Gallows Hill Park
Salem, Massachusetts, United States
The hill Salem long misidentified as the 1692 execution site, still a community landmark of the citys haunted identity and the place the wrongness of memory is legible.
Gallows Hill was Salem's traditional answer to the question of where the 1692 hangings happened, an answer repeated for three centuries in books, tours, and the city's own markers before the Gallows Hill Project located the true site at Proctor's Ledge below. The hill remains a city park and a neighborhood landmark, and its history as the wrong place is itself a real chapter in how memory works: the executions were avoided, feared, and then misplaced on the most dramatic terrain available.
The park carries interpretive work acknowledging the correction. Visitors who walk both the hill and the ledge below get the whole story, error and evidence together.
Visiting
Gallows Hill Park, off Canal St, Salem; open park; see the city's page.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GallowsHillPark_Salem_Massachusetts.jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories