Tag Archives: Witch City

October 15, 2014

A Grave Matter

By daseger

The most telling–and troubling–details about an incident this past weekend in which a young homeless man started digging up an 18th-century grave in Salem’s oldest cemetery were the comments from “a large group” of onlookers, who thought the act might be part of a performance. Given the proximity of the Old Burying Point on Charter Street (and the Salem Witch Trial Memorial) to the fogged-in alley of the Salem Witch Village, who could blame them? Indeed the Village advertises graveyard tours on its website, since “We are fortunate to have on our premises the Charter Street Burying Point or Old Salem Burying Point, America’s second oldest cemetery”. I guess it is their cemetery–who knew?

I did a little bit of genealogical research so I could return a modicum of humanity/dignity to those whose graves were desecrated–apparently the digger (armed with “archeological tools”) believed they were his ancestors. Nathaniel Silsbee, Jr. was a member of the third generation of a Salem family that became quite wealthy and notable after his death. He was a housewright and joiner who lived near the wharves and also held land in North Fields and was married twice over his long life, first to Hannah Pickering and then to Martha, who survived him. I hope they rest in peace from now on.

7 Comments | tags: crime, Halloween, Local Events, Salem, Witch City | posted in Salem

October 1, 2014

Dancing Witches, Disciplined

By daseger

Everything is seasonal, and for those of us that live in Salem the Witching Season begins on October 1st. You can feel everyone getting ready, getting on guard, as our city turns into Witch City. Tomorrow night is the grand Haunted Happenings parade, sponsored by the Salem Chamber of Commerce, of course. The carnivalesque atmosphere is apparently good for business, so we’re all supposed to forget that we are trading on a tragedy. I can never do that, so I’m kind of annoying to be around in October: this is my fair warning for new readers not yet exposed to my October rants. Despite the fact that I disdain absolutely everything about Halloween in Salem, I do like all the other seasons, and I also have an intellectual interest in the creation of Witch City, which definitely took some time–at least a century, maybe more. I’ve explored many of the contributing ingredients here before (including witch spoons, German witches, witch postcards, witch plates, and the Witch House), but there is a lot more that can be added to the mix. Casting witches in a celebratory environment is really nothing new: in the late medieval and the early modern periods they were stereotypically depicted in a hedonistic way: partying and dancing and whirling in wild abandon. One of the most graphic texts on early modern witchcraft, Francesco Maria Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum (1608) presents dancing as a key ritual of demonic homage, as do many other contemporary texts. Witches dance with the Devil.

Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum, 1608; Wellcome Library woodcut illustration, 1720.

Most people stopped believing in witchcraft in the nineteenth century but yet still witches danced, in more of an entertaining (as opposed to threatening) way. The best example of the “romantic” dancing witch is of course Niccolò Paganini’s Le streghe (‘Witches’ Dance’), composed about 1813. The subject matter, combine with Paganini’s seemingly “unnatural” skills on stage, created another variation on the Dance with the Devil: perhaps his virtuosity was the result of a Faustian pact! When the Witches’ Dance was published in the middle of the century, Paganini actually assumes the traditional position of the Devil on several sheet music covers. The popularity of Paganini and his Witches’ Dance inspired many variations on the theme, musical and otherwise, including one by Salem’s famed band leader, Jean Marie Missud (1852-1941), the (very) long-time director of the Salem Cadet Band: March of the Salem Witches (1896). Appropriately for Salem, which by that time had marshaled witchcraft as a marketing tool, and for the March’s commissioner, the Winslow Lewis Commandery, Knights Templar, Salem witches marched rather than danced to this particular tune.

The Celebrated Witches’ Dance transcribed for the Piana Forte by Wm. Vincent Wallace, William Hall and Son, New York, 1852, Library of Congress; J. DeLancey, Witches’ Dance. Grand Galop de Concert, 1909, New York Public Library Digital Gallery; Jean M. Missud, “March of the Salem Witches” Sheet Music, Journal of Antiques and Collectibles and Digital Library of America.

