In Salem itself, the city’s association with witchcraft stretches the truth somewhat, since most of what happened in 1692-93 did not occur in the modern metropolis of Salem. Fear of witches first arose in what is now Danvers, then the rural hinterland known as Salem Village, a community beyond the boundaries of today’s city of Salem. The crisis reverberated out from the village to involve individuals in numerous other locations, including Salem town, neighboring Ipswich, more distant Andover, and eventually the colonial capital of Boston. Referred to as the “Salem witchcraft crisis,” this act of naming linked these events with that place. This happened even as the boundaries of Salem shrank, beginning when the village was finally allowed to become the independent town of Danvers. Although today’s Salem was as important for providing judges for the court that tried witches as it was for housing people who either leveled or were targeted by accusations of witchcraft, the popular image of witchcraft in colonial New England is irrevocably tied to the city of Salem. Popular fiction, when referencing early American witchcraft, invariably uses Salem as a shorthand term to encompass that history: Harry Potter’s international gathering of witches for a quidditch match, for instance, includes a delegation of American witches known through their residence in Salem. Many other fictional accounts similarly use Salem to stand in for witches.
Happy to exploit that connection, the Salem Chamber of Commerce has long tried to promote tourism from the platform witchcraft offers. Some components of the tourism extravaganza that overwhelms Salem these days have been around for decades. When a graduate student working in the archives there in the 1980s, I was bemused by advertisements for the Witch Dungeon tourist attraction. I knew that colonial Salem hosted no massive, ancient edifices capable of containing the stereotypical medieval dungeon. The dungeon concept, like much of popular witch lore in the United States, equates colonial prosecutions of witches in the late 17th century with (mostly earlier) European scares. The dungeon represents just one example of this tendency to understand New England and Protestant Salem in European and Roman Catholic terms.