For almost as long as the Salem witch trials have circulated in the public sphere as a cautionary tale of hysteria and depravity, the city and its residents have managed to make a buck off that reputation. By the mid-1700s, John Adams was writing with astonishment in his diary about his privilege in being brought to tour Salem’s “Witchcraft Hill”—then believed to be the site of all 19 hangings. By 1880, Salem’s first tourist guide highlighted locations related to the events, its victims, and its accusers. In the 1895 edition there were prominent notes on the mania of 1692, which, the pamphlet explained, “now brings thousands of visitors to Salem every year.” Starting at least as early as 1925, the township of Salem was commonly and officially referred to as the “Witch City.” Add a hint of technological growth, a dash of good old American marketing, and a morsel of the commercial and cultural explosion that is Halloween season, and you’ve got yourself a full-on socioeconomic feeding frenzy.
The Salem Chamber of Commerce and the Salem Witch Museum hosted a festival called Haunted Happenings on Halloween weekend of 1982 that drew 50,000 people. Forty years later, the event still takes place, but it lasts a month. It’s responsible for about 35 percent of Salem’s annual tourism revenue. In 2022 visitors contributed $782 million to the region, generating 7,850 jobs and more than $31 million in state and local taxes. More people now go to Salem in October alone than to nearby cities Plymouth and Lexington combined annually.
It is awesome, financially beneficial, and out of control. In Salem, Halloween is a monthslong beast with an unquenchable appetite. It gobbles late-summer weekends and the first-of-winter snows. There are people who welcome it and people who flee it, but everyone feels it. And though by lineage this creation is at best rarely theirs, by geography and the inalterable stain of days gone by, they are full inheritors of its weight. Because of history—its burdens and allure—a community is held in a periodical and self-imposed state of bedlam. Look beyond the hoopla and you’ll see in Salem a storm, age-old as it is modern, that manages to unmask the knotty, innermost contents of the place and the folks who frequent it.