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