12 Comments | tags: ephemera, Halloween, printing, Sheet Music, Tourism, Witch City, Witchcraft | posted in Culture, History, Salem

June 6, 2014

Tedious Details

By daseger

Among the books up for “adoption” and restoration at the Salem Athenaeum this spring and summer is a first (1891) edition of Caroline Upham’s Salem Witchcraft in Outline, which has the outrageous subtitle the story without the tedious detail. It’s a beautiful little book, but I just can’t get past that subtitle, a knife to the heart of any historian: THE STORY WITHOUT THE TEDIOUS DETAIL. Caroline was the daughter-in-law of the first serious historian of the Salem Witch Trials, Charles W. Upham, whose Salem Witchcraft: with an account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects (1867) approached the event and topic with unprecedented context and detail. With her Outline, she admits that she is neither a brilliant essayist nor an historian, but offers her little book to the public as one would the photograph of a notable scene, not a great original painting. And if, as it must be, the rich coloring and delicate effects are missing in the reproduction, it is hoped the drawing may be found true, and no important lines set in awry. Having been desired by the heirs of the late Charles W. Upham to draw freely from the History, paragraphs from it have been woven into the sketch giving strength to the little story, and serving the reader better than a feminine pen I could do”. Her “photograph” is certainly framed well, with a beautiful cover, amazing fonts, and lovely pen-and-ink illustrations of the seventeenth-century houses that “witnessed” the events of 1692. I also like the “signature page” featuring the names of some of the major participants in the trials: Governor Phips, several judges, the victim John Proctor: this represents Caroline’s approach and emphasis on personal stories, which actually anticipates the focus of witchcraft histories from a century later.

So there’s a lot to like about this little book, but again, there is also that objectionable subtitle: THE STORY WITHOUT THE TEDIOUS DETAIL. For me, it’s all about the details: the details make the “story”. I do want to give Caroline the benefit of the doubt, however: it’s clear to me that nineteenth-century Salemites were tired of their witchcraft past (Nathaniel Hawthorne being the best example); they couldn’t quite conceive yet (actually Daniel Low’s witch spoon would appear at just about the same time as Salem Witchcraft in Outline, for the 200th anniversary of the Trials) how to turn their dark past into commercial opportunities. They wanted to acknowledge, but move on. So a succinct outline, produced just in time for the big anniversary, might have seemed sufficiently reverential. And I also have to admit, as one who has delved in Victorian volumes quite a bit, that nineteenth-century history writing is a bit tedious, with its focus on great men, big battles, and past politics. I can appreciate the images below, even though the first one is every professor’s worst fear!

James Gillray, William Smyth (‘A petty-professor of modern-history, brought to light’), c. 1810, ©National Portrait Gallery, London; James Tissot, The Tedious Story, c. 1872, Private Collection

4 Comments | tags: Art, books, Graphic Design, Salem witch trials, Witch City, Witchcraft | posted in Culture, History, Salem

April 24, 2014

Set in Salem (sort of)

By daseger

I have heard so many dreadful things about the new WGN series Salem that I was desperate to see it: our cable provider does not carry that station but I was able to watch it online and I also checked out the series website. It is indeed horrible, in more ways than one. Its central premise, that there were witches in Salem who themselves initiated the 1692 trials in a devilish divide-and-conquer strategy against the voiceless Puritans, sustains that mythology and ignores decades of research, but of course it is fiction, so I suppose all is well. Or is it? One of the series’ executive producers, Adam Simon, maintains that the history is fantasy but the magic is real and that Salem reflects all the knowledge we now have about the reality of European witchcraft. His reality is a strange mishmash of witchcraft folklore from the Continent, England, and the New World, with no cursing crones: a very sexy head witch, empowered by her very sexual pact with the Devil and aided by the very sexy Tituba, stores her familiar frog in her bewitched/incapacitated husband and prepares to face off against a very sexy Reverend Cotton Mather, whose father Increase burned scores of witches back in Essex (England, I presume, though to my knowledge Increase never visited there; he is better represented by his iconic assertion that”It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one innocent Person should be condemned”.) Geography–a sense of place–is not a strength of this show, which is odd because it is named after a place. I get the feeling that the producers and writers don’t even know where Salem is (was): the big city is New York, not Boston, and the costume designer comments that In Salem they had more [sartorial] rules than the rest of Europe. I could go on with my critique, but I think you get the picture.

