Salem's Shameful Treatment Of Its Victims

I had the occasion to visit Salem, Massachusetts, site of the historic witch trials, this weekend.


Though in the town to view an exhibition of Dutch sea painters and paintings, my friend and I spent some time poking around the town, too.

Salem's claim to fame, of course, is the witch trials. Back in the 1600s, some people consumed spoiled grain and, due to resulting hallucinations, began the process which ended with several dozen people being named witches.

Many were put to death, by hanging, pressing, or torturous drowning. None, of course, were real witches.

That's the first ironic thing about the town.

You cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a witch's shop offering fortune telling. Rather odd, actually, for a town which pointedly did not have any witches in its past.

Many wrongly-accused people believed to be witches, but no real witches.

The other curious thing about Salem is what is celebrated and promoted by the town.

The old part of town is down near the water, as you'd expect. There are a few old houses from the period, a village green, and various sites depicting the witch trials for which the town is known.

Those accused of witchcraft, convicted, and hung, met their end on Gallows Hill.

Gallows Hill would, one naturally thinks, be a well-cared for, celebrated place. After all, it's where quite a few convicted witches died at the hand of the state, in error.

No such luck.

My friend and I, on the morning of our departure from the town, decided to take a quick look at the park. It proved to be nearly impossible to find. Our map simply pointed in a general direction out of town to find the site.

Driving toward it, we were given misleading directions by one local shop worker. When we finally met a local resident who offered to point out the hill on her way by, it occurred to us that the hill was quite far from old Salem.

To reach it, the townspeople of the witch era had to leave town, cross a river, climb a fairly steep escarpment and, then, after that, a still higher hill. I'd guess Gallows Hill is a good 3-4 miles from the harbor.

When we arrived at Gallows Hill, we were greeted by a strange site. A children's park.

No plaques. No ceremonial structures or National Park buildings. No self-guided trail. No reconstructed gallows tree or marker on the spot where so many poor, wrongly-accused and -convicted souls met their end.

No, just a skateboard and baseball park. And a few narrow, paved trails leading up to a dilapidated pavilion with once-ornate Greek columns by a now-graffiti-covered municipal-looking building.

It's really quite a sad, telling treatment of what is arguably the only important site in Salem.

Salem is about wrongly-accused witches and municipal rule and hysteria gone fatally wrong. The crushing power of the town of Salem and the Massachusetts Bay Colony stamping out the lives of people, based upon hysterical, hallucinated evidence of some teenagers.

If anything is important, it would be the site where most of those people were executed. Not the commercialized harborside, or the tricked-up shops on Essex Street purporting to vend all manner of witchcraft supplies.

But when you find Gallows Hill Park- if you can find it- all you see is a playground, a large water tower decorated with a painted witch on a broom, and a lonely, overgrown, forlorn hillock.

Nothing marks the place of execution of so many citizens of Salem wrongly put to death by the town and state.

No list of their names. No record of the town's grotesque errors. No attempt to describe, recall or recreate the senseless acts of wrongful state execution.

Salem likes to spotlight its quaint green, pretty, modern museum, and old buildings. And a modern harborside development.

But hidden away, forgotten and purposely neglected, is the site that really put Salem on the map.

Gallows Hill, on Witch Hill Road.

It's a mute, solemn testament to both the immense power of the state to careen out of control and wrongly take lives, then cover that up and make it difficult to discover, no doubt abetted by a town deeply ashamed of the real source of its fame.

Sadly, even in America, the state has grown even more powerful, while becoming better at hiding the truths of its wrongdoing even more cleverly than it was 400 years ago.