In Salem, A Skewed History Lesson

Standing outside the entrance to the graveyard in Salem, Mass., on Halloween night, they looked a little out of place: a handful of sober-looking men, in the middle of a stream of thousands of costumed teenagers, handing out red-and-white pamphlets warning revelers of their imminent damnation.

The fliers were printed by something called the Fellowship Tract League, and their fiery language would have made the dead Puritans in Salem's old burial ground proud. "Thousands of Degrees Hot! And Not a Drop of Water," it warned the parade of Halloween sinners, dressed like Jar-Jar Binks and headed to Hell.

They're similar to the pamphlets you see littered around Harvard Square sometimes. But on Halloween night, with all its faux-pagan trappings, and in this place, there's some extra urgency to the mission of the few scattered street preachers pitching salvation.

Salem's Halloween celebration draws thousands of people annually to the haunted houses and themed attractions in town. The MBTA adds extra trains to accommodate the crowds, estimated at about 100,000 for Sunday night alone, and businesses in the city center go all out for holiday. Some even make more on Halloween business than during the Christmas season.

This year, the celebration also attracted about 500 Wiccans, self-professed modern-day witches for whom this is an important holiday and an important place. Salem, headquarters of the Witches' League for Public Awareness, is apparently a hotbed of Wiccan activity.

There's a reason Salem is such a big draw: 300 years ago, as everyone who has read "The Crucible" in high school knows, 19 men and women were hanged here in a five-month witch craze spanning the summer of 1692.

After three centuries, you would think the witch trials would have faded from memory. Yet Salem is still a powerful enough cultural landmark to bring 100,000 people here on Halloween. The town somehow has managed to turn a legacy that was once a curse--for many years after the trials, superstitious buyers shunned land in Danvers, the nearby town where the witch-hunt actually took place--into an annual economic shot in the arm.

Salem's Halloween extravaganza--the town also hosts events for the whole month leading up to Halloween--is an odd commentary on how we relate to the past. To some extent, people come to Salem for nothing more than the spectacle of seeing so many other people in costume. But the history of the place feeds into the celebration here so intimately that the holiday banners hanging from lampposts in the center of town are decorated with the silhouettes of witches on broomsticks. Even during the off-season, Salem's Main Street is lined with witch-themed shops.

The raucous street party in Salem over the weekend, and the whole year-round industry that has sprung up in town around witches and witchcraft, is a sort of macabre parody of a gruesome episode in the town's history. Everyone who comes to Haunted Happenings, the official name of the celebration, knows what happened in Salem to put it on the Halloween map. But that's just one more reason to buy the T-shirt. In the end, the witch trials are just a great excuse for a party.

Wiccans, and the spare proselytizing pamphleteer, take Halloween in Salem seriously, as something loaded with lasting historical and cultural significance. Maybe to them it's a distilled version of some deeper religious rift in American culture.

But what they think is beside the point. Most of the people in Salem Sunday night weren't there to pass out fliers or light candles by the Witch Trials Memorial on New Liberty Street. They were there to have fun.

This year's Halloween celebration ended with a near-riot. After some idiots in the already thinning crowd started throwing bottles at cops a little before midnight, the whole police contingent--including mounted police, a couple of police dogs, a few officers on motorcycles and dozens on foot--methodically cleared the streets in the center of town.

During the disturbance, some of the cops had to be diverted from guarding the graveyard, where the men with the pamphlets had long ago given up their perch by the entrance. So with no one to stop them, teenagers in costumes filtered into the cemetery, wandering bemused among the ancient headstones. Disrespectful, yes--but maybe an appropriate way to end a night devoted to mocking the past.

Alan E. Wirzbicki '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.