The Streets of “Salem”, according to WGN America

This “Salem” got me thinking about other screen “Salems”, and there are many. Salem on film is a huge topic, impossible to capture in one post. If you differentiate between films that are supposed to be set in Salem (lots of Scarlet Letters, The Maid of Salem (1937), The House of the Seven Gables (1940) and several Crucibles, and films that were filmed in the actual Salem (the more recent Hocus Pocus, Bride Wars, and American Hustle), it is more manageable. I’m more interested in the former, and it basically comes down to “Puritan films” in the earlier part of the twentieth century and “witchcraft films” thereafter, with notable exceptions and overlap. I haven’t seen all the Scarlet Letters (the first one dates to 1911!) but I prefer the 1973 Wim Wenders version (in which Portugal stands in for 17th century Salem) to the 1995 Demi Moore film, and The House of the Seven Gables (starring Vincent Price) has nothing at all do with Hawthorne’s novel: we need a real/reel “remake”! There are also several versions of The Crucible: a 1957 French film adapted by Jean-Paul Sartre, entitled Les Sorcières de Salem, and Arthur Miller’s own 1996 adaptation, which was filmed for the most part up the coast on Hog Island in Ipswich Bay.

Posters for the 1926 and 1934 versions of the Scarlet Letter, and a screen shot of the 1973 Wim Wenders film; Posters for the Maid of Salem (1937) and The House of the Seven Gables (1940), and a photograph of the latter’s Salem opening at the Paramount Theater on Essex Street; Poster for Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Sorcières de Salem (1957).

10 Comments | tags: films, folklore, Popular Culture, Salem television series, Witch City, Witch Trials, Witchcraft | posted in Culture, Current Events, History, Salem

April 19, 2014

Remembrance, Recreation and Reenactment

By daseger

The blogger part of my brain is whirling in anticipation of this long weekend of Patriots’ Day/Easter/Marathon Monday: what to write about? I think I’ve offered up enough Easter eggs, bunnies and witches, and Patriots’ Day, the Massachusetts (and Maine) holiday which commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the beginning of the American Revolution, coincides with Marathon Monday. I have always thought of my own personal ritual–a walk or run down the Battle Road on which the British retreated back to Boston–as sort of a combination of the two holidays, a form of patriotic athleticism. But last year I had a bad cold and stayed home and watched the Marathon on television, including the horrors that unfolded at its finish line in Boston. Now, after last year, the holiday seems different, darker. I am afraid that I am a bit numbed by the nonstop media coverage of the Marathon memorial that we have experienced in the Boston area (and perhaps nationally?) over these past few weeks, so I think I’ll go back to 1775, or at least our impression or “memory” of it. After classes yesterday I flew down to Concord to catch the first day of the new exhibition at the Concord Museum, timely titled The Shot Heard Round the World: April 19, 1776, and while I was there I poked around a bit, looking for Minutemen and Redcoats–or at least their shadows.

In Concord: the entrance to the exhibition, with a militia man inside, flints from the battlefield, a 1930 diorama, and across town, the Major John Buttrick House and adjacent monument.

Concord does commemoration very well, much better than we do here in Salem: of course they a good event to commemorate–the courageous shot heard round the world–and we have a bad one–the intolerant, irrational witch trials. But I would really like to replace the tacky, exploitative, and out-of-date Witch Museum–which is really just one BIG diorama dated circa 1971–with the tasteful and reflective Concord Museum, which seems just as concerned with Concord’s history as the making of Concord’s history. I long for an exhibition on the creation of “Witch City” but doubt I will ever see it.

There’s another exhibition I’m looking forward to further down the road (battle and otherwise): The Battle After the Battle: the Lexington-Concord Tug of War for Revolutionary Fame, opening at the Lexington Historical Society on May 3. I thought these two towns worked together in the spirit of collaborative commemoration, but apparently not! They’ve both been in the business for quite some time, to which the Boston Globe photographs from the 1920s and 1930s below attest. As I was heading back to Salem I spotted a few present-day reenactors outside the Concord Museum: I think they’re camping out tonight so they can be on the spot, rested and ready, for tomorrow’s battles.

Reenactors in Concord (1928) and Lexington (early 1930s) © Leslie Jones, Boston Public Library, and yesterday, outside the Concord Museum.

