September 22: the first day of fall, and the worst day of the Salem Witch Trials, I am aware of both markers every single year. The beginning of the end. In successive posts on this day over the years, I’ve tried to focus on remembrance of the eight victims, the last victims, who were executed on this day 325 years ago: Ann Pudeator and Alice Parker of Salem, Martha Corey of Salem Farms (Peabody), Samuel Wardwell and Mary Parker of Andover, Wilmot Redd of Marblehead, Margaret Scott of Rowley, and Mary Easty of Topsfield. Looking over these posts, I see one big change: we finally have a memorial at the execution site on Proctor’s Ledge. No longer do I have to wander around the Gallows Hill area in search of the sacred spot (like so many before me). It’s been an incredible year of remembrance really, with our anniversary symposium and the dedication of the new Proctor’s Ledge Memorial, at which my colleague Emerson Baker, so instrumental in the verification of this site, asserted that we need less celebration in October and more commemoration and sober reflection throughout the year. I am not hopeful that Salem will see less celebration in October (or now—the celebration seems to start earlier every year), but those who seek more sober reflection now have two memorials at which to meditate: the downtown Witch Trial Memorial turns into a food court in October so head to Proctor’s Ledge if you are so inclined.

 The two memorials: Proctor’s Ledge this summer; downtown in October 2015.

One does not need a memorial to reflect, of course: words and images work just as well for me. The other day I rediscovered a slim (and dusty) volume in my library which I hadn’t seen for years: The Witches of Salem, a “documentary narrative” edited by Roger Thompson, with amazing linocut illustrations by Clare Melinsky. Like all Folio Society books, it’s a beautiful book, encased in its own hard-case slipcover: I think it was a gift but I don’t remember from whom! The Witches of Salem is an an annotated compilation of primary sources with a chronological format, and a good introduction to the Trials. There’s nothing really new here in terms of information, but Melinsky’s illustrations enhance the presentation in myriad ways: aesthetically, of course, but also contextually. They strike me as a cross between Ulrich Molitor’s first woodcut witches from the later fifteenth century and the chapbooks issued in the eighteenth century—after Salem–which featured deliberatively-primitive images to suggest just how backward belief in witchcraft was. To my eye, the illustrations look more European than American but there are some very familiar scenes….

So much suffering on this day 325 years ago, before and after. We do have our memorials here in Salem, so I suppose that gives us free rein to milk the Trials for all they are worth. The worst day, the beginning of fall, the beginning of the ever-longer, ever-bolder Haunted Happenings: they all converge. Even the stately Peabody Essex Museum, which has always been above the fray, has joined in the celebration, moving their monthly Thursday PEM/PM event to Friday this month: September 22.

Appendix:

 A really good article about the “holiday creep” of Haunted Happenings and Salem in general by someone much more objective than I!  http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/salem-and-the-rise-of-witch-kitsch