I visited Salem, Massachusetts, last weekend and found it to be a particularly good way to start the Halloween season. The place obviously looms large in U.S. history as the site of the travesty and debacle that were the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and I took a couple of tours that highlighted the events and sites associated with this. I am posting here several pictures that were among the most memorable parts of the Salem tours. The first picture captures what is by the far the newest site in Salem--a statue of the character Samantha from the TV show Bewitched that was installed in the town a decade ago to commemorate eight episodes of the show that were filmed in the town. It was particularly amusing to hear anecdotes about how the people at the network TV Land were the ones who installed the statue not only to commemorate the shows episodes but also to publicize a particularly dismal film version of Bewitched that came out about a decade ago with Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell. The second picture is of a historic site called the Joshua Ward House that was built in 1784 on the site of the former home of Sheriff George Corwin, who had been quite closely associated with the Salem Witch Trails and had been particularly zealous about persecuting and torturing the people who suffered this tragedy. At one point, Sheriff George Corwins corpse was even interred in the basement of this house. The next three pictures are of the Burying Point, which is the second oldest graveyard in the U.S. Among those who were buried there are Captain Richard More, who is the only passenger from the Mayflower to have a marked grave, and Jonathan Hathorne, who was one of the leading judges in the Salem Witch Trials and an ancestor of the author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Jonathan Hathornes shameful record was such an embarrassment to Nathaniel that Nathaniel changed his last name from Hathorne to the Hawthorne.
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 21:03:40 +0000
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