7 Comments | tags: Commemorations, holidays, museums, Witch City | posted in Culture, History

November 6, 2013

Lynde Street Variety

By daseger

Walking to and from my polling place on a bright November election day, I was struck, not for the first time, by the architectural diversity that is Lynde (rhymes with blind) Street, a downtown cross street between Salem’s major commercial thoroughfare, Washington Street, and one of it major entrance corridors, North Street. Lynde Street is one of those old-city streets that had no preservation protections until relatively late in its development, so it features structures that date from the 1750s to the 1950s, and everything in between. The 1750s house is the Georgian Colonial James Barr House, with expansive additions in back, and across the street is the 1950s house, which is one of the more unprepossessing structures in Salem, in my opinion, though now that I’m looking at pictures of it and the Barr house side by side, I’m wondering if its builders were going for a 1950s version of a gambrel roof?

In the middle of Lynde Street are three structures that further testify to its architectural diversity: adjacent to each other on one side of the street are the former East Church Chapel and Christian Scientist Church (1897), now the Witch Dungeon Museum, and the Rufus Choate House (1787), while on the other side is Temple Court, a brick apartment complex built in 1910. The red line that runs along Lynde Street’s brick sidewalk was no doubt bought and paid for by the owners of the Witch Dungeon Museum, who also purchased the sign that was affixed to a structure situated on the site of the original jail building over on Federal Street in the early 1980s—not until a decade or so later were they called to task for this and compelled to put up a second plaque informing tourists that their Victorian structure was not in fact Salem’s seventeenth-century “gaol”.

The red line, bringing tourists to “heritage” sites, the Witch Dungeon Museum and Rufus Choate House, the former in the early 1980s, Massachusetts Historical Commission, the two plaques.

The Rufus Choate house is named after the famous congressman, senator, and lawyer who resided on Lynde Street from 1828-1834. Choate (1799-1859) spend considerable time in Washington after his elections, but he is more famous for his Salem and Boston displays of courtroom tactics, including the origination of a successful “sleepwalking defense” for one of his clients. The Lynde Street house in which he lived experienced considerable deterioration in the twentieth century, and at one point was apparently condemned by the city of Salem before it was purchased and restored in the 1980s.

The Choate House in photographs from 1891 (Frank Cousins), 1981 (Massachusetts Historical Commission), and yesterday.

And finally we come to the comparatively massive Temple Court, an apartment complex built in 1910 almost opposite the Choate House. I wonder what was here before! This seems like an unusual structure for Salem: you see these turn-of-the century courtyard complexes on Commonwealth Avenue as it extends westward out of Boston into Brookline, but they are more rare in the outer suburbs. Perhaps its existence indicates that Salem did not think of itself as a “suburb” in 1910.

11 Comments | tags: Architecture, Heritage Tourism, Historic Preservation, urban planning, Witch City | posted in History, Houses, Salem

November 2, 2013

Has Salem sold its Soul?

By daseger

One last Halloween-related post (I promise!) on this All Souls Day: since it is a recurring theme of mine, I feel compelled to feature the Huffington Post columnist Greig Lamont’s stinging critique of the Witch City: “Selling your Soul in Salem”. I’ve read it before, heard it before, said it before, but I welcome Lamont’s compelling indictment. You would think he had more at stake, because he contrasts the bygone grandeur of Salem with its wholesale descent into tacky revelry in a particularly passionate way, beginning with soul-searching and ending with soul-selling: Once the house of New World glory, Arthur Miller discovered inspiration in Salem’s story. Today, there’s nothing to be found but a soul-selling despair in this home of American kitsch.

My favorite line, because it describes scenes I see again and again, even in my sleep it seems, comes in the middle of the piece, when Lamont contrasts the city’s glorious past with its vacuous present: today Salem has been reduced to prostituting itself to oddballs in costumes who gawk at gravestones and hanker for “museums” filled with broomsticks and bric–a–brac. For all its magnificent past, today it degrades itself by pandering to those whose zenith is having their photograph taken with a transvestite Dracula next to a guitar–playing zombie — and whose nadir would be to actually learn something new.

Calm Descends 450

What does this have to do with what happened in 1692?

