The City of Witches Still Smells of Smoke

Salem, Massachusetts, USA

By:  Rachel Orenstein

Tuesday, May 9th, 2023

The scent of smoke lingers in the air here. It is the first thing you notice when you step off the train (a dated vessel itself with vinyl upholstery straight out of 1976). The air is sharp with a thawing spring chill. It rolls off the water. You pull your coat tighter around yourself and begin to walk. But still smoke permeates the cold breeze. Perhaps the surrounding suburbs are peppered with mid-day campfires. 

No. No, you know this smoke runs deeper: trapped in the bricks of each renovated building, braided in the tree roots that survived the kindling fates of their kin. 

Salem, the city “still making history,” would seem a quaint New England town to any unknowing eye. Large, colonial houses line cobbled streets. Vintage shops fly American flags. Old lampposts stand tall even in the day. Bronze statues pose on streetcorners and if you avoid reading the plaques, you could even pretend they were normal - some war hero or town founder. Not something more sinister. 

Not the truth.

The truth is told to you that evening, under cover of night by a guide holding a lantern in one hand and a leashed dog in the other. You walk through the town behind him and visit several unassuming houses. You are told of their hidden travesties, of their murderous histories and of the ghosts that haunt them still.

The truth is that Salem is a city nefariously known for the seventeenth-century tragedy of the witch trials. In fits of religious uncertainty and fearful hysteria, twenty-five victims perished under (false) accusations of witchcraft. Although primarily women, the victims also included men, children, and even a dog. You learn that this heavy history attracts one million visitors each year. Fans of history and halloween mix with new-age witches themselves to enjoy the offerings of this small, four-street town center.

Your guide concludes his ghost stories with a stroll through a graveyard monument. His dog - who seemed to bark at ghosts or the wind all night - chews a stick while members of the concluded tour ask recommendations for dining.

You return to your hotel room - which you later learned to be haunted, though you did not personally experience a ghost - and rest your cold, tired feet. In the morning you would grab breakfast in a typical small-town American diner and leave the city in the same vintage train on which you arrived. The shops would re-open, the restaurants would feed tourists, and daily life in this historic place would continue as it does anywhere else.

How grim, you think, that the world keeps going even after such senseless devastation. Although, you suppose it is also reassuring.

There was once a belief that if a woman was burned in flames and survived, then she was a witch. Well, this town has seen an unreasonable amount of bonfires - it still smells of the smoke - and yet it survives. The spirit of the witch has come to be celebrated here. “Salem” has become permanently connotative with “witch.” 

So you cannot help but wonder, with the humorous irony of this legacy, if perhaps some soul damned to the stake did not curse this town to forever be known as the city of witches. 

And honestly, if they did? All the power to them.