14 Comments | tags: Halloween, Local Events, media, Witch City | posted in Culture, History, Salem

October 27, 2013

The End is Near

By daseger

The end of Haunted Happenings, that is: the month-long Halloween “celebration” of Salem’s apparently fortuitous role as the site of one of the most notorious witch trials in history. For many, Salem is Witch City all year round, but that becomes its exclusive identity in October. There’s a constant stream of traffic into and around the downtown for most of the month, especially on the weekends, and people troop around, many in costume, looking for things to do and see: they are clearly not interested in architecture (my neighborhood is packed with cars, not people), or real history (the Salem Witch “Museum” and the Salem Witch History “Museum”, among others, can meet the demand for simple narratives and mythology), nor serious food (stands selling fried dough and sausages line Essex Street). I’ve never understood the allure of Haunted Happenings, either from the perspective of the city or the tourists, but Salem has been selling itself as the Witch City for more than a century now (the witch below is on the cover of a 1904 guide book) and it is not going to stop, so if you love the other side of Salem you just hunker down and get through it–and now the end is in sight.

I could show you lots of more pictures of crowds and cars, along with people taking their pictures with the various grotesque creatures that line the streets—or the Samantha from Bewitched statue–and the long lines in front of psychic parlors, but another way to convey what it’s like to live in Salem during October is through news headlines: these three (from the Salem Patch) caught my attention in the past few weeks:

Salem Psychic Studio Accused of Taking $16K to Remove Curse (October 16)

Help Find Sick [Black] Kitten Stolen from Salem Animal Shelter (October 18)

and my favorite:

Salem Police Look for Axe-wielding Man Wearing Gas Mask (October 23)

3 Comments | tags: Halloween, Local Events, Salem witch trials, Witch City | posted in Current Events, Salem

October 19, 2013

Black Cat Covers

By daseger

Many months ago I wrote about a small publishing company in turn-of-the-century Salem named the S.E. Cassino Company with a diverse list of publications that included Black Cat Magazine, a pulp fiction/short story magazine (which featured Jack London and Henry Miller among its authors) that was in publication from 1895-1923. The Cassino company acquired Black Cat after the unfortunate death of its founding editor in 1912, and moved its operations from Boston to Salem, at least briefly–and then there was a twenty-year run of really cute black cat Black Cat covers. I recently came across a treasure trove of these images, and because they are so so striking (and it’s October in Salem) I thought I would feature a series of them. The Cover Cat cuts a pretty conventional silhouette on the first 1895 cover, but as you can see on this series of October covers, he gets bolder with each passing year. My favorite is from 1907, with the squirrels. Unfortunately, I can’t find the artist (s) responsible for these covers; if anyone has any information, please pass it along.

October Black Cat Covers from the digital collection of an amazing magazine bibliographer, 1895-1913.

Much, much more unfortunately, I have very bad news about a real black cat: a kitten, to be more precise. This past Tuesday, someone stole a weeks-old black kitten named Sunshine (with an intestinal condition !!!) from our animal shelter here in Salem: this is just the sort of story that intensifies my dislike and disdain for October in the Witch City.

4 Comments | tags: Animals, ephemera, Flora and Fauna, Graphic Design, print culture, Witch City | posted in Culture, Design, History, Paper, Salem

October 15, 2013

Little Pumpkins

By daseger

It’s time for the obligatory Halloween decoration post; I can’t delay it any longer as we are well into October. Actually, even though I dislike Salem’s endless Halloween festivities in general, I like to see houses dressed up for the season, especially if the decorations tend more toward “harvest” than the macabre. One of the things I like best about living in a small city full of streets lined and fronted with old houses is “entryway decor”: people really make an effort in Salem, and not just on Halloween. I used to make more of an effort, but I think I’ve been in a funk since the antique planters on my front steps were stolen this summer–there’s just one replacement planter out there now, filled now-lackluster summer plants that I neglect terribly. I did manage to put some spiders on my door wreaths this weekend; they will have to suffice for me this Halloween.

The photographs below, taken on Federal, River and several streets around Salem Common, show homes of people who have made much more of an effort! As you can see, I have a preference for little pumpkins, preferably white, but orange will do–and I like whimsical Halloween decorations, even if they are store-bought: the eyeball lights in the yew below captured my attention, even in the daytime. If I were to give out an award for best decoration, I would give it to the raven–festooned white house on River Street: those birds made me stop in my tracks.